Reflecting on the A to Z Challenge Reflections Post

I heard about the Challenge back in December of last year, and debated whether I was going to do it.  This site had existed for about 6 months and I was having problems getting into the blogging thing.  I finally made the plunge and signed up for it.  I was at first daunted by the task of posting once a day, mostly because I can go a little overboard when I start writing and just keep going no matter how far off point I get, so the suggestion of keeping posts under 500 words definitely helped me to keep length under control.  Also I didn't feel so bad when I had nothing to say.

I did learn some things though.  I learned that ubermensch is a word. I learned that I CAN think of something to put down even if it was just a YouTube video with a description.

Easiest post? Luck, a piece of fiction that I thought up in a few minutes while laying in bed one morning.

Hardest? V-Day.  I had already gone the route of just listing words that start with U, and I didn't want to repeat myself.  So, I just rambled on for a while about words that start with V.

Best part of the Challenge?  Getting to visit some great blogs.  I didn't get through the entire blog list.  Sorry, I only have so many hours in my day.  I did find a few that I enjoyed visiting daily.  I also loved receiving visits from others to my blog and I got really excited every time I got a new comment on one of my posts.  I am, however, a bad visitor in that probably 75% of the blogs I visited I didn't leave a comment.

So, overall I would call this a complete success.  I am notorious for starting things and not finishing them so I'm really proud of myself.  I went ahead and added a page up there at the top with a list of all my A to Z posts, in case anyone wants a walk down memory lane, or in case any stragglers come by and want to see what I did last month.

Special thanks to all my followers and for everyone who left me comments.

And a final note:  During the Challenge I did 5 posts of fiction.  I remembered that I really liked writing fiction.  So, I decided to start a second blog called A Creative Exercise that will be devoted to writing.  I'm one of those insane people who plan to keep more than one blog running.  So, hop on over to my second home. I've already posted my first message to the masses.

Image courtesy of here

Zombie

For the last day of the Challenge I chose the word Zombie. 

Slightly off topic, but I wonder how many other participating bloggers are going with Zombie today?  Imma go with....25%.

Anyway, zombies are hot right now.  So hot I even fought my way through Pride and Predjudice and Zombies (never again will I be tricked into reading Jane Austin). I don't know what it is about them that people like.  Maybe because it's a way to justify fantasies of blowing peoples heads off when you're having a bad day.  How many conversations have I had detailing what I would do during the Zombie Apocalypse (coming to a shopping mall near you December 21, 2012)?  The CDC even used the idea of an outbreak of Undeaditis to illustrate emergency preparedness. 

Anyway, I wanted to make a point here about zombies that I'm not going to articulate very well.  In many modern zombie stories, the surviving humans turn out to be 100% worse for the protaganist than any walking dead.  Like Shane in The Walking Dead, or the soldiers in 28 Days Later (side note: 28 Weeks Later sucked so bad because the attention was turned away from how horrible people can be when facing the end of humanity to a Rage infected Robert Carlyle stalking his kids through London.[side side note: I understand many people don't count Infected as zombies, but you know what? I don't care what you think.]).

Yonder

The following is a flash fiction, sort of fan fiction, borrowing a concept from Stephen King's Dark Tower series:


"The thinny takes you over yonder." 

The old man gnawed a sliver of wood, rolling it from one side of his gummy mouth to the other.  His black eyes, surounded by a web of wrinkles so complex it would have given a spider a run for its money, squinted in the harsh light of the desert.  His head cocked to the side when the wind brought the sound of the the thinny to us where we stood at on the edge of the arroyo.

"Yonder?" The air was unbearably hot, and sweat poured down my brow and over my cheeks.  The sound of the portal whined like a mosquito in my ear, and burrowed deeper in my mind.  It was a profoundly unpleasant noise.

"Aye." The sliver rolled back and forth.  "To the other side of the universe.  So said my Papaw.  It's bigger these days.  Used to be you couldn't hear it from here."  He sniffed and hiked up his sagging pants as if the suspenders he wore were just for show.  "I ain't goin' any closer, and if I was you I would just head on back to the ranch and forget this."

"I can't."  I stared down the arroyo that meandered through the scrubby bushes.  The rains had ceased weeks ago and the stream bed was dry, hard and cracked.  I had been in this world for 2 years and this was my only chance.

"No tellin' where you come out.  Or if you come out."

"It has to be better than here."  I turned to the old man and extended my hand.  "Thankee Sai, for your help."  He took my hand and shook it, a single pump up and down.  Then he turned and left without another word.  That's how they did things here.  No long goodbyes.

I stepped down into the dried up streambed and started walking.  As I moved down the arroyo the whine of the thinny grew louder, more intense, and began to shift and distort until it was no longer unpleasant.  It called to me with sounds of home, promises of a world lost to me.


*Image from here

X is for Xenu

We all know who this guy is, at least we do since Tom Cruise showed us the cray-cray. Allegedly (per Wikipedia)," Xenu, with the assistance of psychiatrists, summoned billions of his citizens together under the pretense of income tax inspections, then paralyzed them and froze them in a mixture of alcohol and glycol to capture their souls. The kidnapped populace was loaded into spacecraft for transport to the site of extermination, the planet of Teegeeack (Earth). The appearance of these spacecraft would later be subconsciously expressed in the design of the Douglas DC-8, the only difference being: 'the DC8 had fans, propellers on it and the space plane didn't'. When they had reached Teegeeack/Earth, the paralyzed citizens were unloaded around the bases of volcanoes across the planet. Hydrogen bombs were then lowered into the volcanoes and detonated simultaneously." Wow. And that's just the beginning.

Winter

Winter is my favorite season.  At least I think it is.  It has been 12 years since I have been through a snot-freezing cold winter (that's when it's so cold that when you breath through your nose the inside of your nostrils stick together.  That only happened to me?  Moving on...).

Before the age of nine I only remember living in warm Mediteranean type climates (due to a military upbringing).  To me snow was exotic and magical.  I used to sit in front of a fan powered on high, wrapped in a blanket, pretending to be an Eskimo.  To us, 50 degrees meant it was time to pull out our heavy coats.

Then we moved to Michigan.  I remember being so excited about moving to Michigan.  Michigan was in the US!  It was in the North! It was January!  I imagined pure white blankets of snow piled here and there in drifts, coating tree branches and the roofs of houses straight out of some crappy Thomas Kinkade painting (no, it's not too soon).  Children would be making snow men and snow forts, and there would be sledding and ice skating.  This was me thinking of Michigan in winter:

We get off the plane and what do I see?  Jack-squat.  That's what.  There wasn't a lick of snow on the ground.  I WAS HEATED.

It did eventually snow, and my poor brother found out what happens if you lick cold metal.  We did go sledding (on flattened cardboard boxes), and built snowmen and had snowball fights.  We "skated" on frozed puddles in parking lots.  Oh, and after a couple of years the first day of 50 degree weather was "let's pull out the shorts" weather.  Ahh memories....

V-Day (no, not that one)

So, I'm running out of ideas here and all I can think is "Five more days.  Five more days."  I guess that could be "Roman Numeral V more days" (hardy-har-har).

At first I was going to write about vision, but was it going to be the physical act of seeing?  The kind that inspires people to do great things?  Or the kind you get after eating certain types of mushrooms?

There's a line about vestigial virgins in the novel Small Gods by Terry Pratchett that had me giggling for 20 minutes.

Then I thought "Vegetables.  That's easy!"  Except just like eating the recommended daily servings of veggies, a post about them never happened.

So I went online and Googled "Words that start with V" hoping for inspiration, but all I got was a list of worlds that start with V.  Thanks a lot Google.

Words like vegan (sorry, the animals are what make food taste good), and veterinarian (I wanted to be a vet when I was younger, but thinking back on it there is no way in hell I would have made it into vet school), valkyrie (are those the woemen in operas with the horned helmets and breastplates?  No?  OK), velocity (no comment here), and lots of words that start with vena, all having to do with circulatory system.

I'm done.  (Four more days.  Four more days.  IV more days.)

ps.  While searching for pictures of the letter V, I came up with the TV show V which I had totally forgotten about.  I never watched the new series, and the only thing I remember from the original 80's series is the lizard baby.

Ummm...



I don't have anything planned for U.  I can't think of anything to write about.

Up
Under
Unctuous
Urgent
Uncle
Ubermensch
Urkel
Udder
Ugly
Ulysses
Umber
Use
Utter

There.  U is done.

Tanka

Before we begin, I feel like I have to explain what a tanka is.  Long story short it's like the better known haiku, except instead of a 5-7-5 count the tanka uses a 5-7-7-5-5 syllable count.  Enjoy. 





Thunder rumbles and
rolls through the hills as rain pounds
on the roof, gurgling in
the gutters and splashing
on worn stone walkways

Short Story Saturday

Part Two of the story started yesterday.

“I'm so tired of this, Rick. When are you going to get a job? All you do is sit around, watch tv, play games. Is this one of your new 'let's mess with Em' games? Because I'm sick of those too. You need to grow up.”

He stared down at the scuffed brown boots he wore. “I mowed the lawn yesterday.” 

“You have a degree. You have student loans to pay. You can't run from those forever.”

“I was thinking I should go apply for grad school.”

“I was thinking we still have a position open in marketing at Brown Webster,” she countered.

Brown Webster was the company she worked for. He imagined going to work with her everyday, and tried not to imagine choking her one day as they drove down the carpool lane.

“Em, I don't think--”

“Of course you don't think!” she pushed past him. “I have to go to work. I'm going to be late now because of you and your games.”

She covered her face with her hands and for a moment he panicked. She was going to cry and was going to be the bad guy after all. But when she lowered her hands her eyes were sad but dry.

“When I come home tonight, I don't want you to be here.”

Rick nodded slowly. “Yeah. I guess that would be best.” He shuffled his feet. Even though he wanted this it still felt awful. It would have been better if she had screamed and thrown something.

She grabbed an empty laundry basket. He watched her sadly and realized that maybe he didn't want to all of it to be over. He still loved her and knew that pretty much all the misery of the past 6 months had been his fault.

“You're in my way.” She was standing with the basket propped on her slim hip. He was blocking her way back to the stairs.

“Oh. Yeah.” He stepped aside. “Em.” She stopped. “I'll go. I won't be here when you get back. But do you think...?”

“Rick, I can't do this. It feels like I'm dealing with a twelve-year-old sometimes. I love you, I really do, but I can't carry you anymore.”

He nodded again. Looked down at the floor. She didn't move. Maybe she was waiting for his reply. He looked down at her small feet. She was still wearing her fuzzy green house slippers. Her shadow slanted away from her and he saw his own shadow pointing towards her. Only that wasn't right. The light was to their left. He glanced to his right and there was his shadow laying sadly on the concrete. He looked back at the shadow pointed at Em and realized it wasn't attached to anything, it was just a black smudge on the floor like a discarded rag. Then it wiggled.

“Em?'

“I have to go to work.”

“Em. Emily!”

“What!?” she snapped,whirling around--

--and the shadow leaped into the air, and as it flew it expanded and unfurled like two giants wings sweeping towards her.  She had no time to react. He tried to reach her-his arm went up, one foot lifted to take a step; and the shadow was on her, wrapping around her small body like a soft black robe. Without a sound she disappeared.

The shadow crumpled, empty, to the floor in a puddle that spread like an oil stain. It expanded in a perfect circle, thinning until a circle of gray concrete appeared and grew larger as the ring of shadow grew thinner and rushed to the edges of the room. Then it was gone.

Rick stood alone in the basement. The light bulb dangling from the ceiling pushed the shadows into the corners. He stared around him, at the laundry basket lying discarded on the floor; at the washer and dry and his bike. It was all still and silent as if the shadow had swallowed all the air in the room.

His vision blurred. “Em?” The word fell softly as a he watched a shadow slide across the floor towards him.

Rick

Another Flash Fiction Friday.  This is actually the beginning of a longer story I'm working on.  Enjoy.

They stood together in the basement. The light bulb dangling from the ceiling pushed the shadows to the corners, but Rick still felt uneasy.

“You are ridiculous,” Em said. “Seriously, how old are you? Monsters in the basement?”

“I never said monsters,” Rick replied. He glanced around the room again, at the washer and dryer and the plastic table they used to fold laundry on before dragging it back upstairs. His bike was in one corner, banished to the basement until spring. In another corner stood a stack of plastic totes filled with Christmas and Halloween decorations. “I just said I'm kind of weirded out.”

She waved her small hands around the room. “Nothing here. Maybe if you got a job and left the house once in a while you would have better things to do than make up stories about the Boogeyman Man in my basement.”

Her basement. She never let him forget that it was her basement, her house, her job that paid the bills. A year ago they had been soul mates, but that was before he was fired from his assistant manager position at Cheddars. Before she realized that he was a 17 year old in a 30 year old's body and there was nothing she could do to make him behave otherwise. Before he realized that if she couldn't change him with subtle hints she would belittle and insult him in every way possible. His friends went from “artsy” and “interesting” to “lazy” and “useless”. His tattoos were no longer “intriguing”, but “stupid”. His beard went from “sexy” to “Why don't you shave that thing off? No one wants to hire a guy who looks like he's homeless.” At this point he stayed because he never wanted to be the bad guy in a break up.  It was also easier than finding another place to live. He didn't know why she let him stay.

“Let's just go back upstairs,” he said.

“No,” she said, flipping her dark hair over her shoulder. He used to love that hair. It was black and shiny and smelled like lavender. “Where's the monster Rick?”

“I never said there was a monster,” he repeated.

He never did say there was a monster, but the basement had been really creeping him out the past few days. There were noises, like whispers from far away, and shadows in places where shadows shouldn't be. And just this morning he had seen one of those shadows move.

Of course he shouldn't have told Em about it. She had immediately rushed downstairs just to prove him wrong.

Pets

I have 3 cats. Tom and Jerry, who are brothers I have had since they were kittens, and Sunny, who showed up on my porch one day last August half starved but extremely friendly.

Jerry does what he's going to do and the others just go along for the ride. Jerry is the most stubborn of the three, but he's still my favorite. He's the type of cat who would be in the ruling class if only cats had thumbs. To keep him in his place, I like to rub his tummy and sing "I got that Jerry tummy" to the tune of "Moves Like Jagger." He doesn't get as much joy from that as I do.

Tom is the kind of cat who figures if he can't see you, you can't see him. If you pick him up he just goes limp, so you can flop him around, if you were so inclined.

Sunny is the kind of cat that people who are allergic to cats hate. If you walk into my house, he will be there to greet you like a good host, and the second you sit down he will be in your lap.

A few nights ago, I heard the cats ripping into something.  I was in bed and debated whether to check it out.  I thought they had gotten into the utility closet (where both the litter box and food are kept, which is why the door is always open) and were tearing into the bag of cat food.  Finally, to save myself the effort of cleaning up cat food the next morning, I dragged myself out of bed to slap some sense into them. (No animals were physically harmed during the writing of this post, though I probably hurt their feelings when I cussed them out.)
I get into the kitchen and what do I find?  Jerry had jumped onto THE TOP of the refrigerator and pulled down the bag of cat nip kept there.  He had chewed a good sized hole in the bag and scattered nip all over the floor as the other two cats rolled around in ecstacy, little green flakes coating their fur.
I took the cat nip and put it in the laundry closet and went back to bed.  Two minutes later I hear the sound of a small package hitting the floor and realized that there were still two bags of cat treats on top of the fridge.   I get back to the kitchen and Jerry is standing there with a bag of Whiskas Temptations in his mouth while Tom and Sunny loitered around waiting for him to give them their treats.

I blame my mother.  She had visited the week before and was always giving the cats treats.  I'm a mean cat mommy and only give them treats once a week.  I figure they got used to daily snacks and decided that if I wasn't going to give them anything, they would get it themselves.

Out of Context Science

Just wanted to point out one of my favorite non-Blogger sites, Out of Context Science.  This Tumblr site is devoted to excerpts from reputable journals of science taken completely out of context that leave you scratching your head.

I'm not a scientist-nor do I play one on tv-but I can generally get an idea of what the original article is about just by the excerpt, but some of them leave me doing that head tilt thing that dogs do when they hear a high pitched noise:

Here are a few examples:

"it is optimal that she be exposed to the number of planets between five and eight days later"

Algorithmic Education (including the Mathematics of Cramming) 

"to our knowledge, this represents the first description of nasal packing with strips of cured pork for treatment of life-threatening hemorrhage"

Pork, the surprise remedy for a nosebleed "The wrinkly balls did not yield all of their mysteries." Scrunch time: The peculiar physics of crumpled paper      



So if you have an interest in science and ridiculous sounding excerpts, visit Out of Context Science.

*Image courtesy of Puppy Toob.

NaNoWriMo

So, I was looking into this NaNoWriMo thing.  Basically for those of you who don't feel like following the link, it stands for National Novel Writing Month.  During the month of November participants work to complete a 50,000 word novel in 30 days.  The moderators of the event apparently don't actually verify the work, they just count the number of words. 
I wonder how many submissions they recieve that are just swear words repeated 50,000 times?

Mapinguari

Cryptozoology is a fascinating field of study.  You get things like Bigfoot, the Chupacabra, and the Mapingquari.

What's a Mapinguari?  Well, according to Wikipedia, it has "one eye, long claws, caiman skin, backward feet and a second mouth on its belly".  I also read somewhere-but I can't find the source at this time-that one of it's special powers was to turn day into night by it's very presence.  So according to the internet it looks something like this:

Except maybe not so plush.

I understand that many cryptids have some sort of basis in reality, or at least resemble animals that could possibly exist.  But what on earth were the people smoking when they came up the the Mapinguari? 

Current theories include prehistoric ground sloths or some sort of giant primate like Sasquatch, but then that just means a cryptid was derived from cryptid which is just kind of...wha...?

Luck

It was a coin toss, easy enough to beat, but as she grasped through all the lines of probability, she found no way to win. 

She could manipulate the coin to land any way she wished, but she could also see all the outcomes of the results.  Her opponent would call heads, she would make the coin show tails and win the right to choose the first cup.  The crux was in the final outcome.  In one future she chose wrong and drank poison.  In another she chose the correct cup, but later that day would choke on a particularly tough piece of bread.  Every line she pulled down and studied resulted her death.  Whether she was first or her opponent, she always lost in the end.  She could see no alternative to the situation.

She glanced around the room at the others gathered there.  This was a dangerous game, you only had a 50% chance of surviving to the next round.  She had made it through 4 contests, all dependent on her ability to manipulate the toss and forsee the results, but it looked like her luck had run out.

"Shall I call it then?" her opponent asked.

"Go ahead." 

"Heads then."  The moderator flipped the coin.  She didn't bother manipulating it as there was no point.  It was the end of the line.

The coin was made of gold, the head was some king who never existed in this universe, the tail a creature no longer living on this world but thriving on another.  As it flipped and glittered in the lamp light, she felt a queer tug in the part of her mind that explored all possible realities .  She grasped it, with shaky mental fingers and pulled the new world toward her.  It came to her reluctantly -it was a very small chance-but she wrenched it into existence with a smile.

Oh you sly universe.  I only looked at the possibilities where I manipulated the coin.

The coin landed tails up. 

"Challenger drinks first," the moderator said, pushing the tray towards her.

She lifted the small clay cup to her lips with a wink.  "Cheers".

It seemed her luck was still with her.

Keeping Up

Two weeks into the Challenge, and I'm actually keeping up.  I'm so proud of myself.  I can actually see myself finishing something I started for the first time in I don't know how long.

I'm trying to do this right by visiting other sites from the linky list.  I'm also trying to keep up with the sites I follow.  I work full time with a 1 1/2 hr round trip commute.  When I get home I have lot to do before I can sit down and focus on this thing.  Plus I need 8 hours of sleep a night or things get ugly.  After the first 2 days, I decided to set a schedule.  And after 2 days of that the schedule went out the window.

(part of my problem is that the blogs I follow only show on by reading list every other day, and they only show under my profile every 2 days.  Anybody else have this problem?  I have tried contacting Blogger about it, but I'm just going in circles there.)

I try to comment on all the sites I visit, but sometimes I skip that part, because I don't have anything interesting to say.  So, if you don't see anything from me every few days, just remember: it's not you, it's me.
That said, I'd like to point out some of my favorite bloggers so far. If you're not on the list remember:

I kid! I kid!

Adjective, Not a Noun by K.S. Lewis.  Her theme is excerpts from her work in progress.  I don't understand what the plot of the book is, but the bits and pieces she lets us see are very interesting.

Absconditus Creations.  I mentioned this site in my Versatile Blogger Award post.  I still like to visit on a nearly daily basis.  The theme for the A to Z Challenge are drawings with little poems describing them. 

Just Ermie.You should check out Ermie's plans for world domination.

mirabile dictu.  On this blog Cherstin Holtzman is detailing the process of handwriting her first novel.  I just found her a few days ago, but I love the way she writes in her blog posts.

Junk

Have you ever seen that show Hoarders?  I have, and I know that these people have a real mental illness, but I use it as a reminder of what could happen if I don't toss stuff.

I'm not a hoarder.  I don't think I'm really a pack rat either.  My problem is that I keep stuff because "I might need/want it some day", but then 2 years later I look at it and wonder what the hell I was thinking.

I used to do this with old notes from highschool and college.  I might "need" my notes from 10th grade history, in case I had a 10th grade history test I needed to take 3 years later.  I also used to do this with my son's school work thinking wouldn't it be nice to have this little memory of when he was in kindergarten and wrote his 'e's backwards.  Do you know how much crap kids bring home from school?  I tossed a lot of things, but it still piles up before I start grabbing handfuls of papers and throwing them in the trash.  I have enough drawings of sharks, thank you very much.

Most recently it was moving house.  I moved into a 3 bedroom house nearly 2 years ago.  I only needed 2 of those bedrooms so I used the 3rd room for storage.  Well, my mother was coming to visit so I had to clear out the room.  So I'm going through these boxes that have been locked in a room for 2 years and I came to the realization that if I haven't seen it this long, I obviously don't need it.  Some of this stuff has been in boxes and storage bins for 4 or more years. 

So what did I do with all my junk?  I consolidated and hid it all in various closets around the house.  Sure I got rid of some old childeren's dvds and a few board games, but the majority of it I kept.  What I'm going to do with scraps of paper, nick nacks I don't even like anymore, half finished crochet projects, two (that's 2) Christmas trees and books that I have no desire to read again (but I might want to read them again-but I know I won't), I don't know, but I might need/want them sometime in the future.

Imagination

So here's something that started out strong and petered out real quick.  There's no point to it.  I just needed to have something to go with Imagination.

I made this ALL BY MYSELF.

Imagine a world where people run around in tastefully placed fig leaves, riding unicorns, and drinking honeywine out of goblets made of rainbows created by the Keebler Elves.

In this land maidens with long hair keep dragons as pets and valiant knights have to pretend they're not allergic to dragon dander when they go to the maiden's magic apartment.  "Oh, you have a dragon?  I 'love' dragons.  Look, he's rubbing his green scales all over my black slacks.  Isn't that nice?"

Here you can always tell who the  bad guys are because they always wear black, have greasy black hair, and long mustaches that they twirl evilly around thin fingers as they knock lollipops out of the hands of small children.

Haiku

he stalks on soft paws
tail twitching waiting to bring
death to feather mouse

sunshine on the grass

and summer breezes carry

the scent of water

cold snow drops into
my collar from a branch above
hidden in the night

Game of Thrones

I am  a regular viewer of Game of Thrones.  I am also reading the books.  I got halfway through A Feast For Crows before I broke my Kindle in a tragic knee meets screen accident.  So until I get a new Kindle, or just break down and buy it in paperback, the reading is on hold.  I figure it will be a couple of years until we get to that book anyway (fingers crossed for 3rd and 4th seasons), so I can slow down.

Anyway, Game of Thrones is pretty popular show, so of course the internet has put it's own spin on things.  My favorite site happens to be Arrested Westeros which does a mashup of screencaps from Game of Thrones and quotes from Arrested Development.  If you've never seen either show, a lot of it will make no sense to you.  If you are like me and watch Arrested Development on Netflix, A LOT, it's Huh-Larious.

And just for the heck of it, some Joffrey slapping:

Good Lord, I hate Joffrey.