Maintenance

You might have noticed in recent posts several comments are deleted... it's not that I don't like what you have to say, it's just that this blog has been bombarded with international spammers who want you to look at naked pictures of young Asian women. I figure that's something you can find yourself if you really want to see it. I've set the comment filter now, so unless your comment is obscene, threatening or otherwise offensive, you'll likely see it posted soon after you leave it. That is all.

Sorrow

Another entry for Three Word Wednesday. The words are abstain, halo, and prayer.


Darkness comforted her, the quiet of it, especially now. She stepped outside in cool air, marveling that people refused to abstain from chaos. She looked up. Bathed in the illuminated sky, the crystalline moon halo. Spoke a prayer that was simple and not. Let everything be okay. Let this pass.

Trashy books

So, I happened to be driving behind a Half Price Books on Sunday afternoon and noticed this horror... a dumpster full of books. That's right, you guessed it: I went dumpster diving. Snagged about a dozen titles before they politely told me to move along (for liability reasons).

What about donating to a library sale? Or the local American Association of University Women, which has a major book sale to fund scholarships? What a big, frigging waste. Among the dumped: A biography of Amelia Earhart. Dorothy Allison's Bastard out of Carolina. Seriously... Dorothy Allison in a dumpster.

And this hard-boiled crime gem from 1936: Confidential, by Donald Henderson Clarke, complete with a Mary Astor lookalike pouting on the cover. A blurb from the jacket:

Barry Ross was a newspaper reporter who would cheerfully have confessed that he was a worthless scamp, far too fond of women, far too lax about money, far too indulgent in liquor. But he had human decency and he responded to the dark loveliness of Rhoda Field, and these traits started him on a campaign to "get" the biggest big shot of New York crime -- Steinhart.

To quote a line from the novel: You look too nice to be in a dump like this.

Life imitates art

Belated entry for Three Word Wednesday. Trying something a little different, a stream-of-consciousness, word-painting kind of thing. The words are grimace, stumble and phase.



Paint cool paint fingers slide through slide through slide through gelatinous cool paint. Color and life and places and faces grimace. One phase to the next. One ends one begins. New places emerge in smooth streams. Rumbling stones stepping stones we stumble. We rise. Sun rise mountains. Cool stream cool stream of paint of thought of life.

Memory lane

Drove through a town where I used to live today and pulled into the junior high parking lot and asked at the front office if I could look around the school. The principal said I couldn't do that but he'd be happy to give me a tour, and he spent nearly an hour with me showing me the additions, changes, and things that hadn't changed.

Visiting my old school has been on my list since I started an exploration of my past for a new YA novel, which has so far remained in the idea stage. A drive-by of my old house a few months back told me that maybe this one needs to simmer for a while, that maybe walking around in the hallways of my school was something to save for later. I stopped on a whim today and it turned out to be a good thing.

I wondered if forgotten memories would surface with visual cues. But instead existing memories were bolstered, validated, strengthened. The rooms were locked and hallways silent. I asked to see rooms that had long ago changed purpose. I expected things to look smaller but instead they looked bigger. The corridors and stairwells remained familiar, maybe because they still sometimes show up in dreams.

I don't know how this visit will process, surface or manifest in the story, but I sense it was a necessary step toward the novel's creation.