writing

J is for J K Rowling

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My oldest son has been seen these days with his head securely hidden behind this book:

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A single mother at the time, she wrote in cafes while her daughter slept (Wikipedia).  Oh and by the way, her name is pronounced Rolling too. If it was Rawling, it would have an “a.”  No matter if you like Harry Potter or not (I did, but I never read the last book–I’m not a series person), you have to admit that J K Rowling’s story is an inspiration to all writers.

We’ve all heard the rumors. The way to get published in writing is to be a) super connected with the BIG 5, b) live in New York City, or c) have loads of money and buy your way in. Well, I’m not leaving Alabama, then I’d miss awesome events like the rattlesnake rodeo.

Rowling used her imagination and drive to keep going despite being rejected by 12 publishing houses initially.  She did what it took. She wrote. She persisted. And she became a success.

I’m not sure if every writer has a dream of being a best seller, but I know every writer wants their work to be read. (After they get over that scary phase of I show my work to no one.)  Without an audience, there is no one to find joy in the words you’ve created.  There is no one to laugh and cry with you as you take your characters on their journey. Without an audience, you’ve just put words on paper, but with no one to read them they don’t hold much meaning.

I hope one day I hit the big time like J K Rowling, but until then I’m going to keep on writing.

Intuition

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I’ve always been one to trust my intuition. If something seems off, then I leave the situation. I think that’s why I’ve succeeded in surviving unscathed as long as I have. I haven’t ever been in a situation in which I feared for my life, or felt like I might be killed. Sure, I’ve ended up in situations where these things could have happened, but I always trusted my instincts enough to remove myself from the situation before something bad happened.

Once, when I was in high school, a bunch of us went down to a place called Thirteen Bridges. Supposedly, if you walk across all thirteen bridges then turn around when you come back there are only twelve. It’s one of those haunted in Alabama places, where teens loitered to imbibe, hang out, and partake in various other sultry activities.  It was also private property, but that never stopped us from trespassing.

The night we were there, it was so dark, and we hadn’t brought flash lights. We were walking blindly, just chatting and having a good time. All of a sudden, I stopped dead in my tracks.

“Guys, we need to turn around and go home right now.”

My boyfriend joshed on me and told me to suck it up. They wanted to walk all the bridges. My friends tried to cajole me.

“Come on, Lauren. Let’s go. Don’t be a party pooper.”

“I’m not going further. We need to turn around.”

I can’t explain how, but I knew we shouldn’t go any further. We had walked all the way to the ninth bridge. We turned around and started walking back. We passed some youths with alcohol. When we reached our car, the police were waiting. They gave us a slap on the wrist and told us to get out of there.

The next day, my boyfriend and his friend drove out there. They were determined to walk all the bridges.  He called me that afternoon.

“Lauren, you have some crazy intuition or something. The tenth bridge had fallen in. If we had kept walking we would have walked right off an incline.”

Trust your intuition. It’s usually trying to tell you something!

And for my fictional part of my post, I wrote for Flash!Friday today.  The character was supposed to be a spy (again, I have no experience with writing spies. I took a different route). The photo was of a bum holding a coffee cup. Enjoy!

Undercover Ops
@laurenegreene
210 words

A good spy must trust his intuition.

Coffee cup is pouring over with change today. I jiggle it just to hear the clink of coins against each other. I smile at the worker bees. The great masticators missing instead of secure in my mandible.

I catch the eye of the next passerby and before he can step off the curb into the safety of the street, I yank him toward me by his coat sleeve. A ticket floats to the ground—the rays of sunlight gleam off its shiny surface.

“Let go of me,” the man says, trying to reach for his fallen ticket and escape my grasp.

“I know who you are, but do you know who I am?”

The man pulls away and brushes off his coat as if I have contaminated him. George runs out from the Italian market behind me.

“I’m sorry. He means no harm. Old fart thinks he’s an undercover operative or something.”

“Well is he?” the man asked.

“I’m Agent P! He’s the one, George. Wrestle him to the ground.”

George shakes his head, hands the man his fallen ticket, and they both walk away. There’s always tomorrow. I shake coffee cup, and the next man drops a dollar in. My lucky day.

Gigi and Gipop

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I know this is supposed to be a writing blog, but without my grandparents, Gigi and Gipop, I’m not sure if I would be a writer.  When I was in 4th grade, Gigi sent me “Tuck Everlasting.” I remember trying to read the book and hating it. She usually was so spot on in the books she sent. Every year, she would send a book and while I think a lot of children would have hated that, I absolutely loved it. Reading was my life.  It took me about three more years, but when I finally read “Tuck Everlasting” it became one of my favorites.

I read it with the kids a few years ago, and as suspected it was too old for them. They need the life experiences of crushes and they need to rid themselves of the girls are icky stage before they can understand that book.  My grandparents persisted in sending us books, even into our twenties. I have a fine collection of leather bound classics thanks to them. I give them credit, and my parents for being an avid reader, which led to me wanting to write.

I usually spent a week or two during the summer at their house in Florida. They always had a dog, which I loved because we never had one growing up. My favorite dog was Zelda the dachshund. Guess who she was named for? They also had a white dog at one point, and he was so cute but so very hyper. I think at some point they had to give him away because he started biting.  At their house, they never turned the TV on. At night, after Gigi killed me at a game of Scrabble, they would watch what I called “the boring news” aka “The McNeill Lehrer” hour, so I had a lot of time to read, use my imagination, and explore on my own.  They also took me to the Junior Museum in Tallahassee, Wakulla Springs, antique shopping, to the mall, and maybe most importantly, Gipop let me out a gallon of whatever flavored ice cream I wanted.

I have tons of memories of them, but unfortunately few photographs. Most of those are at my parents’ house. Gipop passed away a few years after I graduated from high school. By that time, they were living in Tennessee, and I drove home for his Memorial Service.  Gigi carried on.  She lived to be ninety-five. She read every single day of her life. A lover of words. I still think about both of them every day.

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I love this photo, because it looks like Caden (my son) has a huge arm. That’s actually his cousin’s arm in the background! This is Gigi at her 95th birthday party.

Easter and Editing

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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!

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Just Desert

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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

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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!

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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

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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.

Go To Church Or The Devil Will Get You

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If you live in Alabama, or have driven through Alabama to get to the beaches, then chances are you’ve seen the above sign. This sign was inspiration for my new book, “The Devil Within.” The real truth about this sign is that a contractor, named Billy Newell erected the sign because of his deep love of God. You can read more about the truth here: http://blog.al.com/live/2009/09/ws_newell_dies_contractor_erec.html

But this sign inspired to spin some fiction! Here’s a little blurb from the first part of “The Devil Within” (still in editing, but hopefully will be out in May), just to give you a little teaser!

Everyone has seen the sign.  It sits on the highway between Montgomery and Birmingham: Go to Church or the Devil Will Get You! A caricature of a devil holding a red pitchfork with eyes burning holes into every car that passes by.

My pop put up that sign.  It was the beginning of the end in my eyes.  He did it right after the accident.  He went down the street to Baker’s Seed and Feed and Hardware Shop, squeezing my hand too hard as he dragged me in—the only child left.  He bought red paint and some two-by-fours, and then we hopped back into the Ford truck and drove all the way down to the end of the property next to where the pond stands.  He handed me a Coca-Cola, and I lay under a tree thinking about how Momma had looked like an angel in her casket and wondering when I’d ever see her again.  The Coca-Cola almost burned going down my throat.

“What you think, boy?” he asked, spitting some tobacco out of the wad in his cheek.

I stood up and walked around, looking at the sign.  He had traced the devil from an old sign, colored him in, painted words in bright red, and then put it up.  It looked crude, but I guessed it would do.  I was more interested in finding some peanuts to add to my Coca-Cola, but I nodded enthusiastically like it was the best piece of artwork I’d ever seen.

Flash!Friday: We meet again!

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Today, for Flash!Friday the story element this week was conflict, specifically (wo)man vs. self. And the photo was of the first all women jury in 1911. It was strange to me that the first jury was in 1911, and women were not allowed to vote until 1919 (ratified in 1920). But, these two elements made my creative juices flow, and as such I came up with two stories.

Story # 1: 

Proof
@laurenegreene
203 words

The trial was simple: did she or didn’t she kill herself? Six months pregnant with another man’s baby. The plaintiff’s lawyer said it was all very clear that she jumped.

Katie sat in the front row of the juror box and listened. She understood the need for self-harm. She’d been doing it for years. Sitting here, amongst these women, most who were older and wiser than her, she didn’t know if she could come to a conclusion. The wickedness of self-doubt always sitting next to her.

The three piece suit and top hat droned on. Katie pulled back her sleeve to count the marks she’d made on her arm; six now. One was precariously close to the artery. Jack had found her that time, the baby crawling around with red knees, in their tiled bathroom. He seemed relieved when the summons had come for the jury.

“It’s remarkable, Katie. You’re making history. Baby will be fine with Nurse Delores.”

And now the doubt crept in again. If the woman who died felt as lost as she did, felt the fear and anxiety of the world on her shoulders, then maybe, just maybe she threw herself off the building. Where was the proof otherwise?

Story #2

Only A Woman
@laurenegreene
206 words

The first words out of Ethel’s mouth were, “I can’t.” Ethel believed she couldn’t do much. Her parents believed she’d inherit the world.

“You’ll see, Ethel, dear. One day women will even have the right to vote,” her mother said.

But Ethel was too busy telling herself she couldn’t pass her history test. Her parents had sent her on to college. She would be educated, this child of their old age.

When the summons came, Ethel was shocked. She was even more shocked when she saw the all women jury.

“What if I’m the one who causes a hung jury,” she asked the woman next to her.

Ethel took detailed notes throughout trial. A pig theft. She didn’t even know there were pigs in Los Angeles. Ethel finally felt like she was overcoming her fears. Fears she had carried within her like an overstuffed suitcase her whole life. Fears of “I’m not good enough,” and “I’m only a woman.”

She was named foreman, and in the end she was the one who handed down the guilty verdict. Self-doubt scoured away like scum from a bowl. She went on to be a leader in the Suffrage movement, so more women could reach their potential as she had.