He’s more like his mommy than he knows.

Please pardon my abrupt absence. I *officially and completely* finished the second draft of my novel a couple weeks ago (!!!), and then promptly ran off with my boys to northern Michigan for a week of fun! (more…)

This was a small series of photos I found within other larger landscape photos I took in England. Most of these I hadn’t even known were there until I super-zoomed in and found these little candid moments that I never would have caught otherwise. (more…)

60 mph, white knuckles, barely enough room for two cars! 90-degree turns in the city, where I swear, people are not heeding the 30 mph speed limits! And if you were ever worried about driving on the left side of the road, or going through a roundabout, I say BAH! Try driving in the English countryside!

But the people are friendly and it’s a lovely place, really!… If you survive the roads and everything.

Picture heavy under the cut. These photos were taken between Wanborough, Marlborough, Swindon, and Bath. (Click here for the full set, 72 photos in total.) Please enjoy the following photos while I attempt to get my brain jump-started again to prepare some more verbal posts! (more…)

There is no story for my photo this week. (And by the way, I’m sure anyone following this will have noticed that I’m hopelessly behind in my weeks, with little chance of ever catching up – and I don’t really care.)

Last Friday, I passed 50K on the second draft of my novel-in-progress, and just about as fast as I crossed that line, I promptly disappeared from the internet. Work-related anyway. I took an impromptu weekend off. I wasn’t supposed to be taking the weekend off, since I still need to plump and polish this draft by about another 18,000 words, and there’s this monumental and looming deadline to finish before my kid finishes school for the summer – self-imposed, but since I’m my own employer, I’m being kind of a hard-ass about it, lol! Oh, and we’re also simultaneously planning a trip to England in these same three weeks.

Yet even with all there is left to do, my brain spit out that 50,000th word, and shut down. It felt called for, felt necessary, and so it happened. (more…)

This week’s excerpt is actually a title, from my in-progress collection of stories and poems:

How to Stand on Your Hands

notes: And so I went on a quest for the ultimate mangled dandelion. And I took a damn lot of pictures of them too! (I may or may not have even dreamed about dandelions last night… I know, that’s a bit much, isn’t it?) (more…)

Jodie was reading on the couch when Piper burst into the apartment, bringing the wind with her, smelling of dried leaves and the crispness of fall. Hayden followed behind her, tall and nervous. Jodie made men nervous. She didn’t know why.

Piper ran up the stairs. Hayden stood in the center of the room. He nodded, Jodie nodded back, the mutual acknowledgment of each other’s presence. This was the part she hated. Was she supposed to stop reading? Was she supposed to entertain him? Make jokes? It was an odd, forced kind of friendship, her roommate’s fiancé. The walls of this apartment were paper thin; she’d even heard him having sex before. Jodie would be maid of honor in this man’s wedding, next to Amelia, and Piper’s dozen-or-something sisters. Piper was making the dresses herself, both her own and for the wedding party, clouds of tulle in yellow and lavender. They’d all look like Easter eggs.

Hayden shifted his weight, cleared his throat. “You mind if I steal your girl for the night?”

Didn’t he already have her?

Jodie shrugged. Did she mind? Didn’t she mind? “Sure, have at her,” she said.

- Jodie, from chapter 1.1, Exactly Where They’d Fall

notes: Happy Easter!

Little bit of Photoshop work on this one, just for the heck of it. I felt like desaturating the colors a little (it was too bright for Jodie, lol!), and added a texture.

“It’s summertime,” she said, clutching her arms tighter as it started to rain. “We’re always busier in the summers. The new shop, and Charlotte’s about to have the babies. I have a lot on my mind. I’m not mad.”

He sighed. “Of course.” Though he wished she would just be mad, that he threw his dirty field clothes on the bed, that he walked through the house in his boots, that he put the milk carton back empty. Anything. He would be overjoyed that she was mad at him, so that it wouldn’t be something else instead.

“I’m going inside,” she said. “It’s starting to rain. Are you coming?”

He shook his head.

He wandered to his fields in the warm summer drizzle. He meant to plant a lighter crop this year, but all he gained from the lightened workload was the extra time to watch his marriage fall apart. It was too late to change his mind at this point in the season. He had what he had, and there was no going back. So he watched the wheat sway in the wind, tiny raindrops stinging his face, the wet sky feeding the soil. He reached out a hand to touch the young stalks as he passed. It amazed him that this ground was so filled with life, that anything at all on this toxic farm was able to grow.

- Matt, from book #2 (working title: Where the Universe Dwells)

notes: I am cheating the crap out of this week! I actually took this picture last summer, lol!

But I’m busy, and I’m writing, and that trumps my picture project. At least for the next few weeks until I get this novel draft done. And I will get this novel draft DONE, and to my beta readers, by June 12th! I have about eight weeks, and it’s looking possible, people! It’s gonna happen, I swear it!

And maybe this is like one of those things where if you say it out loud with enough conviction, it might actually manifest itself into existence?

Amelia came home to an empty house, and Drew’s absence from it felt unsettling. Coming home to him was a comfort she never realized until he wasn’t here. They didn’t officially live together, except that most of the time, they did. He’d even taken up a corner of her spare room with his laptop, his stacks of The New Yorker that came faster than he could ever keep up reading, his pens left around the house, his scribble of random poetics on grocery receipts and sticky notes.

She picked up an electric bill payment stub from the kitchen table, his handwriting scrawled over the back of it: freedom, friction, fiction, fallacy. She examined it, tossing the words around in her head like a puzzle. She asked him once what these meant. “Oh, it’s nothing,” he had said. “I thought it might be something, but it was nothing.”

- Amelia, chapter 1.4, Exactly Where They’d Fall

notes: a looser translation of the text this time. I took this when I was sick, playing Scrabble with D, and it seemed like the kind of thing Drew might do, make random words and see if they might or might not be something.

I actually tried to make all four of his words on here, but there’s only two F’s in a Scrabble game, lol!

Eeek, and I’m SO far behind with my photo/story project weeks! Writing has been keeping me busy though, and I refuse to complain about that!

But I actually do have an idea that should catch me up on a few photos at once pretty soon here.

*kind of a long excerpt this week*

It was a concrete drain pipe, discarded and long forgotten at the side of the creek. She came over, bundled up like a marshmallow in canary yellow, and he was too, in dark green. Snow melted in patches on the ground, but there was none inside the pipe. Instead, he found a black plastic trash bag. He knelt down to it, pushed at it to guess what was inside. He imagined live mice bursting out, or miniature-sized alien creatures, with slimy green skin like toads. But whatever was inside felt firm. He broke it open and found newspapers.

“Wow,” she said, picking one up. “I bet they’re from a hundred years ago.”

The date said 1981. He read a couple words from the headline, stumbled and stopped at one he didn’t know. She looked at the word, mouthed the syllables. “It says ‘embargo.’ Don’t you know anything?” He would have figured it out. She just had to be so quick about things.

“What’s ‘embargo?’” he said.

She shrugged her shoulders. “I heard it on the news once.”

The bag of newspapers was heavier than he expected, and he dragged them out of the pipe and crawled inside, sat in the middle. She followed and sat next to him. He imagined it was a submarine, or a space ship – yes, space ship. He stretched his feet to the other side, pressed against it like there were pedals, turned a steering wheel out in front of him. She pressed her feet out too, but she wasn’t driving. She didn’t need to because he was, and she planted her hands down like she was holding on.

He swooped left, a whole body swoop, and she did too, to avoid a plummeting asteroid. He swooped right, and she did too, so not to collide with another space ship. “Whoa,” she said. “That was close.” But they weren’t out of danger just yet, they were still being chased – yes, by white-suited inter-galactic soldiers in stealthy space jets. He drove, and she held on. She was his sidekick, his wingman. She got to be the sidekick because she was shorter, because he was seven now and she was still six, and because she knew a lot, and a trusty sidekick needed to be smart. She was a funny little twig of a girl with a mop of wild blonde hair. She talked about panda bears or how you should turn off the water when brushing your teeth. She knew every endangered species there ever was. And the planets too, but he taught her that.

- from the practice novel, which is now buried in a shoebox in my closet, may it rest in peace.

notes: sorry about the length on this excerpt. I always really liked this bit, but the novel as a whole was going nowhere. So I thought I’d rescue a little bit for this photo project, so that it might have its little 5 minutes of glory

Also kind of meh about this photo. It’s not my favorite photo of the week, but as per my project rules, it’s the one that was taken for a story excerpt. If I hadn’t had D with me I could have gotten a better shot, maybe climbed in there to clear some of that brush away. I would have liked a clearer shot into the pipe – it was SO dark in there, and super cool.

And much like the kids in my story excerpt, I totally would have climbed inside if I were 6 (and in fact did climb in many drain pipes like this). But you know, I didn’t want to give my own 4-year-old any ideas about climbing into creeks and drain pipes, lol!

outtakes that I liked better: