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.

Where have I been?

Okay, the new Godzilla movie is out.  I've heard it is okay, but you don't really see the monster until the last 20 minutes.
That's taking things a bit too far, postponing the actual sight of the monster until so late, after it has done all this damage.
Sigh.
I watched eight old school Godzilla movies last weekend. They're pretty pathetic until about the mid-90s.  But they can still carry me away.  Kaiju...big monsters dreamed up by the Japanese...that only seem to want to destroy their homeland.
Maybe because WE tried to destroy their homeland to end WWII, they got the idea.

But, now here's where it gets sort of interesting.
I have come to the conclusion that the reason I like Godzilla so much is because it represents the ultimate BAD BOY.
Women are intrigued by bad boys.  We want to understand what makes them tick.  We want to love them.  We want to change them into good boys, the kind we can love and cherish for the rest of our lives. (Although the idea of a real old bad boy, all wrinkled and pruney, is disturbing.)
So, here we have the ultimate BAD BOY in the form of a radiated dinosaur/monster, whose only real fun is destroying skyscrapers and the people inside them stupid enough to remain there when most of the other citizens are running away?
Think about this.  Oh, yes, think about this.
See if I am not right.

Disgruntled

While I was watching a program on the Smithsonian Channel about this guy named Shockley (of course I forget his first name) I realized that my days of genius are gone.

Whoever this guy started out to be, he always thought, even as a young child, that he would win the Nobel Prize for something.  In the few minutes I watched the show, I learned that he got it for inventing along with the two more famous guys, the transistor.  We all know how important those things are.  In the background, mysterious and mystical formulas and mathematical equations floated.  They meant nothing to me.  They never will. But he is responsible for starting what is known as Silicon Valley and all the assorted scientific wonders that has produced.  He went around recruiting the best and the brightest men (humph) and got them to work together...inventing stuff. 
The show didn't say he invented anything after the transistor, though. Maybe he just sat around picking people out for their genius and let them do all the work.  I don't know.

 

Yesterday I saw one of my favorite Alien shows about Albert Einstein's brain.  Really.  And it went on and on about how he must have been visited by aliens when he went into one of his deep thought things.  He used to just sit quietly and think and all these cool things that nobody else can understand came to him.

Trance-like.  Far viewing.  Self-hypnosis.  Daydreaming?  Whatever it was he did, he came up with that totally incomprehensible stuff about bending space and finding wormholes in which to travel to far off stars and not age as much as the people you left behind.

Now, I think that's pretty much bullshit, but I'm not a genius in that way.  Besides, nobody has exactly proven that this will happen as they haven't been gone far enough away at the speed of light to prove it.  It's a THEORY and we are supposed to accept it as fact.

Well, I call shenanigans!

If I sit real still and think inside my brain, I come up with ideas for stories.  There are some people in this world who cannot picture things in their minds unless they see a photo or something in National Geographic...and then they have to strain to come up with a description of what they've seen.  I imagine these people do not become writers.  For all their genius, for all they think of space bending and mass equaling such and such...I think I'd rather have the brain I have.

Even if it is starting to forget more than you'll ever know.

Near Death

Okay, it wasn't really that bad, but...somebody asked me how many words on the WWII story I had in the can.  I decided I would print out all the various disconnected scenes along with the six chapters that are actually the beginning of the story and count the words.  Easy, right?

So, I went looking for the scenes and found three pivotal scenes, nearly whole chapters, missing.  They were just not where I thought I put them.  I could remember what happened but not how, the words were not there for me to recapture, but the ideas were.  I panicked.  I looked through my WORD files.  Nada.  Karyn found something by typing in key words in that little file folder thing on the bottom of the page here for which I was grateful, but I distinctly remembered these two missing scenes that I knew I had written and were apparently gone forever.

I tried her trick, putting several words that were distinct to these passages into the little space atop the folder looking thing on the bottom of the screen.  Nothing happened. 
I went through 819 SENT emails because I knew I had written these passages recently enough and was negligent on deleting sent stuff.  Nope.  Not there. 

I wrote to the very friends I sent these sections to, hoping beyond hope that they had somehow saved these bits.  Nope, though they remembered what I had written.

I read through those SENT folders again. 

I prayed.

I checked my husband's WORD file on his laptop...success!  I found one thing I had written last summer and neglected to put into My WORD file.  That was good, but still, there were two whole big scenes missing.  Memorable, but not word for word repeatable.

Last resort, today, I started looking through my entire documents file.  I found two files with BACKUPWIDOWSWALK on them...surely something I had transferred to gmail then into my files somewhere.
I opened the first and there was the first segment I was looking for.
Opened the second and, bingo!  The last missing piece was in there.

So, I am printing out all the words I have written, wherever I may find them, just to see how many words I have regarding this lovely story.  My heart is happy.  Now I just have to highlight and print all I have. 
I can do that.