And Ever Closer

I found out today I officially get to be on a panel for the Texas Library Association (TLA) conference next year. I'm pretty excited. It looks like I will actually be on two different ones. I really need to work hard to know my stuff. I can't wait.

I've been thinking about the Ten Minutes I wrote yesterday and how I struggled with it while I was writing it because I don't really write for adults usually and it seemed to be going that way. I guess I could take it and make the next creature a teenager or that the main character turns out to be a teenager. That would be interesting. Overall, though, I think I really liked what was going on so far. Who knows what happens next?

I'm not too crazy about what I wrote for today's Ten Minutes, but I stuck it out, and here it is:

Keys raining, always raining in this place. Not it seems but it always is. Never allowed outside. Wet would destroy the fragile connections of my skin to skin to muscle to bone leaving me as less than ash, A compete compatibility connection with the grass and the ground. It’s perfectly shorn, though. I wonder who does that. Do they wear suits? Is not everyone like me? My mother smokes. Has smoked. I don’t like it. She is too calm. When she smokes. I don’t feel…well, safe. Really. Not at all. It’s creepy the way she looks at me. When I ask her for something. So I stopped asking for things. I wait for the butler to get it. The butler is perfectly timed to meet all my needs. But the butler isn’t human. Am I? Why does my mother smoke? Maybe she can’t handle me. Maybe I’m the creepy one. The unreal creepy one. Maybe.

The grass, maybe it never grows. I don’t think I grow. Just circuitry of some kind I suppose. But if that’s true why do I malfunction so often?

Black ooze I saw it once oozing since that’s what it does.

No, not like that.

Maybe the color wasn’t really black, but I paint it that color so I won’t know what it is. Ignorance is not bliss, but I can function in it.

Circuitry burnt.

That appears with the ooze. Maybe it isn't really called circuitry. Who gave me that word for it? That man. I wonder if he was my father.

The butler is coming.

What time is it now?

Time for the rain to stop.

Hurry and put everything away. Can't be seen with this. A plan to make the rain stop so I can escape. No more creepy smoking mother. No more butler. No more of any of this. I wonder if I make the rain stop, will the grass grow? Will it whither? Like me in this place.

The butler has arrived. Bringing a check up. What other functions does he have, I wonder.

I’ve read in books. Book. The one I have said there were many books once upon a time, but now there is just one. Well, one other and this one. This one is not allowed, which is why I have to hide it. I wonder who else has seen this book. It says that the rains were not always here. That there were days of no rain and plenty of sun and breeze, a breeze. People would darken in the sun. Now there are machines for that, but no one really does that anymore. Not much need.

I submit to the exam. The butler will report his findings. All normal. Normal for me anyway.

The book I stole also talked about snow. Snow and blizzard and cold. I think what I feel is cold, but that is not the word for it anymore. Now it is called temperate. But I feel cold. I can see it on my breath. No one else can see the cold in the air. No one breathes smoke like I do because I am the only cold one here.

Ever Closer

Here is today's Ten Minute Exercise. Today I tried playing music. It definitely affected the story. Perhaps you can tell.

Racing through city streets on a rainy night. No use saying dark. It’s night after all and even in a big city not every corner can be lit with bright yellow lights. This corner—that is where we’re racing to--a flash of light. Blue. Red. Green.

A dance club door opening and closing quickly. Who are we following? Sounds, beats pounding against my eardrums. My ears have always been sensitive to this type of noise. I long for some place quieter calmer, dimmer, less light, but I have to be in here since I’m following someone. But I can’t think with all this noise. There. Just saw it. Something that doesn’t belong. She’s beautiful, too beautiful at least for this place. Don’t get me wrong. I’ve seen my share of beautiful women in a city like this, but she is beyond comparison. Were anyone truly awake here they would notice—notice she is not of this world.

I follow without getting too close. Does she know I’m here—that we’ve made contact with our “friends”. I don’t know why we continue to work with them. They don’t really do much for us in return. Nevertheless, my job is to follow, to track her movements to see what she’s doing here. I follow her to the restroom. Many of these places are unisex and you can find many people in here doing other things than what the facilities were made for. She must have disappeared into one of the stalls. At least the noise of the club is lessened, dampened in here. I can think a little more clearly. I wish I’d brought those nifty ear plugs with me but I left the case in the car. I should wait for her outside but then I’d be faced with the roar of the beats and voices of people having a good drunk time. Damn, she’s come out. She looks me up and down. I can see that out of the edge of my eye as I pretend to preen in the mirror. I look at her and play along like I don’t know who or what she is.

“Hey, you having a good time?”

She just smiles, flirting back. I guess the reaction to this look of unbelievable sensuousness should make a normal person nervous. I have to try to act like I’m flustered but trying to play it cool. “What I mean, is do you want to be having a better time?” I try to flirt.

“Sure. What do you have in mind?” If I can get her out of here, out of this noisy place, closer to the car, maybe I can get her then.

But Addison doesn’t know this change in the plan. I was only supposed to confirm suspicions of her presence. “Why don’t we head back to a friend’s place. He’s having a special party. A private party.”

“Sounds good,” she says without hesitation. Is she on to me?

I turn my back to her which makes my skin crawl. All my protective senses scream in defiance. But I have to continue this role-play to accomplish anything from this fiasco. I lead her out of the club. I don’t want to go out the back door, which is closer to the car. Closer to Addison, who is going to be furious, so I go out the front hoping she’ll believe me and follow me out back before she realizes what’s going on.

Later edit: So what I just typed in ten minutes was 573 words, so had I continued typing non-stop like that, I could have written over 2,000 words in forty minutes. Seriously? Granted, it was utter crap, but that's pretty cool. I could totally meet the minimum word count everyday if I don't worry about critiquing the story. And that's kind of what it's about, isn't it? You at least have a first draft on paper or hard drive and then from there you massacre it and reform it into something much better. Cool.

NaNoWriMo: Looming Closer

Okay, so after reading several forum discussions, I have decided to write something brand new. The problem is I have nothing brand new to write. I don't want to go through any of my notebooks because I really do want to do something brand new. I need my brain to get in gear and come up with something. Not even my dreams are helping, though. Last night I was dreaming about Copyright for Cultural Institutions. Nothing really creative in that. Trust me.

When I was doing my postbac in creative writing at UH, I had a teacher (it may have been my friend Melanie, who is an amazing poet) assign us a ten minute exercise. Everyday or every other day, we were supposed to sit down at our computers and write for ten minutes straight, no editing or critiquing as you wrote. We were not supposed to fix our mistakes or anything. We were only supposed to type for ten minutes. I really liked them and they were really good to get me writing, so in preparation for NaNoWriMo, since I have no ideas coming, I am going to do this everyday for the next five days. Below is today's.

I am so worried about what to write for NaNoWriMo this year. This is the first time I’m really going to participate. I wanted to write one of the two stories I’ve been thinking about for the past few years, but I think I should do something completely new. Something to write about… Maybe library related about a little girl who gets lost in a library and meets all sorts of characters. Sounds kind of boring. How funny. I’m not supposed to edit this as I go along but I’m critiquing my ideas as I go though. Silly Little Girl lost in a library. What happens to her? She meets a werewolf and a jellyfish. I love jellyfish and there really isn't ever stories about them—at least a nice story. Maybe that should be saved for non-fiction. She just got these really nice shoes that she loves. They’re pink and light up when she runs or jumps but she’s not allowed to run or jump in the house or in the library and it’s too hot to run and jump outside. She is a child of the 21^st century after all. So she does it secretly in the library when she wanders into a closed section by accident. When she sees no one is there she runs and jumps and skips down the aisles, her shoes making little squeaking noises every now and again. Then she stops and she hears a squeak that isn’t coming from her shoes. So she quietly tries to find the squeaking that isn’t her and she finds a little white mouse—make that two. They see her. They run to each other. They look back at her and then turn around and slip into a book—but hey that book is closed. I didn’t know mice could squeeze themselves flat like that. Hm…What is that all about? So she tiptoes over to the shelf, pulls the book and…she finds no mice. No mice whatsoever, but she does see a really old creepy looking castle in the dark with a moon and an owl.

“What would two mice want to do with a creepy old castle like that?” she asks herself. She can’t figure it out, so she flips through the book some more but because the book is so old, the pages start coming out bit by bit in her hand and they start to crumble. “Oh, no!” She drops the book and looks around hoping no one saw her or heard the loud bang. She figures she should pick it back up and just stuff the pages in. When she picks up the book again, she sees the two mice. One is holding the other which looks to be unconscious or dead. “Oh, no! did I do that? Oh, I’m so sorry, poor mousey.”

The other mouse looks up at her with tiny mouse tears in its eyes saying, “why would you do that? Look at the mess you’ve made of our homes.”

“I’m so sorry tiny mouse. I…I don’t know what I should do.”

“Well, maybe you should fix this home of ours. I’m sure we’re not the only ones you’ve disturbed. And at that moment, she feels a sharp pinch on her little finger.

“Ow!” She nearly drops the books again, but holds on very tightly to her chest so that she won’t drop the book again causing further damage. When she looks down at the book, though, there is a little

Time's up.

Hm...maybe I should finish that last thought. I think it was a lizard of some type. A tiny one, of course.

NaNoWriMo

It's that time of year again, the time to hurry up and come up with an idea so I can procrastinate writing it so that I fail at the end of November yet again to win the NaNoWriMo challenge. Yeah, that's the spirit. I really do want to make a serious attempt this year. Last year was half-hearted and I think I stopped about a week into the month. This year I really want to do it, an, while I have several half-baked ideas, I really don't know what I will write. There's the story I started while I was in Okinawa and did quite a bit of character development on and actually wrote the first 10,000 words of before I realized I needed to rewrite it from a different character's perspective. My worry about using that one is that even though I will be starting the story from the beginning, I'm not sure it will be okay with the rules since I've started the story before. I hope to go to one of the events before November 1st in order to ask some of the others who have done this before if it's okay or I could always just email NaNoWriMo and ask them. Oh, and in case you plan on doing it too and want to be my buddy or if you just want to follow my eventually demise into a dark procrastination and flurry of nothingness, then look up my username on the NaNoWriMo site, caribot, which is the same as my Twitter account.

In effort to come up with a new idea to write about, I told my brain to start working on coming up with a new idea, so last night when I slept I had sooooo many dreams. Unfortunately, while a bit of the dreams were cute, they did not make any sense whatsoever, nor could I pull the semblance of a basic story from the mishmash. Oh, well, maybe tomorrow night.