More purple houses, Twin Cities

A couple of great purple houses from the Twin Cities, thanks to my superfriend Jill. She tweets at @SahveSays. Love the goddess moon detail on the second house.

Traffic school

It's time for my stop on the spectacular Holiday Blog Tour. Thanks, Kristy Harding, for the great intro and Q & A! I had intended a traditional short-short story but as often happens it took on another form while I was writing it. Here's Traffic School:

This comprehensive test includes essay, short answer, true and false, and multiple choice questions. Do not seek help from your neighbor. Please pick up your pencils.

      1. You live in an average middle America town. You are driving to work in the morning. You stop at the end of your driveway. Do you:

A.     Turn left and go directly to work as planned

B.     Hesitate

C.     Turn right and abandon your life as you know it

D.     Turn on the radio and listen to NPR, proceeding to work as planned

E.      Turn on the radio and listen to Rush, proceeding to work as planned

       2. Who made your smart phone? No, I mean who.

       3. If you drive through the fast-food restaurant for bad coffee and an instantly gratifying yet calorie-laden and greasy breakfast, how much closer are you to a hardened artery, really?

 4. What if you don’t get the hashbrowns?
 

NEW SECTION: HISTORY

1.      At what point in time did it become acceptable to eat food from restaurants that are attached to gas stations? At what point did it become acceptable to eat food made from the same product that makes gas? Did anyone object?

2.      There are no petroleum products in the hashbrowns.

a.       True

b.      False

NEW SECTION: MATH

1.      How many needles are on the Christmas trees in the discount store parking lot? (Hint: The number declines hourly.)

NEW SECTION: DEMOGRAPHICS

                  1. What percentage of Christmas trees will be decorated with white lights? Non-white? Other?

NEW SECTION: GEOGRAPHY

1.      What road are you on? How do you know? If the strip mall to your right is identical to the strip mall in Canton, Ohio, and the fast food restaurant to your left is identical to the one in Marshfield, Wisconsin, then how do you know you’re really where you are?

Now I ask you again: What road are you on?

NEW SECTION: ECONOMICS

  

                  1. If someone takes several days off of work to stand in line for a Black Friday sale that will save them less money than they would have made at their jobs during the time they stand in line, does that make sense?

                   2. Do you have enough stuff?

NEW SECTION: FORENSIC SCIENCE

                  

                  1. As you’re driving down your unknown road, view the house and property to your left. If you dug up the backyard, what are the chances you would find human remains? (Hint: Try under the garden shed.)

NEW SECTION: PHYSICS

  

                 1. The county sees fit to spend millions of dollars to install a roundabout where previously there had been a problematic intersection. Over time they see a reduction in accidents, yet the number of curse words and flipped birds has increased exponentially. What is the difference in psychic negativity?

NEW SECTION: POLITICS

               1. It has been said that Midwesterners are nice. Yet once inside the insulated anonymity of their cars, they leave the Midwest and enter the embassy of Fuckudonia. Please explain how vehicles become hostile nation-states.

NEW SECTION: MATH

                1. If a man driving a Ford F-150 tailgates you for twelve minutes, passes you and cuts you off, what are the chances he will fail to see the utility truck installing city Christmas decorations over the road? If he hits the truck, what are the chances that the utility worker will be thrown to safety in a snowbank, yet one of the glitter angels will plunge through the driver’s windshield and impale his cold, cold heart? 
 

NEW SECTION: ETHICS

                         1. Would it be justice, tragedy or irony for a fallen angel to kill the driver? Explain.

               2. What if you found a body in his backyard?

NEW SECTION: ASTRONOMY

1.      If a three-mile-wide asteroid passes by Earth mostly unnoticed, does it make an impact?

NEW SECTION: PHILOSOPHY

1.      Do you know where you’re going?

2.      Are we going there together?

Thank you for reading. Tomorrow, please visit the awesome blog of Sujeiry Gonzales, who has been called the "Latina Carrie Bradshaw". She plans on sharing a list of her favorite lessons learned from relationships featured in her book, Love Trips: A Collection of Relationship Stumbles. Also be sure to check out her relationship advice on her blog Ask Sujeiry and on the site Being Latino.

A day for writing (i.e. Every Day!)

Music to awaken the writing day. What are you working on?

Holiday Blog Tour starts today!

Hey, the great Holiday Blog Tour starts today! Some changes in the lineup from my earlier announcement (and we have a man now!) Check out these great artists, poets and writers as they post new work:

December 7: Lupe Mendez
December 8: Gwendolyn Jerris
December 9: Natasha Oliver
December 10: Regina Tingle
December 11: Caridad Pineiro
December 12: Teresa Carbajal Ravet
December 13: Nathasha Alvarez
December 14: Stephanie Dorman
December 15: Karen La Beau
December 16: Annette Santos
December 17: Zoraida Cordova
December 18: Kristy Harding
December 19: Nikki Kallio (Purple Houses, woot!)
December 20: Sujeiry Gonzalez
December 21: Samantha Kolber
December 22: Thelma T. Reyna
December 23: Julia Amante
December 24: Icess Fernandez

Done-o-wrimo, day (minus) five

Here's my Nanowrimo wrap-up: Word count, 82,808 on my existing manuscript, lots of editing/rewrites done. This was a great month to keep on track, and I've broken through the place that was hanging me up a bit. A stuck place often means you want the novel to go in a certain direction but the novel wants to go in another. You have to listen to the novel. The novel is in charge.

The total word count for all Nanowrimo participants was 3,288,976,325.

Next year -- gonna try a genuine Nano & write 50K from scratch. How about you?

Float

Just tweeted this story as my contribution to the Twitter Fiction Festival.  See @NikkiKallio.

There was a woman who filled her apartment with water. But no one noticed, and she kept trying to save everyone from drowning.

One day the landlord came by for her rent and while he was explaining what a problem it was that her rent was late, his lungs filled up with water.

She grabbed him under the arms and swam to the ceiling, where she’d cut a trapdoor to the apartment upstairs.

Somehow she managed to pull him up onto her neighbor’s living room carpet and squeeze the water out of his lungs, and when she did, he kept telling her why she must pay her rent on time, and that if she was late again, he’d evict her.

Then there was the time the maintenance man came in to change the batteries in her smoke alarm.

She found him floating unconscious in the hallway, the hammers and screwdrivers on his belt flaring out around him like a hardware tutu.

He spun gently in a kind of janitorial water ballet.

It was too hard to pull him up to the trapdoor so she dragged him out the front door and dumped him on the concrete walkway.

This time it took a passerby’s help to get him breathing again. The maintenance man thanked her and said he had seen angels.

From then on she put up warning signs because she couldn’t always be home to stop people from drowning.

But when her friends came to visit, they asked her what the signs were for.

When they started to gag she suggested they go outside and sit on the patio instead.