People were refusing to go out for New Year’s Eve this year – or at least some people were. Parties were being kept to small groups of friends, safe indoors, with candles and bottled water, canned goods and books to read. Maybe it was a bit silly, but I took note. I knew where our flashlights were, and yes, we had plenty of batteries. Some of those fat Ds our flashlights needed, and piles of the AAs that ran everything else. I even changed that stupid little 9-volt in the smoke alarm (with all those lit candles, who knows what might happen). And since it couldn’t have been any more than twelve degrees outside, I went shopping for extra blankets, in case we lost heat. And while I was at Target, I saw some Duracells on sale. And I had a coupon too – buy one get one free – so I bought four packs and got four free. Four free packs of batteries!

“Maybe we should stock up on ice and coolers,” Danny said. “So we can keep our beer cold when the power goes out.” His smart-ass grin spread cheek to cheek.

Really. No one was ever hurt by being adequately prepared for something. I don’t think anyone had serious regrets about knowing where their batteries were when the power didn’t go out.

- Lexi, chapter 4.5, Paper Birds

week 3: this is not an advertisement for Duracell or anything, lol!

(Might also be useful to note that this story takes place around Y2K-time, not sure if you could guess that from this excerpt alone.)

I almost went with another photo for the “official” week 3 shot – the slanted one in the outtakes below – but in the end, I just didn’t. It was, I don’t know, a little too off-putting? Lexi is clearly too much of a control freak for such a skewed photo, lol! Maybe that’s it.

A question, which I’ll need to know for my real project when it’s time: If I were to take a picture with a product brand in it like this, can I publish it in my story (for money)? Are there permissions needed for something like that?

outtakes:

And bonus, pics of the snowLADY we made too

I saw someone talking about hit counts on another blog, and it got me curious about my own.

This blog, total page views in six-ish years: 9,780.

My Lakeside Heights story, total page views in less than three years: 351,356.

Well, at least my fiction is clearly more interesting than my non-fiction? LMAO!!!

I guess I’ll take that as a good thing. Stick to what you’re good at. (Don’t worry, I will.)

Then when no one was looking, he would write little notes for her in the margins of his newspaper, vague and secret communications between them, a whole conversation. They never wrote emails – too much for her husband to find – but they had these instead, in between lines of news story, or on a napkin slipped under his pie plate. His handwriting was terse print, chicken scratch. Thank you. The pie was wonderful, it made my night.

She couldn’t keep these, she told him. There was too much risk. She wanted to. Even a simple one – thanks for the pie – she wanted to hide in some safe place so she could have it forever.

It’s fine, he wrote on the next one. Just keep them in your head.

- Leila, “ghost from a wishing well, part 1,” Lakeside Heights.

week 2: in which we eat pie!

Setup was much easier this week. But this one also required venturing outside the house, kid in tow (which is something I’ll likely have to work around for the real deal as well, so I don’t mind the practice). Baby steps, people – we just went out for lunch. And Dylan got to eat pie!

There weren’t many outtakes from this shoot, it was pretty simple, pretty straightforward – which was a relief after last week’s shoot. I chose this one over the couple others because I liked the texture on the napkin, while leaving the background in obscurity. (I would have liked to get the pie plate a *little* more in focus, but I couldn’t figure that out without losing focus on the handwriting.)

I also meant to have my hubby write the note, so it would be in a man’s handwriting – though it turns out my own handwriting isn’t very feminine after all, lol! Ah well, so be it!

Outtakes:

Sunlight came through the blinds of our bedroom window, splitting her skin into slats of light and shadow. It reminded me of the first time we kissed, in her parents’ living room, wet from the pool, late afternoon sun beaming through tall windows, my hands on her wet, cold skin. Our bedroom now was not very much unlike the one she grew up in, with its yellow walls and white bedding. She even brought her cork boards, pinned up with old movie tickets, prom pictures, and one of those paper origami birds I used to fold for her.

- Danny, chapter 1, Paper Birds

week 1: and so the project begins?

The idea here, and for the next 52 weeks, will be to see if I can capture a piece of my stories in images. And further, to see if I can illustrate a variety of different story subjects, and continue to do so every week for 52 weeks. Because the idea for my novel series will require one well-planned (and hopefully interesting) image almost every week.

The second idea here is to practice my photography skills. To take better, more interesting, and more adventurous (= less lazy) pictures.

So this one was tricky because it required a very particular time of day, and sunlight, which was much harder to come by (being January) than I assumed. It was mostly cloudy all morning with only these occasional bursts of sunlight that I had to run and grab quickly when they happened. That, and my camera works for bunk in low lighting, and I’m still trying to figure that out.

I ended up taking over 400 shots through the morning (burst mode, people!), and this was the one I narrowed it down to. I chose it for the light versus shadow, and that the birds managed to face each other. I felt it reflected the intimacy of the story excerpt

So there – week 1 down!

I’m expecting these next 52 weeks to be very eye-opening for me. Either I’ll learn a lot and be well-prepared to start my novel series… or I’ll be ready to pull my hair out and run screaming

I’ll still write the novel series even if the photography thing doesn’t work out, but I do hope I can keep this up.

Feedback/advice is welcome.

Some outtakes in my Flickr stream:

#1: read your old college writing, you know that writing you were sure was so good, that you were sure would be published some day? And oh, is it bad! Rest assured that you are a better writer now.

#2: try some other hobby as a novice. Join a community where there are lots of professionals doing amazing work. Fail badly and stand in awe. Then realize that you are not this novice at writing. At least there’s that.

Sorry, I haven’t written in this thing in FOREVER. I do have some stuff in the works. I have SO much stuff in the works! (Too much stuff in the works?)

Stuff #1: I’m beginning a 52-week photography project. It’s partly a New Year’s resolution kind of thing, but it’s also practice for a writing idea I’m putting together. My project will be photos inspired by pieces of my own writing – you’ll get to see the first one soon enough, and I’ll post them here, as well as on my Flickr page, each week.

Stuff #2: the writing idea I’m putting together. I’m sure nobody remembers, but a couple/few years back, I was working on a novel of linked short stories. It didn’t work – not really. I abandoned it, and began writing other things instead, one of them being my current silly little web series. But after nearly three years of work on that, I now know where I failed that first time, and how to do things differently this time. And I want to try again. It’s a ridiculously crazy idea, because I’m not sure I’ve even seen this format done before except in my own web series.

The idea is that it’ll be a novel series in linked stories – with photography! It’s still in such a tender and fragile idea stage, but I’m all kinds of excited about it. It’ll also be indie-e-published, because I won’t even begin to try to convince a publisher to get on board with this crazy business! I’m beginning to think I wouldn’t even want a traditional publisher if it was a possibility, because this is something I want to do exactly my own stubborn way. Readers can read the series by the chapter each week (e-format only), or in book form at the end of the “season”, which I hope to do in both e-format and print. The series won’t begin until fall of 2012 to give me some time to wrap up some of my other current projects.

This probably makes no sense to a lot of people, but if you follow my upcoming photo project, you’ll get a small taste of what I mean by it.

Stuff #3: the novel continues to be written. Part of the reason the series isn’t starting until next fall, besides just my photography practice, is that I want to get this novel good and finished and out the door. I’m currently about 40% through the second draft.

So that’s that then. I have a lot of (self-imposed) work to do! And Stuff #4: I also want to do a better job at keeping this blog updated (for anybody who still follows this old thing).