More from the Mermaid Arms

Best they left in the morning, even if he was a louse to throw them out.  She’d only make things worse.  Her and her girls.  

   Going around to the side of the house, he looked up toward the light coming from Number Five.
   She was there, silhouetted, leaning against the window, traced in silver from starlight. 
   To his eternal shame, his body reacted to the vision of her, wanting to take her in his arms and hold her, smell her hair, feel the softness of her body against his.
   Christ!
   How much torture could one man take?

The rabbits in my life

Every day once the snow melts I look out my window at the back yard gardens.  Every day is something new, something different, and as the days grow longer and the green gets greener, our furry friends appear.
Only they aren't cute and cuddly.  They want to destroy our plants and eat our green beans and tomatoes.
It used to be the squirrels.  Either they're dead or they have moved on.
Sometimes it is the groundhog...I don't know what it eats, but it is HUGE and lives under our neighbor's shed.  Big brown slug of a thing...it must eat anything it wants to eat or can find.

And then, there are the bunnies.  Yes, they are cute and clever and furry and funny, but once they find our gardens, they become instruments of the devil.
They take one bite from a perfectly ripe, round tomato and leave it on the vine to rot or draw insects or get moldy.  They gnaw off the green beans, while leaving the eggplant and peppers alone.  I haven't seen anything attack the broccoli or cabbages, but the white butterflies lay their eggs on them and then the plants die for having their roots destroyed.
Forget what happens to our squash!  Those IOTD are invisible, possibly worms or a virus even.  I love squash and hate to see perfectly good fruit shrivel and die.

But today I happened to see a preciously little bunny chase under the pool deck and wait, wait to get into the garden.  It slipped across the yard, beyond the garden then came racing pall mall back through the yard into the perennial garden and hopefully out the six foot chain link fence we had to put up to keep the bloody white tail deer out.

All this for some tomatoes, beans and peppers.
Squash, cabbages and broccoli.
And flowers.

Seems like a lot of work, doesn't it?
Bunnies belong in hutches, not my yard.  Grrrr!

More stupidity

Okay, so we were in Wildwood.  The weather was lousy, rainy, cold, foggy.  There were times when the ocean disappeared.  So I had some time alone to write.
And I did!  Sixteen hundred words toward ending WWII, but really not that much closer.

I have to think and "see" the scenes before I write them.  The movie in my head doesn't always work.  These two fabulous scenes came about because someone's love story inspired me and I forced myself to write the other one.  Good character development, though, since this is women's fiction.

To my regret, we did not get to Long Beach Island because the motel claimed not have gotten our reservation.  So we came home early.

Even so.  I had a good time.  My characters had a great time and got further along in their story.  BUT, and this is a big one...I don't know where these scenes belong.

Stupid, stupid me

I think I mentioned here before that I did a stupid thing with my newest manuscript.  I got off the first six chapters then I got sick, so I stopped writing.
Months of research, I copied everything onto paper because I like that and can work on it without a computer.  Reams of information about WWII, the Merchant Marine, Long Beach Island. I did interviews with people who were alive then.  I went to two museums and searched records.  Sally and I drove around, placing where buildings were located all those years ago and what is there now.  That way, I could actually let my people walk to places and it would be correct. We found two Victorian houses, mirror images of each other, that will be perfect for the guest house in the story. Writer's privilege to move them around. There were actual houses and guest houses on the beach, which was much wider, but some of them got wrecked during the hurricane of '44.  So, I have just about everything set.
Last year, I made a timeline.
But, my big mistake was writing out of sequence. I just wrote here and there, whatever I felt like writing.  Little scenes, big scenes.
Anything but not in order. I tried to put what I had done onto the timeline, but I have since not learned my lesson and have written out of sequence again and these things are not on the timeline yet.
DON'T DO THIS, people.  Write in sequence.  Do not write whatever you want to write then get stuck having to fill in the big gaping holes in the storyline!!!!!!

I need to somehow make sense of the timeline which is written on legal paper, sideways.  I can't even copy it.  I may have to write it all over again, somehow, but not sideways or vertically.

Regrets, I have a few...for doing it my way.