A to Z Challenge

Frayne’s Sacrifice

/ legreene515 / 8 Comments

What else could F be for but Flash Fiction? Today’s story was done for Finish That Thought and for Mid-Week Blues-Buster. I killed two birds with one stone. Both of these were difficult for me today. The song on MWBB didn’t really inspire me, and I don’t consider myself a sci-fi writer at all, so using an alien protagonist for Finish That Thought was difficult for me.

Frayne’s Sacrifice
@laurenegreene
490 words

It was the night of a blood red moon. His fourth trip to Earth to look for Basha. Frayne hated this place. Last time he’d come, he landed right in a drone path. Took all his power to steer his ship to safety. He couldn’t understand a whole world intent on killing each other.

He stumbled around in the dark, staring up at the moon. The last of four blood red moons from 2014 to 2015. He knew the Christians of the earth thought this was religiously significant. Frayne laughed at that, shaking his head at their lack of astronomical knowledge.  They’d been using Christianity to explain natural phenomena for centuries. He didn’t know what Basha saw in these earth people, and he was sick of looking for her. She needed to take her rightful place next to him on the throne of Planet Bingo, where they would rule and reproduce as necessary, and then their little spawn would take over after their time was up.  Until he found her, their duty could not be fulfilled and he would feel incomplete.

The red barn stood at the edge of the field.  The farmhouse was in the distance, lights dancing in the windows. He snuck up to the house, and folded down upon himself until his knees were touching the grass. He placed his hands on the edge of the window frame and peeked into the house.

Basha was in the kitchen, making a meal. She was moving as he’d never seen anyone move before, swaying her hips. The human man walked up behind her, and what was he holding? Was that a baby human? Frayne saw the paleness of the baby’s skin and the truth hit him like a penny falling from a hundred foot building. Basha had reproduced with this earthling. He glanced back through the window, and as he was about to turn and walk away the screen door opened.

“Frayne—come out from behind there. I can sense your presence, you know.”

Frayne unfolded his seven foot body and stomped over to Basha.

“We were to be married. You could have had this on Bingo.”

She shook her head, and he noticed she was holding the half-earthling, its little fists waving in the air.

“I could never have this, Frayne. The earthlings believe in family. There’s is a love so eternal; I can feel it in my core.”

“You’ve seen the wars, same as I have.”

“They fight because they’re so passionate. It is something you could never understand, unless you let yourself live as one. They love as no others love.”

“I don’t understand this thing you call love.”

“It’s a feeling—something you can’t touch.”

“I’ll tell the council you died,” Frayne said.

“You’ll do that for me?”

“It’s what you want.”

She walked back toward the dim light of the farmhouse, but turned around to look at Frayne one more time.

“That’s love, Frayne.”

Easter and Editing

/ legreene515 / 15 Comments

This weekend, I’m going to read over the edits and send “The Devil Within” back to my editor. I must have told myself this about a thousand times as I watched the clock tick by. I didn’t literally or figuratively watch the clock. I mostly spent time with my family, because it was Easter weekend.

I am not religious, but I was raised in the church. Everyone in the south seems to be.  When Christmas and Easter come around, it’s a big deal. We had egg hunts galore, including one for my daughter’s daycare where the organizer brought an ice cream truck. Boy, that was popular! We know have candy pouring out of our ears–the dentist will be happy to see us coming soon. And we spent time with our family.

The thing is, my edits are done, but I really want to read through one more time and make sure no more changes need to be made. I’m also a hater of conflict, and there are several suggestions my editor made that I don’t agree with. I’m done procrastinating TODAY. I keep telling myself just to finish the darn editing. After all, the sooner it’s finished the sooner I can move on with edits on my other works.

Having your work edited is so hard mentally. Being a writer means you’re a creator of sorts. You create a world for your characters to live in, and when someone shoots that all down or doesn’t understand where you’re coming from. It can be quite hard to accept. It’s all part of being a writer though. Whoever said writing was easy? No one ever.

I’m glad I put editing on the back burner this weekend though, because I was able to spend a lot of quality time with my three growing kids. One day, they’re not going to want to wake up at the crack of dawn to see what the Easter bunny left. One day, Easter egg hunts are going to be things of the past. Until then, I need to enjoy these little moments.  I’ll leave you with this little gem from the weekend. I usually try to keep my personal and writing blog separate, but this photo of my middle boy is just priceless.  Happy Belated Easter!

IMG_2579

Just Desert

/ legreene515 / 12 Comments

Pun intended. Years ago, when I was just a college kid, I drove across country with my friend Jon and his sister Cass. We had gone to high school together, and we decided to go on this little adventure together. We stopped at Bryce Canyon in Utah. Utah has amazing scenery–so different from the greenery of the North, a lot red.

Thor's Hammer at Sunset

I  read about the desert. I just knew it was hot during the day and cold during the night. So we pitched our tent, and we went for a hike. Then we came back to our campsite, baking in the 100+ degree heat and complaining about it too. I told my friends it would get cold during the night, so we zipped up the tent and snuggled into our tents and baked like burritos, because the temperature never fell.  You see, even though it’s in the desert, the Bryce Canyon campground is at the bottom of the canyon, and it traps heat. I’ll admit it: I was wrong.

Today’s story, I wrote yesterday for Flash!Friday. The theme needed to revolve around a blunder, like the one I made in Bryce Canyon. And the photo was of a desert. And just a warning, there is some profanity in this post. I mean, I for one would be cursing up a storm if this happened to me!

Mirage
@laurenegreene
208 words

Bloody blunder that’s what it was. Bollocks. I could have sworn, I was signing up for a trip to Mount Desert, Maine. All-inclusive. When I showed up to the airport, I was surprised to see my plane was going to Africa. I mean, who doesn’t look at their tickets? Me, that’s who.

And now, here I am, running down a freaking hill for my life. And it’s hot, dreadfully. They’re chasing me, but they’ve fallen far behind. My marathon days have served me well.  I didn’t even know hills existed in Africa. Who invented this horrid place anyway? A sadistic god content on torching his fallen people, that’s who.

Thank God I packed extra water today. I stop for a minute, look behind me. There’s no trace of the errant tribe; I stumbled upon their sacrifice by mistake, but there’s no way I’m going to be their next victim.

I come to the bottom of the hill, and I’m surprised to see a road off in the distance. Blurry, weathered, but a road. And I hope to fucking God it leads me the hell out of here.

When I get out of this place, I’ll be content if I never see another grain of sand in my life.

Sweet Caroline

/ legreene515 / 15 Comments

This post isn’t really about the Neil Diamond song, “Sweet Caroline,” but now that you have it in your head, I’ll do you a favor and post the song right here:

Blogging every letter of the alphabet is hard, especially when normally I just post pieces I write for Flash Fiction challenges.  Today, I thought about writing about confidence, but instead I decided to give you “The Last Straw,” in which Caroline is a peripheral character.  I won the Special Challenge over on Finish That Thought for this piece.  The first sentence was provided, and then we had to use at least one emotion/noun combo (e.g. angry waffled).

And although Caroline is a secondary character the story revolves around her. Her mother, the protagonist, makes the right decision for her.

Enjoy!

The Last Straw
@laurenegreene
450 words

This was neither the time nor the place for his antics. Lines were being practiced on the stage. Kids flitted around like anxious butterflies. My daughter sat in the glum corner.

“Where’s your father?”

“He took the happy juice, again,” she said, without looking up at me. “He forgot my costume.”

I sighed. My tired feet weighed a thousand pounds from a double shift. He had one job, to bring Caroline’s costume to school, and he’d failed like he had a dozen times before.

“Is he here?”

“Outside, with Victor. Mom, how can I be Juliet without my costume?”

“Go talk to Ms. Harrison.”

I knew I didn’t have thirty minutes to get up the mountain and back down. Caroline’s eyes were stained red from too many tears as she went to track Ms. Harrison down. A seething bull settled inside me, ready to gore Darnel. I’d given him so many chances, and he kept disappointing me—a record constantly on repeat. And now, he’d shattered our daughter’s dream like he had the cracked window in our lonely bedroom.

Darnel was out on the school’s quad with Victor. He was dancing around, a raving lunatic, and I knew he’d taken more than just happy juice.

“What’s he on?” I asked Victor, as Darnel tried to kick up his heels and belly flopped onto the firm green lawn.

“I’m not sure,” Victor said. “Honestly I’m surprised he even made it here without running off the side of the mountain. Caroline was something else. Mad as a tick. She yelled at him in front of everyone. Told him she wished he was dead. Didn’t faze him one bit either.”

Bones ached, and I shifted my legs trying to find a comfortable position, having stood all day at the diner. Low on tips too, and I needed to pay for Caroline’s senior trip still. I was bone tired of coming home to find Darnel having spent the money on booze and drugs. And the lying. That was the worst of it. He wove tales with a dishonest thread. I couldn’t even catch a glimpse of who he used to be. The man I fell in love with all those years ago—he didn’t exist anymore.

I reached into my pink apron, and I pulled out fifty dollars, a good chunk of the day’s tips.  I settled the money into Victor’s hand and caught his eye.

“Take him down to Bradford. I don’t want to see him again.”

“What’ll you tell Caroline?”

“Leave it up to me.”

I turned my back on Darnell, and walked away from the man I had once known. Caroline wore the color of hope when the curtain rose.

Blogging! Bananas!

/ legreene515 / 12 Comments

B

Blogging seems an appropriate word for an A-Z Blogging Challenge.  Why is this post called “Blogging! Bananas!?” Because I’m sitting here at 5:20 AM badly wanting a banana. I can’t explain it, besides to say when I played around unsuccessfully with Canva this morning, a monkey mysteriously appeared in the “charge” box. I scraped that, because I didn’t want to pay $1 for a monkey who didn’t exist in my image. But ever since, I have wanted bananas. And guess what? No bananas. In my house, bananas either fester and grow black or they’re gone within a day. Sort of like blog posts. You either get a lot of hits or none at all, depending on so many factors: topic, tags, categories, advertising, marketing or just dumb luck.

I started seriously blogging about four years ago. When I say serious, I mean I tried to blog a couple of times a week. I’ve never made, or really tried to make money, on my blog. I blogged over at http://www.lululandadventures.blogspot.com/, which I’m sad to say I haven’t been updating recently. I need to, because I’ve changed that to my personal blog, and this is my writing blog. I came to blogging after years of ignoring an urge to write. I came to blogging to deal with the loss of my hair to alopecia areata. I’d had it as a child, but after I stopped breastfeeding my daughter I lost all my hair. At first, my blog was used as a cathartic release.

I feel like blogging gave me the stepping stone to start writing again. Once I started writing again, I had the motivation to start querying. When that didn’t work, I self-published. Now, one of my books is in editing with Booktrope, and I hope it’ll be published in May.  All of this, because I had the courage to put myself out there and blog.

A is for Ambition

/ legreene515 / 20 Comments

Today is a little bit different. I’m starting the A to Z Challenge, in which I blog through the entire alphabet in the month of April. It will be interesting to see whether I can complete this. There are about 1700 other bloggers joining me.

Today is brought to you by the letter A. I wanted to blog about ambition last night, but I was busy working on a flash fiction piece, and then my wonderful, beautiful daughter would not go to sleep.

According to Merriam-Webster dictionary, one of the definitions of ambition is a desire to achieve a particular end. Ambition is the key to drive. My son is ambitious at gymnastics. He pushes himself. He doesn’t accept failure. He keeps going, even when the going gets tough, or even when it’s an event he doesn’t like. My ambition (defined as: a particular goal of aim) is to become a successful author.

Sometimes, ambition doesn’t seem like enough though. So many things can get in the way of success, including real life, day jobs, attitude, mental blocks, and that little “p” word, procrastination. I am the queen of procrastinating when I don’t want to do something. And all it does is hurt me. Procrastination takes my ambition, crumbles it up, and it throws it in the toilet. My ambition this week is to finish editing “The Devil Within,” so I can send it back to my editor. And it’s slow going, because I don’t really want to do it!  I lack ambition when it comes to editing. I have plenty of ambition when it comes to writing, but that’s only part of the story. It’s sort of like, you can’t take the good without the bad. I need to train my mind to believe that in order to be a successful published author, I must edit.  So this week, I’m striving to be an ambitious editor–we’ll see where it gets me.