Camp Nano ... a new (to me) holiday/celebration/event

In the attempt to re-ignite the muse, for real this time, I am joining a friend for Camp Nano!

I did music camp as a kid and only ever did tent camping once, it did not go well.

(how I would have looked , had I been a puggle, at the end of an actual camping trip)

Me? I think the wardrobe can be the thing ... but not always.

 It should be more about the equipment ... the keyboard, the chair, and the tenacity to sit before a screen each and every day.

 

So, we're gonna try it again.

I am currently shooting for 50,000 words, but will be thrilled if I can actually do 10,000.

Wish me well.

Oh, can you pass the marshmallows?

writing doodle - getting ready for NaNo ... this time I'll really do it

She stepped into the room to inspect her work and smiled.  Preparations for this year's writing challenge had been beyond exhausting but worth it.  The room finally looked perfect.  The dust bunnies had finally been defeated, but she didn't own an old Indiana Jones Halloween costume for nothing.  The storm of paper on the desk had been sorted, filed, cleared, and the necessary had been shredded. There was a new cushion in the old roller desk chair to make for comfortable nights.  

This year nothing could go wrong.

Everything was perfect.

She had even learned how to drink cold, bitter coffee just like real writers are supposed to slug down when the words just wouldn't come.

It had been a tiresome trek working like an absolute fiend attempting to get everything right.

Too many self-help books had been devoured along with too many audio books that were assigned for inspiration.  

The new checklist had a mark in every box:

1. frozen meals prepared for those long November nights
2. extra dog food was purchased so the pooches wouldn't go hungry
3. mail had been forwarded to reduce distraction
4. phone set to go automatically to voicemail 
5. basic plot outlined 
6. characters sketches complete
7. new battery for the laptop, just in case
8. extra lightbulbs procured for the solitary lamp

Now all she had to do was check her calendar and wait for NaNo to arrive.  Just like Christmas, it arrived every year.

Then it was time to actually check the calendar.

Wait a minute.  2015? When had that happened?  The last time she remembered looking at the calendar it was 2013?


Now what?

At least the room was ready for the white glove inspection, even if the rest of her life was not.

writing doodle - another beginning ... fat shaming/social media

Writing is a lot like exercise.  The more you do, the stronger and the better the results.  Right now this feels a bit like falling off of a bicycle ... things have gotten away from me  and rolled over me, but I'm gonna start plugging again.

~~~
Lula/Stephanie/Valerie ... walked into a bar (just kidding)

~~~~

“I hate those no-nothing, nothing doing punks on social media,” Lula said.  She pressed a button on the side of her phone to shut it down and tossed it into her purse.

In the beginning of my bounty hunting career, the only social media that seemed to touch my life was the grapevine in the Berg.  It never mattered what my supposed or real transgression, if it happened within five minutes of home, my mother and grandmother would have been informed. Depending on the source, the details varied, almost always embellished in some way shape or form.  But the framework of what happened was there.  There was no escape. Not unlike social media. With the blooming of all of the forms of social media, I opted out.  Provided I remained in the Garden State, I had enough connections, friends and family to do my job without technological embellishments. Mostly.

For a Tuesday morning, things were slow in the bonds office.  Connie and my cousin the weasel, were out doing who knew what and I was babysitting Lula.  I put down my cup of coffee and wiped the remaining doughnut crumbs from the corner of my mouth. “What’s wrong, Lula?” The last time she turned off her phone and chucked it into her purse, she had given up on Tank. It had only lasted about two weeks before she saw her way clear and knew he was missing her, but it was a long two weeks for me. I crossed my fingers that it wasn’t Tank related.

She huffed, shrugged, and sighed.  “Everyone’s a hater. Everyone’s a critic.”

In my experience, that was true enough.  “You know what my Grandpa Harry used to say, right? Opinions are like assholes.”

We said in unison, “Everyone’s got one.”

“Exactly,” I said.  “So, who said or did what?” I wasn’t sure if I wanted to know, but she’d talk about it one way or another.

“You remember the last time Sally Sweet and I played the bowling alley after hours?”

Just this last weekend, Sally Sweet and his band of Lovelies had lost their regular gig at the Liberty Ballroom.  The management had wanted to change things up and started Swing with the Swingers night, combining a place for swingers to meet others, but not to swap, set to the old big band tunes circa World War II.  At about the same time, the local bowling alley was looking for new streams of revenue and turned into an after hours place for kids to hang out after curfew on Saturday nights and they wanted a band. On a provisional basis.”

“So anyway, we did one set and had my cousin Peanut take some pictures and put them up on FriendSpace to try to improve our cache. We are building our brand.”

Peanut was a makeup artist cum stylist Lula had trained in her personal style for many years.  This meant that the color wheel had a flat.  The more things opposed each other, the more they were obviously meant to be together. This color chart had no subtle tones, no pastels, it had neon. A lot of neon.  The hair and the hair pieces, the shoes, the outfits, the makeup, everything seemed to be neon. Or black trimmed in neon.

“Okay.” I had a really sick feeling in the pit of my stomach where this was going to go.

“Well anyway, there’s fat shaming involved.”

Lula had made the executive decision it was better to have dangerous curves than no curves.  She was on the plus-plus side of plus size, but most of her clothes came from the Junior Miss Department.  Her clothes tended to wear out from the inside out.

“Ouch,” I said.  “Some people just aren’t kind.”

“No shit. Let me show you the picture they are all hating.”

I wanted to cover my eyes and look through my fingers.  I had seen the best of Lula and some of the outfits she wore to perform were far from the best of Lula.

“It’s on my FriendSpace page,” she said.  She pointed to my phone and said, “You still haven’t friended us yet. We need all the exposure we can get.”

I sighed.  I really didn’t want to do the social media thing now or ever.  As soon as an account opened, I was sure it would be filled by my mother’s friends keeping better tabs on me. Worse still, over the years there have been multiple less than flattering pictures of me and I really didn’t want to see those posted on the internet for the whole world to see.  It was bad enough receiving them in text messages or on email, but to my knowledge, they weren’t available for the entire world.  Even if they were some days it paid to be an ostrich.

Lula tapped me on the shoulder so I would evacuate Connie’s chair and she could control the computer. I guess some pictures were best seen when they were larger than life.  We traded places and Lula logged into her account.  After a few clicks and a minor delay waiting for the page to load, there it was.  Possibly one of the most unflattering pictures of all time of a woman’s denim clad posterior as she was bending over a refreshment table.  To make things worse, her pants had split and a tramp stamp was visible. 

I recognized both the jeans and the tramp stamp with clown faces on each side and which proclaimed her to be the property of her snuggle bunny, Albert.

“Oh, God,” I whispered.

“Yeah, that’s what I said.  Your sister’s got to be hating life right about now.”

My older sister Valerie had always been the taller, prettier, smarter, and more successful one.  Until recently.  Recently divorced, she married Albert Kloughn on the rebound and immediately settled into life as the perfect homemaker and babymaker. The two of them put the mild in wild. 

TBC? 

so it's been a while ... sorry about that ...why a bra is better than a man - the beginning

Well, it has been more than a little while since I've updated.  Writing is kind of like going to the gym ... you don't realize just how many muscles you do or don't use until you don't do it for a long, long time.  This has hurt, but in a good way.  It is just a beginning to make sure I didn't break something too important because we all know that November is coming.

~~~~~

“Babe.”

I, Stephanie Plum, consider myself to be multi-lingual. I speak English, naturally. A smattering of Italian, courtesy of the neighborhood and a fondness for the world’s most perfect food, pizza. Bergese, not necessarily a language per se, but it could be one. Come one, everyone who is raised in an Italian American home that is in the berg speaks Bergese; it is commonly known as guilt.  It is a combination of body language, tone of voice, sighs, and a lack of words. The lack of words provide the context of what I haven’t been doing lately of which I should feel guilty: no husband, a job no one really approved of, and no big plan for either one in the foreseeable future.

My final language is Babe,  the single word that had so many meanings: good, bad, sexy, impatient, unruffled, and always me.  I have been the recipient of long and complex salutations from Ranger Manoso.  Ranger is a man of few words.  Much like Bergese, it is a combination of understanding the body language, the tone, the inflection, and the incredibly short sentence structure. Why waste an entire sentence when a single look sometimes combined with a solitary word would suffice?  Plus, each word out of his mouth seemed to fill the room with pheromones or hormones that short circuited most of the brains of the female of the species. When we first met, I either babbled constantly or was left mostly mute.  Now, I still babbled but I could mostly control my own thoughts.

I glanced up from the list I was composing to notice he was leaning against my kitchen counter, arms and legs crossed, and a slight upturn of his lips. Tonight was different, he wasn’t in either basic black or some form of cammo. Ranger was in jeans, the well worn and painted on kind. The white, lightly striped oxford shirt set off his light chocolate coloring.  I am sure others might think he had mocha latte colored skin, I preferred to think of it as the color o a Snickers bar, fresh from the freezer. You know, not quite milk chocolate but yummy and delicious all the same. Yummy but full of not always great consequences and dangerous to those who should leave such things alone. Me? He wasn’t dangerous to me, much.  Sure, we had had our night a long time ago. And, yes, he had ruined me for other men, especially Joe Morelli, but my wounds had been licked and I had mostly healed.

He quirked his eyebrow. As a kid, I spent hours in the mirror trying to both quirk my eyebrows and wiggle my ears. I could manipulate my ears just a fraction not so anyone else would notice. The eyebrow thing? Not so much. I usually looked more startled than curious. I would have better luck stenciling an eyebrow that way, but then I’d always look lopsided and a bit deranged.  Then again, a bit deranged wasn't necessarily a bad thing. I am a bounty hunter and it wasn't necessarily a bad thing to look intimidating.  

“Yo,” I said.  Hey, two could play trade long, elegant nonsequitirs. Besides, I was in the middle of a project. A list. A possibly life changing list. The list wasn't for or about me, it was for my sister Valerie’s daughters. I immediately lowered my head to the notebook page and bounced my pen on it to clarify my thoughts.

“Why is a bra better than a man?” he asked.

Ranger is silent and stealthy like a cat. I hadn’t heard him come behind me so he could read over my shoulder.

I covered the list with my arms, looked up and glared at him. Val’s daughters were getting to the age when they were going to know the facts of life sooner than later, not that I was planning on having that talk with them. But I could put my vast knowledge from my past career as a lingerie buyer to good use by explaining the finer points to them.  

“Exactly why are you here,” I asked asI shot a look at my watch, “At five-thirty?” Was he after a favor? Usually if he wanted a favor it was in the form of a distraction and he showed up after nine, sometimes ten o’clock. Was he bored? Was he lonely? Nah. This was Ranger, he was never bored and from what he had told me about his family he would probably never be lonely.

“Dinner? It’s been a while.”

“I don’t know about you, but I had dinner just last night.  I even had it the night before.” Once dinner might have been construed to mean the prelude to a possible something. It had been so long since we had been alone together in a situation that might have been misconstrued as a date that it was probably the prelude to a work discussion.

“You know you’ve got to eat.” He took the three steps from my kitchen table to the refrigerator, opened it, and shook his head. “Your hamster could starve to death on what you keep in here.”

Two whole sentences and one was an attempt at humor.  Something was either very wrong or possibly very right.

writing doodle - deeper and deeper and now what?

I woke up to find my skin was hot enough to use as a cooking surface.  Too bad I don't like eggs, I could have made several on the surface of my stomach. I felt just awful enough, I might even eat them.  Then again, maybe not.

By the time I staggered into the bathroom, it was as though I'd been beaten about the he
ad and torso with an ugly stick.  Every quarter of an inch of less, there was a raised red patch.  It looked kind of like a bad case of poison oak, but none of the patches were weeping and frankly I haven't been outside enough to be exposed.

The only possible solution was that the hives had spread during the night.  My positive affirmations CD didn't do its part to keep me from obsessing about another upcoming 'w' word.  I have no problem with the 'm' word, it is the 'w' word which creates problems.  All the planning, posing, pretending.  Not to mention all of the bills for a blow out for a woman who changes personalities within five minutes of receiving a diamond solitaire, which she probably wants to upgrade anyway.  If the personalities of my intendeds had ever returned to normal, the entire 'f' experience, I mean fiance experience not the fun f experience, might not be so disturbing.

I found my bottle of calamine lotion and some q-tips, the oatmeal scrub for my bath, the ever present bottle of bendadryl, and the towel that gets kept in its own baggie after it has been boiled for 30 minutes and dried in an extra hot drier, and completed my morning plans.  

First the bath to calm the current dermis, then swabbing the raised areas with calamine.  After the bath, two tabs of drugs, and finally a call into work since I am not effective on any kind of drug, not even Advil. 

"Louie," I called into the bedroom.  "It's a short trip this morning.  There's no time to doddle. Come on, oatmeal."

Louie raised his head from what had just been my pillow and glowered.  Louie is half dachshund and half German shepherd.  I knew the dog who sired him, my grandfather's long haired dachshund, Max, a little dog with an ambition to do big things and a penchant for digging.  The female was older and probably didn't feel anything or just didn't care enough to disengage him. By the time the owners figured out what happened, it was too late.  Louie was the only survivor in the litter.  When he was whelped, the owner delivered him to my grandfather who gave him to me.  Told me a real man was judged by the way he treated his animals.

Great.

I am the proud owner of a designer dog.  To give you a better visual, Louie is a full sized shepherd from nose to tail and the rest of him is a low rider.  I think of him as my own personal canine cocktail table.  You wouldn't think that a dog with four inches worth of legs could jump a six foot fence but has to be shoved to get onto the bed at night.

"I promise to make you your own bowl of oatmeal if you make things quick."

Oatmeal is a magical word, his favorite food, and a command.   Once the word has been said, it is an implied promise that he can have a portion of cooked oatmeal, non-sweetened.  He was off the bed, had  his leash in his mouth, and aimed his body at the backdoor before I finished my sentence.