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Temperamental Time

It’s Wednesday’s Word, and you know what that means: write something – an essay, poem, or flash fiction – based on Wordsmith.org’s word of the day and post it by midnight. Past results from this fun writing exercise can be found under Wednesday’s Word on the sidebar to the right.

~

From a writer’s perspective, Time is a friend and a foe.

The more time I take to practice the craft, the better I become at writing. Yet, time is exactly the one thing I’m lacking most days. Take today, for example. My calendar tells me I’m due for a writing challenge, but my day job insists that I work late into the evening (darn those paying jobs). I considered passing on the challenge this week and publishing a back-up post, for the sake of time. Then, I read today’s word:

miry. adjective: 1. Resembling mire. 2. Muddy; swampy.

Something about that word whispered “time” to me and hinted at a story that I couldn’t resist writing. Plus (I should have known), once I clicked on the website and actually read the word, I couldn’t back down.

*****

Unpredictable

Rosemarie finally put her finger on it: the last two weeks were like riding a roller coaster in the dark. She couldn’t predict when life would shift from warp speed to a full stop, and she never knew, until it was too late, when it might pull her down, hard and fast. It took her breath away. That was what she told her friends when they asked her “how does it feel?”

How does it feel to lose your mom?

Those words still didn’t register in Rosemarie’s mind any more than the doctor’s excuse of “aneurysm.” What did make sense was something her mother repeated each time Rosemarie pushed her to the limits.

“Rosemarie Helen Lewis! I’m gonna to blow a gasket!”

That’s exactly what her mother said the night before the morning she didn’t wake up. Rosemarie’s High School graduation was just a few weeks away. Her mother had been scrambling for days to get the invitations out, to plan the party, to buy herself a new outfit. Rosemarie only borrowed her mother’s cashmere sweater for the party at Karen’s on Friday night. There were rumors that a few college friends of Karen’s older brother might show. Rosemarie needed something special, just for the night. She didn’t even cut out the tag.

Then, some freshman idiot bumped into her when things got wild and spilled his giant glass of Mountain Dew all over her front.

Rosemarie apologized to her mother and offered to pay for the dry cleaning out of her allowance, but she shook her head. Her mother’s face turned red. She started talking low then slowly lifted her fists into the air and ended up screaming. Her mother stomped off into her bathroom to cool down and went to bed that night with a killer headache.

The next week was a mix of time moving too fast or too slow. Too slow at the funeral, which seemed to last all day. Too fast at the burial where the priest rattled through prayers and incantations and suddenly they were lowering her body.

“Don’t we get a little more time?” Rosemarie asked the priest.

The funeral director looked at his watch. Rosemarie’s father put his arm around her shoulder. They lowered her mother’s body anyway. Rosemarie then spent, what felt like eternity, staring at a paper plate filled with baked ham and bundt cake.

Every waking moment was painful. She laid in bed and willed the sun not to come up. She stared at the clock and tried to make the numbers change to midnight.  She decided she should just give up. At four o’clock on Sunday afternoon, she jerked the curtains on her bedroom window closed, slammed her door, and covered her face with her pillow.

She would simply ignore life going on.

As soon as her breathing fell into a rhythm, her father called her to dinner. His rounded shoulders and the bags under his eyes made him look old as he stood at the counter over a pot of something hot.

“Grab some bowls, would you?”

Rosemarie set the table for two. She felt funny leaving her mother’s place empty, so she moved the pile of mail in front of her mother’s chair. Her father spooned dinner into her bowl. Rosemarie studied the food. She couldn’t tell if it was supposed to be soup or stew. The base was a thick sludge of rice and broth. It was a mixture of leftovers from the refrigerator and vegetables on the verge of rotten. Her father hadn’t thought to chop the baby carrots, so orange tips poked out of the sludge like logs. She tried to cut into a potato and found that it was pure mush.

“What do you call this?” she asked.

He pushed and stirred and patted the soup stew with his spoon.

“Shit,” he said, “a big bowl of shit.”

He let out a deep sigh and took her hand. And, the brief smile he managed was just enough.

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Get Busy, Missy

After last week’s Freshly Pressed whirlwind of fun, I’ve finally settled back into some kind of normal, which feels a little bit like this:

At least, that’s the face I made this morning after I saw Wordsmith.org’s choice for the word of the day (which I couldn’t even pronounce right):

onomancy. noun. Divination by the letters of a name.

Who needs Cardio in the morning when you have a word prompt like that to get your blood pumping.

Like a nervous contestant in a Spelling Bee, I stalled for time by begging for details. I read this note following the definition:

Some parents name their children after careful consideration of onomancy to assure the best possible future for them.

Though helpful, the note didn’t make today’s writing exercise any easier. Then again, writing isn’t easy. If it were, I’d be cranking out more than one post a week.

I’d have that novel finished by now.

Heck, I might even have your novel finished by now.

But I digress.

Here’s to practicing what I was preaching by turning onomancy into some kind of story…any kind of story…boy, oh boy.

*****

An Exercise in Naming

Some days Marilyn would wake up calm, confident, and feeling like God. Other days she would storm out of bed and tear through the house as if she were the Devil on a losing streak, kicking trash cans and cursing laundry.

Pregnancy had brought on a surge of hormones and, with it, a sense of power offset by worry. She ate whatever she wanted, but she questioned the affect of each morsel as it slid down her throat. Her emotions made her feel invincible and then suddenly depressed, so that she wondered if she might give birth to someone bipolar.

Her keen sense of smell made working the perfume counter precarious for the first trimester, but it was the simple question from her co-worker, Bethany, that sent Marilyn’s stomach into convulsions long after the morning sickness subsided.

“What are you thinking about for names?”

Marilyn covered her mouth with the sleeve of her white cosmetic coat and took off for the bathroom.

“Names,” Marilyn repeated when it was all over, and she wiped her mouth with toilet paper. She shook her head as she turned on the faucet to splash water on her face. When she headed towards the door and saw her reflection in the full length mirror, she pulled her shirt taut over her growing belly.

It wasn’t as if she had ignored the idea of a name; she was simply afraid to make a choice. Suppose she picked the wrong one, a name like Hercules with so many expectations attached? Of course, she wouldn’t name her baby Hercules, she told herself. But, even “Donald” might mark the baby for failure if he grew up believing he had to be a financial tycoon but couldn’t pass High School Economics.

A name says a lot about a person. She thought of Jackson, the baby’s father. Jackson had brown hair with loose curls and manicured nails and a smile that forced her to say yes. Yes, she’d love to attend a wine tasting with him. Yes, she’d said as she packaged up the bottle of Coco Chanel he just bought for someone else. He was irresistible.

Marilyn still teared up at the thought of his mocking expression when she told him the baby was his.

“Baby!” he’d said, a little too loud over dinner at Antonio’s Little Italy. “Impossible,” he laughed.

He took three huge bites of his Creamy Penne Pasta – even the words made Marilyn weak in the stomach – and he left without paying. Marilyn got stuck with the bill and a permanent reminder of the night he took her out, got her drunk, and ignored her mention of “precaution.” She should have listened to her mother, who’d said anyone with a last name for their first name couldn’t be trusted.

Marilyn did not want to screw up her baby’s name.

She spent the next few weeks scouring the shelves at every book store for every book on baby names. She researched sites on the internet. She wrotes lists and asked her co-workers and customers to vote for their favorites. She even asked her mother.

“Gertrude,” her mother said.

She went back to the perfume counter for advice.

And then, her water broke.

Bethany rushed Marilyn to the hospital with just her purse and her insurance card. The list of names sat next to the cash register under a sample bottle of Eternity.

Marilyn gave birth to a healthy seven pound girl with a full head of straight blond hair. The next morning, Bethany showed up with flowers. Marilyn sat in bed with the baby resting in her arms.

“So, what did you decide to call her?” Bethany asked.

“Helen,” Marilyn said. She kissed the baby’s forehead.

“Hmm.” Bethany pulled the list of names from her purse. “I don’t see that one on your list.”

“No,” Marilyn smiled. “It just came to me, like someone whispered her name in my ear when she was born. Helen.”

“Maybe it was just the drugs,” Bethany cocked her head.

“Maybe.”

But Marilyn hadn’t felt this sure of herself since the year she turned twenty-one, moved out into her own apartment, and bought herself a couch to celebrate. Marilyn cupped both hands underneath Helen’s small body and held her up. Helen kicked her feet and opened her eyes.

“But, what does it mean?” Bethany asked.

“It means, she likes it,” Marilyn said. “Helen.”

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You Mean, You Have to Practice?

“A thousand books on tennis won’t improve your serve, but a thousand serves will.”
~ Rick DeMarinis, from an excerpt of his article printed in The Writer, November 1985, and reprinted in the November 2010 issue.

~

As I sat in a hallway at work the other day, I overheard someone practicing the tuba. The music climbed the scale with perfect tone but then squealed and tumbled into low vibrations, like the sounds of a diesel truck unwilling to start. I flashed back to a recent conversation with my son.

“Mommy,” he said, “I want to play the trumpet.”

“That’s excellent!” I cheered. Then, I rattled off stipulations and requirements that he ignored until he heard the word “lessons.”

“No, mom. I don’t want to take lessons. I just want to play the trumpet.”

Oh.

Right.

My son and I are not so different in that way.

“I just want to write a novel.” How many times have I said that before?

In the beginning, I didn’t have time for books about the craft or a writing class or advice about failed first novels.

“I just want to write,” I repeated.

But, writing – like tennis or trumpet playing or…anything, really – is rarely done well the first time or the first hundred times. To hone my writing skills, I needed diligence, a willingness to learn, and a daily commitment.

And, I needed to practice.

I understand that now, so I practice my writing in several ways.

1. Morning pages. Every day I write one to three pages — of rants, self-doubts, or goals for the day. Often, I start off by reminding myself what day of the week it is, a challenge in itself sometimes. Occasionally, I record a milestone, like a draft complete or a short story’s Honorable Mention.

2. Letters to my best friend. Inspired by Lynn at The Letter Jar, who is on a mission to compose 365 letters in 365 days, I began writing letters to a dear friend with two small children. Phone calls are near to impossible when you have small kids at home. Besides, a hand-written letter is a treasure after a long day of laundry, meals, and redirection. While it’s a different kind of writing, it draws out my creative side just the same and often leads to story-telling. Plus, I reconnect with my dear friend in an old, and more intimate, way.

3. Writing exercises. Every other Wednesday, I face a strict deadline to post a story, by midnight, based on a word prompt. While the deadline is self-imposed, I have good reasons why I don’t blow it off: 1) I am motivated to write something new, 2) I stretch my writer’s mind by forcing myself to write outside of the box (a psychopomp might stand at your death bed wearing a hooded cloak or he might just show up in a Mets cap), and 3) each attempt at the exercise reinforces my commitment to writing.

4. Submitting. I’m not talking about submitting to my inner editor or the lackadaisical attitude of my muse some days. I mean, that whenever and wherever I can, I submit a completed story. I’m a firm believer that there’s much to be gained in the practice of writing cover letters, following submission guidelines, and crafting the ever-painful three sentence bio.

5. Reading. Nowadays, on top of novels and short story collections, I do read books and magazines on and about writing. Then, I translate my experience as a reader into my perspective as a writer, by writing a post about an inspiring article or interviewing a guest author.

6. Writing workshops and Author Readings. Workshops help me grow as a writer in the areas of craft and in giving and receiving feedback (which complements all lessons learned about writing). Also, when I attend an Author Reading, I learn the art of not sweating buckets or passing out while standing at a podium, in front of a roomful of peers, reading your story.

(Lordy.)

What kinds of exercises help you practice your writing?

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