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I started and tossed at least five blog posts last week. One was a humor post about life as a cat lady, which turned out not as funny as I hoped and a little bit repetitive of other similar “lists” I’ve seen elsewhere. Then there was my review of the last season of BBC’s Sherlock, which turned into a rant about slut-shaming within the feminist community (RE: the response to Irene Adler’s characterization), and I didn’t want my review of something I love to be full of rant, so into the trash it went too. The rest were all those sorts  where you start a post, get one sentence in, are forced to go do something else, come back two hours later, and can’t remember what you were writing about in the first place.

Some weeks, you just want to throw your pen in the air and say bugger it.

Fortunately, I did get a lot of proofreading done on This Ain’t No Fairy Story, which I’m actually liking on the first edit. This is an unusual experience for me. Usually I hate everything I write on the first edit and only achieve a minimal satisfaction with it after several rewrites.

This weekend, a water line burst at my house, leaving my entire yard like a swamp and sending my uncle out to dig a pit in the field where my well is, getting covered head to toe in mud, but getting the leak fixed. (I so owe him a cake.) I stayed home in case he needed to get into the house, which meant I didn’t get to see my B, but I did get to clean out my “junk clothes” drawers, which were overflowing.

You know junk clothes right? Those ancient and tattered things you wear when no one’s looking because they’re comfy, or you’re cleaning house and don’t want your good jeans bleach-spotted, or you’re painting or remodeling and don’t want stains on something nice?

By Saturday night I had one pile of clothes that were good enough to be donated and one pile of clothes that were too stained, bleached, or full of holes to give away.

However, it occurred to me that I do need new rugs for the kitchen. And several of the shirts in the unsalvageable pile were in colors that would go with the basic color scheme of my kitchen (which is brown, turquoise, and sage).

If you’ve never made a rag rug before, they’re fairly simple and, depending on the fabric and stitches you use, can be quite pretty. (There’s a good tutorial here.) T-shirts and sweats are really good for this because of the stretch. I wanted two 30 inch rectangular rugs and am practiced enough in crochet to free-hand the rectangles without a pattern, working one up in a sort of  spiral-with-corners and the other in a classic granny rectangle. (It’s like a granny square, but instead of starting in a circle, it starts on a longer chain.) I will post pictures of my rugs here once they’re completed.

It’s a great way to use up old clothes and keep them out of the garbage and landfill. You can use any of the common crochet motifs and stitch patterns for this, just grab a big crochet hook and your t-shirt yarn and go. You may want to make the bottoms of your rugs non-slip, and there’s an easy enough way to do it (I use this on the soles of house-socks too, to make them non-slip). Just get some puffy fabric paint in a corresponding color and paint dots or patterns onto the bottom of your rug, then follow the directions to iron and make the paint puff. Instant non-slip bottom.

So, I suppose I’ve been productive this last week and weekend even if the writing itself hasn’t been working all that well. Sometimes the brain just needs a break from spewing forth words on command.

For today’s Flash Fiction, I’ve decided to participate in Chuck Wendig’s Random Photo Story Challenge.

Here are the three photos I chose for my inspiration: (Links because all are copywritten):

• Piano Apple by zakonslike
• Untitled by Leonardo Amaro Rodrigues 
• Closed Wings by yukiharu

White

She had been told, as a rookie, that there was always one unsolved case that stuck with you, the case that you never forgot, that you were never able to forgive yourself for failing to solve. The older cops, the retired cops at the bar, they said that no matter how long you worked with that hanging over your head, in the end, that case will be the reason that you quit.

It rained the day she came across hers. The weather was almost like the murderer had planned it to be so, like the sky cooperated to make everything look even more muted and grey.

The apartment the victim had been found in was one of those colorless modern numbers, all black and white, metal and glass and hard lines. It was the sort of pristine apartment where you can’t imagine anyone with mud on their boots, a dog on the sofa, toddlers running around, or any of those dirty things that inevitably come with living. It was too sterile for that, for anyone to actually live in. There hadn’t even been any food in the refrigerator.

The crime scene was as sterile as the rest of the place. Not a fingerprint to be found. The victim was naked, of course, but whatever she’d worn to get to that place had disappeared, everything except a silver bracelet around one wrist. She was beautiful and as pristine as the apartment, not a mark on her and nothing to mar her perfect skin. She lay there, white against steel grey sheets, her dark hair spread over the pillow like she was sleeping. There was no blood, no body fluids at all, not on the sheets and not anywhere else. The only two splashes of color in the apartment were the red of her lips and a single granny-smith apple sitting on the piano keys.

She always wondered after that why the murderer would leave that one apple in an apartment with no other food. It hadn’t even been tasted. No fingerprints. No saliva. Just a perfect apple, green against the black and white.  It didn’t make sense why it would be there.

Poison had been the murder weapon. That, the victim’s dark hair, her fair skin, and the apple, well, it always made her think of a fairy tale. They never identified the girl, and they never found any scrap of evidence to point to a suspect. A week after she had been found, the body disappeared from the morgue. The case was filed away – cold from the start.

When the detective retired, that was the one that she couldn’t forget.

As an old woman, she thought she saw the girl once, on the street with a handsome young man on her arm, but when she turned to watch them they were gone. There was only a small bearded man sitting on the street rattling a can. Coins for the poor?

She dropped a few quarters in the can and went on her way.

© 2012 – Jennifer L. Davis

If you haven’t stopped over yet, Chuck’s doing a quite interesting project celebrating the release of his new novel, Blackbirds. It’s a tumblog called “This is How You Die” where folks are submitting stories and artwork detailing their own deaths.  If you haven’t yet, go and submit your death today!

Let’s get that out of the way first of all. I am not a pirate, I am, in fact, a potential victim of piracy. However, SOPA and PIPA are not the way to go about protecting those copyrights.

Because see, here’s the thing… that First Amendment? Freedom of Speech and Freedom of the Press? Those things are important to me, more important than making sure some doofus doesn’t go about copying my work. For one thing, these bills won’t work. Like DRM, they will do more to punish the legitimate consumer than to stop piracy, and in the process they will break fundamental aspects of the internet, endanger internet security, destroy the entire DNS structure, and do all sorts of things that will make it impossible to do business on the internet.

The sponsors of this bill are big entertainment corporations. They don’t care about the little guy, they don’t care that this bill will make the very tools I use to publish and advertise the content I create impossible to use, and could very well put those networks out of business. Twitter, tumblr, Facebook, Youtube, etc. – anywhere that depends on user generated content – could be completely destroyed by this bill. That means nowhere to notify my fans of a new story, nowhere to advertise my current projects, nowhere to announce that I’ve gotten something else published.

My income from writing would go from a steady stream to a barely existent trickle.

The worst part of it is, the thing that should make all freedom-loving Americans sit up and pay attention, is that this bill would make censorship even easier. Already, people have learned that they can have content they don’t like taken down by submitting a false report of copyright infringement. They don’t need proof. They just need to submit the report. With this bill, it wouldn’t just take down one small piece of content –  they could destroy entire websites, freeze funds, stop someone’s only source of income, even put them in prison for up to five years  –  just from one report of infringement.

Censorship. Someone being silenced just because of an unpopular opinion. Sounds like the Great Firewall of China, doesn’t it?

Yeah, that’s exactly what it is, and it’s here in the USA, unless we stop it.

– Jennifer L. Davis
Please see below for more information:

PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.

A Girl Scout is calling for a boycott of Girl Scout cookies in a youtube video. Why? Because Girl Scouts allows transgirls to join and participate. (Update: Looks like the Hate-Mongering Girl Scout has now set her video to private. Maybe she learned a bit of a lesson here?)

Here’s the thing. The Girl Scout Mission? This is it:

Girl Scouting builds girls of courage, confidence and character, who make the world a better place.

And the girl in this video? She’s not making the world a better place, she’s spreading hate and bigotry and has become one of those people ensuring that the world is a more dangerous place for transwomen.  And all you have to do is read the news to know how dangerous a place it already is.  And here she is, wanting to stop one of the sources of income for an organization that has become one of the few safe places out there for a transgirl. For that, honestly, I think she should be the one banned from participating in the Girl Scouts.

Girl Scouts is all about empowering girls and turning them into strong, independent women. It’s just the sort of confidence-boosting organization and help that a girl in a particularly difficult situation might need.  Allowing transgirls to join and participate could very well save lives, by giving that child a community where she is welcomed and included.

So here’s what I propose: Let that boycott proposal have the opposite result, and let the GLBT community and our friends come out to support this organization that has been so supportive of us. So here’s the plan:

Buy All The Cookies.

I’m trying to eat healthier, but I’ll buy boxes as gifts and give them away all over the place if I have to. (While reserving one box of my favorite, Thin Mints, to stick in the freezer at home, of course.) I’ll buy what I can afford and do whatever I can to help.

To find a place where you can buy cookies, just go here: http://www.girlscoutcookies.org/ and they’ll give you the nearest cookie station, or alternatively you can contact your local Girl Scout Council to find out how to contact and help your local troop or how to donate, if you don’t want to buy cookies.

Help them out. They deserve it.

Pinkie Pie from My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic

Sometimes it seems like I’m a completely different person when communicating with written text instead of verbal. I can be downright witty, as long as it’s in writing. However, it’s often difficult to get me to say anything at all.

This can lead to a bit of a disconnect between people who know me and my voice primarily through text and those who know me primarily through verbal conversation. My best cyber-friend, for instance, once expressed surprise when I described myself as almost paralytically shy.

Well, I am. I feel more confident with the written word no matter what language I am communicating in – this leads me to tell people that I can read and write in five languages, but I can barely speak one.  My wit, whether verbal or written, can vary from dry and sarcastic to downright silly, but either way, I feel more comfortable letting it out in the written word.

I’ve written a lot of serious fiction. I’ve also written quite a bit of humorous fiction, and I prefer to mix comedy into my drama and drama into my comedy.  There is a reason why my current and most-likely-to-be-finalized novel is a satire. When given the right characters to channel it, I have found that apparently my pen can be very funny indeed. It’s all about confidence and where comfort lies – when and where you are more comfortable, it is easier to let certain aspects of yourself out to play.

Humor isn’t, of course, the only thing I feel more comfortable expressing in print.  To be honest, I feel more comfortable expressing almost everything in print, humor just happens to be the thing that other people notice most of all. I’m always surprised when I am told that something I’ve written made someone laugh because I almost never make anyone laugh outside of it. Well . . . except, perhaps, when I run into the wall or trip over my own feet, which has a disturbing tendency to happen on a regular basis.

Do any of you have voices that you feel only get let out to play when you’re writing, that almost never get expressed anywhere else?

I hear a lot of writers out there complaining that they can’t write short fiction, that the only thing that feels natural to them is long-form prose. I used to feel the same way, particularly when I was in school, and before selling a story meant the difference between living off of cereal for a month or eating actual food for more than one night a week.

There’s nothing like unpaid bills and an aching bank account for making a writer productive, and breaking their illusions about what they’re willing or able to be paid to write.  And I’m here to tell you that if you can write a novel, you can write a short story.  The trick, of course, is not letting your characters get off track and keeping the plot to one straight path.

Writing can be a lot like braiding hair. A novel might be more like an elaborate and intricate braided bun, consisting of a dozen or more strands woven together and branching in or out and looping around. The trick in this, of course, is to make sure that in your weaving you keep the braids tight, weave in your ends, make sure nothing is introduced that doesn’t come together with the rest and find resolution somewhere – it all needs to get tucked in.  Detail and intricacy are welcome in a novel.

In a short story, sometimes the most meaningful parts of the story are in what doesn’t appear on the page. The short story author must be content to leave stuff out and trust in the reader to understand what is left out, and what it means.  Instead of an elaborate braided updo, you might have just a simple fishtail braid – or not even that – it may just be a ponytail.

With a short story, you rely on your readers to fill in the blanks of what comes before and what comes after in your characters’ lives.  It can be amazing, sometimes, the amount of meaning and detail that can be achieved by leaving things out. Sometimes very important things.  Hemingway, one of the true masters of short fiction, almost always left the most important parts of his stories completely out of the text. The story “Hills like White Elephants”, for instance, is about a couple facing abortion and yet neither abortion nor pregnancy are mentioned in the story at all.

He made his point with the story, and he made it while leaving everything the story was about unmentioned and barely even referenced. It is also a tale told in dialogue with little action or real plot, but this makes the story no less meaningful. As a story, it’s like a kick in the gut. A particularly sharp one.

This seems to be a common thread among many of the best short stories, whether literary in nature or otherwise. They are defined not by what is written in the actual text but by what appears in the negative space around it. It is the purest distillation of what a story can be, and writing short stories can often lead to tighter writing in novels. Practicing the one will always make the other better.

I was broke, I love my family and wanted to give them thoughtful prezzies, so I turned to crafts.  All of my creative energy was turned away from my writing and toward designing things they’d like and executing those designs.

To that end (and in planning on selling some of my crafts on etsy for a few extra dollars), I spent nearly the whole month obsessively pouring over crafting and foodie websites and working on finalizing some of my own designs.

And now I need to shut all of that obsessive browsing down. To that end, I’ve added all of those sites, my feed reader, and everything else digital that took up so much space in my mind over the last month onto the most restrictive time-block on LeechBlock. I can only visit those sites for 15 minutes a day total before they’re all blocked.

My brain is running low on RAM and had too many applications open at once. It’s time to shift that focus onto what’s really important and get back to writing, but I know that focus is a difficult thing for me so I turn to ways I’ve found to force it. Disconnect, Block sites, Avoid Information Overload.

Write.

So if I’m less active over the next little while in various online communities of which I am a part (Tumblr, Twitter, Forums) you can consider it part of my digital detox.  I’ll be back, once I get my writing back on schedule (including my poor near-abandoned blog). I just need a bit of time to refocus.

Photo courtesy of greg.turner on Flickr

I don’t have any major resolutions this year. Though I am participating in the Doctor Who Fitness Challenge along with My B, I think I have now firmly established good healthy habits when it comes to both eating and exercise, so the challenge is just a way of making what I’m already doing more fun.

There is, however, one thing I will do this year. I’m going to finish This Ain’t No Fairy Story, edit it, get it out to betas, and have it into a publishable form by the end of the year. My intent is to go the route of traditional publishing, but I am growing out of my unease with independent publishing the more I read about it and I won’t discount that as an option entirely.

Fairy Story is the sixth novel I’ve written, but the first that I feel truly comfortable offering up to a wider audience. I’ve always been told you should never seek to publish your first novel. Perhaps with the sixth I am finally ready. The first draft is only a chapter away from completion, and I have fallen in love with these characters. I owe it to them to see this to completion.

I was looking for an inspiring fitness challenge for the new year, and here it is:

 
In honor of Doctor Who and David Tennant (and, of course, the Proclaimers and the Sue from Catering, and Dancing Ood Sigma, who is epic), in 2012, I will walk 500 miles, and then when I’m done, I will walk 500 more – and I won’t stop there. If it goes to 1500 miles, or 2000, so much the better. Plus, I’ll be walking it on my elliptical while re-watching the last 6 seasons of Doctor Who.

Of course, I’m not the only person who has turned this video into fitness inspiration, there is a tumblog devoted to it already. Go join in there if you want to take the challenge too!

Image courtesy of Navy Blue Stripes on Flickr

It’s the shortest day of the year, and that means that they are celebrating National Short Story Day in the UK.

This makes me a bit jealous. Why can’t we Yanks have a holiday dedicated to the Short Story? We have had, in our history, some of the greatest short story writers that have ever been. But the way I figure, it doesn’t have to be an official holiday for us to celebrate it.

I talk a lot about novel writing, but I write many, many more short stories than I do novels and everything that I have had success publishing has been a short story, essay, or non-fiction article.  Writing short stories can teach a lot about how to create a story structure, how to have a good, tight plot arc.  You have to keep your characters on track in a short story – there simply aren’t enough words to let them go wandering off into subplots after subplots.

Sometimes it seems like the market for short stories is dying, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. The magazines that our favorite short story authors of days past first published in may be gone the way of the dodo, and even BBC radio, one of the last places short stories are regularly read on public airwaves, was considering cutting back on their short story programming (to much public outcry). However, where old markets are going the way of the dodo, new markets are opening up. There are popular short story podcasts, websites, and e-zines.  I sell more short stories now to online paid-subscriber e-zines than I do to print magazines.  Sometimes I do miss holding the contributor’s copies in my hand, but it’s nice knowing that there are still places out there to publish short-form work.

In celebration of Short Story Day, I’m going to share links to where you can read some of my favorite short stories:

• “Hills like White Elephants” – Ernest Hemingway
• “The Yellow Wallpaper” – Charlotte Perkins Gilman
• “The Birthmark” – Nathaniel Hawthorne
• “Murders in the Rue Morgue” – Edgar Allen Poe
• “The Colour Out of Space” – H. P. Lovecraft
• “A Study in Emerald” – Neil Gaiman