I caught a sore throat. As in the, “wake up at 5am unable to speak or swallow because of the agonizing pain” variety.
And, at 5am, my husband made me a potent cup of honey and lemon tea, which helped quite a bit. He’s told me in the past that cussing really does help numb pain, so the first thing I said after regaining my voice was an expletive. 😀
I’ve been listlessly wallowing for about three days now. It’s not strep — just very swollen and raw — so all I can do is wait it out with ibuprofen.
Which led me to browsing through the old pictures I had uploaded to my blog, when I came across the quote above.
My opinion hasn’t changed, but I figure that I can elaborate some more.
The advice to “write from experience,” doesn’t mean to tell about the time you accidentally shoplifted Road Warrior at the mall. It means to write about the broader themes that you are familiar with. Like friendship, loneliness, romance, betrayal, etc.
For example, I have six kids irl, and I write a lot about pregnancy and motherhood in my stories. None of my fiction is autobiographical, but the themes are reflective of my real world experiences.
A few years back I read an article written by a woman who began her career as a midwife before she had her first baby, and how experiencing natural childbirth firsthand changed the way she interacted with her clients. As I recall, she hadn’t expected it to be so different on the other side, and personally understanding what other women were going through helped her be a better midwife.
You can’t simply empathize with natural childbirth to know what its like; you have to experience it.
You can’t empathize your way through writing about things like love, betrayal, fear, hope, etc, and produce a story that’s relatable to people who have experienced it. You need to know what the heck you’re talking about.
And if your experiences are so limited that you can only produce one book from them, then maybe you should put down the electronic devices and go live a little.
Back in January, I got an inkle loom for weaving straps, and fell madly in love with the whole process. A month ago, I got my hands on a rigid heddle loom.
I’ve been going through my stash of acrylic yarn on practicing, experimenting, and learning, and finally decided that I was up for using my handspun on the loom. The result is pictured above.
The kids have claimed all of my earlier pieces for themselves and their toys, so only heaven knows when I’ll see those again, ha ha. I guess they make some pretty good doll blankets and shawls.
Weaving actually has a therapeutic effect because of the repetitive motions of passing the shuttle from one hand to the other, combined with the feeling of accomplishment at making something. I like to joke that maybe it will help get me out of my massive feelings of disillusionment towards humanity, but really, it’s best to be honest with ourselves and accept the fact that the disillusionment is here to stay. The past couple of years have been playing out worse than I expected, and here I thought that I was a cynic before 2020 — now I realize that I had been an optimist.
I’m pretty heavy into the “just one more pass with the shuttle,” as an hour goes by. My husband once took the loom away from me so I would actually go eat. It draws me in, and I love it so much. Weaving makes me happy in a way that knitting and crochet never did — I’m even starting to make a sizeable dent in my yarn stash.
When I don’t have a bunch of small children running around, I’m probably going to end up with one of those big shaft looms.
Now I just need to figure out what to do with all the cloth I’m making.
I’ve dun gone and murdered my foot through slovenly treadling at my spinning wheel.
Okay, so it’s mostly fine, but every now and then I get a stabbing pain if I step wrong. That would be the tendons screaming at me.
As a Millennial, no one ever impressed the importance of posture on me during my childhood. Quite the opposite, actually, since I was told that I held myself unnaturally straight, and was therefore uncomfortable to be around. In an effort to “fit in,” I taught myself to slouch.
Now that I’ve realized the reasons why people historically cared about posture, I regret doing that. Unfortunately, childhood habits like that tend to creep in the moment I stop watching. I wish that just one person has said, “Good on you,” back when sitting straight was easy, so I wouldn’t have felt like a freak for it. Could’ve saved myself from a lot of pain.
Anyway, I wasn’t paying attention to my foot on the treadle of my spinning wheel, and now after a mere year and a half of using it, the bad practice has caught up to me. I need to correct my errant ways.
Though in my defense, my learning materials never mentioned anything about peddling with your entire foot.
I had intended to post 1000-word installments of The Scions every other week, which seemed like an easy goal.
As it turns out, my life is currently a little too hectic to pull that off.
I’m not even averaging a 100 words a day.
More like, “I wrote a sentence and fixed up some word choices today.”
But that’s how it currently is. I don’t mind — it always feels like one of the largest miscommunications that I’m always struggling with is that other people don’t understand how much I love the journey. Life is too interesting for me to complain about how I don’t have the time or energy to write much these days. Besides, this is basically the reason why I don’t do deadlines.
The story is still very much on my mind, and I have no intention of abandoning it (not than anyone wants to read it anyway), it’s just coming more at a drip than a steady flow.
Despite being a self-described “hopeless romantic,” I also have a hopeless pragmatic streak as well — don’t be afraid to settle for Good Enough. Because face it, there’s no such thing as perfect.
Good Enough is hard to come by in this modern age.
For starters, finding someone who isn’t going to up and bail on you in a society that actively encourages breakups and divorces is a feat in and of itself. Consider yourself lucky.
Honestly, that was one aspect of marriage that I didn’t expect. When my husband and I hit financial difficulties, people I barely knew started telling me to leave him — as if somehow the job market was going to magically embrace me with a lucrative career as the result. Uhhh, no. That was 2011. Everything was burning. And I liked having someone to endure with.
Don’t discredit how much it means to have someone you can always count on, no matter what.
So, at this point, you’re probably wondering what inspired me to write this. Is there trouble in paradise? Dark secrets behind the scenes?
Always. 😉
I don’t frequently watch youtube videos, but I do occasionally read over the recommended titles when I venture over to the site in my search of knowledge. Some people kill brain cells by huffing aerosols, but I do it by peaking at what the mainstream is doing.
I saw this:
At this point, I’m pretty convinced that therapists consider a no-strings-attached booty call to be the only “healthy” relationship, but that’s a different topic.
I chortled when I saw that recommended video, because I know that all of my fictional couples would be labeled with things like, “toxic,” or “codependent.” Heck, I’m currently working on a story that begins with an unapologetic kidnapping, so clearly, appealing to modern values is not something I concern myself with much (they’re all Christian-based anyway, and I’m not Christian). Rather, I don’t think that the path to happiness is so straight and narrow as we were led to believe.
Heaven help me, the toddler has learned how to use doorknobs. Today she put on her shoes and tried to head out the front door to play, all on her own. Need to keep a close eye on that one.
The baby is two months old already. Time is flying by, yet I barely remember living without him. I love his smile.
Summer is in full swing. The freezer is stocked with popsicles and ice cream to help beat the heat, and the splash pad has been dug out from the garage. The children are running rampant. Surprisingly, the first sunburn of the season wasn’t mine (for once).
Writing a dark story is turning out to be more of a challenge than I expected.
I have an idealist inside of me that tries to insert insights and epiphanies that would prevent the Traumatic Climax from happening, so I have to pull back and rewrite. The result is that the characters keep coming oh-so-close to redeeming themselves, then turning away and clinging to their dysfunctions.
It’s realistic enough; I’ve watched plenty of people do that in real life.
I’m not the sort of writer than deliberately sets out to manipulate the emotions of readers. The only reason why I’m writing this story at all is because it’s stuck in my head too badly to be ignored, and the only person intended to ride this roller coaster is me. There is no sadistic glee happening behind the scenes.
Perhaps this is a concept that’s difficult to grasp in our society, but I don’t write for money or popularity. I write for me. I write because I gained knowledge too heavy for me to bear, and my childhood hobby became my vessel of expression. I need it to remain artistically pure for the sake of my sanity. That’s why I always pull away from online groups and self-advertising — anything that could influence my writing away from what I need it to be.
Is there anyone out there capable of understanding?
So here I sit, feeling bad that Hartmann is too caught up in self-pity to realize what he’s doing, that Carol’s personality is too weak to resist, and that Lambert’s too checked out to notice. All it takes is one sentence to turn everything around, but I can’t let myself write it until it’s too late.
If this story wasn’t pounding at my head, I wouldn’t be writing it at all.
Since I recently had a baby and didn’t feel much like playing with dyes, I decided to buy crochet thread online for this project.
I ordered copper. What I got was … a diluted washed-out faded copper. Also known as: tan.
I will probably end up re-dying this thread before I use it again, because I’m not really into the “pastel brown” class of colors. I like my browns to be boldly brown.
Anyway, as an experiment I combined peach and yellow threads for the pattern, to see if I could get a “rose gold” effect. It looks much better in real life, especially because looking at it from different angles subtlety changes whether pink or yellow is more dominate.
Not that fond of the photo — it doesn’t give the proper overall effect.
And the “copper” was supposed to be much darker for better contrast. XP
I used a historic Norwegian pattern for this band, which is very pretty.
Hartmann was summoned back to the Base the next day, and waited in the bunker with no explanation of what was supposed to happen. He stared at the Suit and ached to touch it the way the cleaning lady did, but his training kept him in his position, ready to salute the moment a superior appeared to deliver orders. He mused over the possibility that some new intel had dropped, and he was on the verge of being sent out on another mission. In a matter of time, he would return home a hero, and the incident with Carol would be as forgotten as completely as she was.
What he did not anticipate was Captain Lambert to appear with Carol in tow. She was pale, and hid behind Lambert’s large frame to avoid Hartmann’s burning gaze, seeming even more timid and nervous than she had before. If he hadn’t been so annoyed over her reappearance, he would have found her behavior cute.
“MSG Hartmann,” Lambert said brusquely, “You are to assist me in training a new pilot for the Suit.”
Hartmann’s hackles rose sharply. “Who?” he demanded without any of the expected deference. “That bitch?”
Carol’s eyes teared up as her head swung away, her hands wringing together as she tried to shrink into herself behind Lambert’s back. It wasn’t the captain’s barked out punishment that twinged Hartmann with contrition, so much as the way Carol failed to defend herself against the word. He had expected her to bite back at him, to fling insults and posture as if she had a chance in a fight against him. Anything that would show that she thought of herself as too tough for him to feel guilty over. Compared to all the other women Hartmann had known, Carol seemed unnaturally quiet.
The way Lambert moved to shield her filled him with jealousy.
There was no way the captain was smitten with Carol. She was too pathetic and plain. All she had going for her was the fact that she cleaned the Suit … and the way her hair brushed the top of her petite shoulders, promising a feminine clavicle hidden underneath the neckline of her t-shirt. Hartmann thought about how she had felt under his hands, and how her soft muscles had struggled to pull away from him without any success.
Hartmann was the Suit’s pilot, and Carol was the cleaning lady. If she was going to belong to anyone, it was going to be him.
Not Lambert.
But he was determined to punish her for turning his world upside down.
Hartmann added extra energy into every push up, boosting himself off the floor to clap before catching himself again, purely for the sake of showing off. When he was through, he smugly noted the displeasure on Lambert’s face, and the amazement in Carol’s eyes.
“As I was saying,” Lambert continued gruffly, “The Suit considers Carol to be its ‘commander,’ and orders have come down for us to train her on how to pilot it for combat use.”
“You expect me to believe that, sir?” Hartmann narrowed his eyes.
“I verified it myself.” Lambert crossed his arms over his chest. “During the incident you created, the Suit automatically turned on and welcomed Carol as the ‘commander’ while she was inside. She has full access to all the Suit’s records, as well as a number of features that we never dreamed of. While you were lazing around at home, Carol and I were up digging through as much information as we could.”
Hartmann was lost for words. The muscle in his jaw twitched, but his teeth were locked together. He stared as Lambert proceeded to brush Carol’s hair back and clip a receiver onto her t-shirt, stared as the cleaning lady looked to the captain for reassurance who in turn gave her a small nod, and stared as she climbed up the ramp and enclosed herself inside the Suit. His Suit.
“Carol,” Lambert spoke into his radio, and it crackled as she replied,
“Here, sir.”
Then, disbelievingly, a computer voice sounded over the radio: “Welcome back, Commander.”
Was that why Carol had slid out of the Suit in an inexplicable daze the day before? Did she genuinely have a connection with it that he could never understand?
It wasn’t fair.
He was the best pilot.
He got the most important missions.
Why should the cleaning lady appear out of nowhere and take away his glory?
By Autumn Rain 