More Than What It Seems: Grapefruit Edition

They are never just grapefruit, these pinky-golden dreams I find in my tree.

A grapefruit, recently of the tree in my back yard. The dirt washes away.

They are freshness.

They are zest.

They are balm.

They are fortification.

They are sunshine.

They are delicious.

Mmm, brains. Oh wait. No, that’s grapefruit too. Recently eviscerated from its peel.

Cleaning the shelves, photo vignettes

A wandering of my bookshelves, presented for your consumption. If we’re lucky, you can click to embiggen each picture. 

A fingerless Mary among the books

Mary wants her fingers back. She lost them somewhere between Gregory Maguire and Carl Sagan. She glows in the dark, so if you have them, she’ll haunt you. 

It’s a bloody stone!

This is a pair of flat metal bars meant to represent money, wrapped in the program from a show at NMSU in ye olde dayes. How does one display such a memento among the other sentimental falderal?

Three glass bottles

There used to be four of these glass bottles. The fourth one, which had a cork rather than a ground-glass stopper, exploded into glitter all over the floor when I knocked it over.  There were many expletives.

A Gargoyle and a Nose

The Gargoyle is watching you. And he’s hungry. The Nose Knows. But they’re both kept in check by the Tim Horton’s can.  The Tim Horton’s can hopes we will do 10 Things again soon. Otherwise it might have to eat the Gargoyle.

A photo of a portrait of Richard II of England

Almost forgot to add Richard II. He used to live on the wall in the hallway, but staged many a coup to escape the wall. Lacking a horse, I gave him a kingdom on a shelf. 

What’s on your shelf? 

Watch out for the Paper Boy and Other Friday Randomness

Without further ado, I present your Friday Randomness

1. I frequently get collection phone calls for someone with a similar name. I would not want to be the intended receiver of any of these calls. They are frequently more menacing than the paper boy in Better Off Dead. Which is my favorite line of writing this week. I crack myself up. 

2. Sonar X10 started a conversation like this yesterday: “If there’s a fairy in the van…” I think it was a warning about pixies tying my loose shoelaces to the pedals but I was laughing so hard I might have heard him wrong. 

3. I finished reading Sum: Forty Tales of the Afterlives by David Eagleton. Review to come, eventually. Another book I’d put in my top five for the year.

4. Driving to the grocery store the other day, I turned a corner and came face-to-face with the largest turkey vulture I have ever seen. It was perched on top of a road sign with it’s enormous wings spread wide, catching the buffeting breeze. A superstitious person might have taken it as an omen. I just wished I’d had the camera.

5. The turkey vulture has inspired me to require the main character in my Mud-Vampire story to swallow a rock. It strikes me as funny. I’m not sure how they’re connected either, except that I scribbled both of these things on a piece of paper in the van. Deciding this is the closest I’ve come to actually editing that story for two weeks. 

6. My NaNoWriMo word count is 42,800. I’m one day behind the goals I’d planned for myself at the beginning of the month, but I’m also feeling enthusiastic. How many words do you think I can churn out today?

7. One of my favorite elements from the commercially under-appreciated series Firefly is the word SHINY. I suppose it means something like cool or awesome, but with a certain folksy subtlety. I think you’d be awfully shiny if you left a comment down there. I say that with a pretty please, and my thumbs in my belt loops, rocking forward onto the toes of my boots, and batting my eyelashes.  So stand up and be shiny. Tell me anything you want. Tell me the weirdest thing you ever saw at the grocery store. Tell me your favorite thing to eat at family gatherings. Tell me if you’ve ever seen a turkey vulture THIS BIG.  I’m waiting.

Whims: Who gets to tinker with my NaNo?

Whims are funny. This morning I had the whim to sew myself a new shirt to teach myself how to do properly-oriented darts. Earlier this week I had other whims.  

Whims happen to me a lot.  

One whim was about changing my Mainstream Fiction NaNoWriMo novel to science fiction by dropping in “a fraternal alien-twin for one main character and a liberal sprinkling of the word ‘ovipositor.’”  I decided to resist this one.  

That whim was followed by the one where I invited you lovely people to suggest something outrageous to drop into the novel instead.  Here were my seed ideas:

• A blender
• A pair of handcuffs
• Some Ceilidh dancers
• Three guys named Baldy
• A nose-picking stiltwalker with eczema 

In various forums, several of you had suggestions.

Patrick: “I say you throw in a swarm of bees and some lemonade shaved ice.”

Mmmm. Buzzzzz. I have a scene with ice cream cones right now.  BAM! I’ll change it to lemonade shaved ice.

Cass: “How about they open up a dvd cover and get sucked into another alternative dystopian world? A little Alice in Wonderland meets Pan’s Labyrinth meets Hot Tub Time Machine.”

Snort. I *do* love John Cusack.  Hmmm…

Cab: “I was thinking that maybe Carlos was obsessed with prime numbers and/or had the world’s largest collection of Hello Kitty paraphenalia, but those are just character quirks, not outrageous scenarios.”

Ha. Hello Kitty.  I’ve actually been looking for a funny inside joke between Carlos (one main character) and his best friend.  I could have Best Friend give Carlos Hello Kitty stuff all the time.  His bedroom could have oddball Hello Kitty stuff here and there.

Maria: “Set it on fire.”

Heh heh.  In particular she suggested setting fire to a boring party scene. The roof, the roof, the roof is on fire. Ok, nothing is on fire yet.  But I always keep this one in my back pocket in case things get boring.  I had someone throw up in the middle of the party instead. I know, sort of mundane, right? Fire might be better.  

EVF: “You need a massage and a steam bath.”

Oh wait, I think she meant that for ME.

Beth and Clownfysh approved the liberal sprinkling of tweets through the novel, which, because the story is set in the mid-nineties, led to the suggestion of Time Travel in the novel, which connects it back to Cass’s Hot Tub Time Machine suggestion.  Twitter party in the Hot Tub! 

You’re all really fabulous, you know that?  

I don’t REALLY want to change to science fiction right now.  Or maybe ever.  I love to read Science Fiction, but haven’t ever written it.  While I think that NaNoWriMo is an excellent opportunity to push boundaries and boldly go where I haven’t gone before as a writer, I’m just not there yet.  BUT! The story is set mainly in a video store.  Opportunities for allusion to SciFi classics abound!

What do you think about stilt-walking Ceilidh dancers taking over the video store to have a lemonade-shaved-ice party with John Cusack, except that the party is ruined when Hello Kitty lets loose 13,931 bees in the store, and when everyone rushes out in a panic, one stilt walker trips on an electrical cord and sets fire to the life-sized cardboard cut-out of the White Rabbit?

Oh yes, and my word count right now is 35471. Not prime, but pretty sweet.

I was bored in the van yesterday, a photo essay from my NaNo-mushed brain

I ended up waiting for a little while in the van. With the camera. Here are some of my snaps. Don’t worry, I wasn’t driving when I took these photos.  

This sticker has been covering the center badge of the steering wheel for about seven years. It came from a bank in Pennsylvania. Sonar X10 put it there back when he was Sonar X3.

The steering wheel of our van with an old battered sticker over the center badge

Clowns to the left of me…

The view to my left as I sit in the driver’s seat of the van

…jokers to the right.

The view to my right as I sit in the driver’s seat of the van

Does anyone ever clean this van?  Ooh! Look! A piece of paper for scribbling random thoughts.  

The van floor between the front four seats (the second row faces backward)

Sonar X10 changes the sticky note messages seasonally. He’s due for a change, I think.  I could steal those papers for scribblings.  

Sonar X10’s Window in the van, covered with blue sticky notes that spelled ‘Happy Halloween’

More dust, on the radio. But the music was good.  

I was listening to 94.7FM on the radio

When you live on the coast, sand ends up in your car. Universal truth. 

The sandy floor mat of the van under the driver’s feet

When we went to the beach last week, the lovely Carrie handed me this crab shell. It was whole when she gave it to me, and as fragile as a potato chip.  It’s actually about the size of a large potato chip too.  I put it on the dash board to keep it safe.  It was safe from human poking, but the heat of the sun on the car dash pulverized it in a few days.  

The dashboard of the van in front of the passenger seat, holding a crumbling crab shell. And a lot of dust.

I bet y’all can’t wait for all this NaNo business to be finished, huh?