I was tagged by Nina for this. I rarely do memes but since I don’t have anything else more useful to post on my blog today, here it goes!

Here are the rules:

Go to page 7 or 77 in your current manuscript
Go to line 7
Copy down the next seven lines as they are – no cheating
Tag 7 other authors

It’s not much taken out of context, but this is from Exactly Where They’d Fall page 77, one of Amelia’s chapters:

She [Piper] wanted to switch tents so she could bunk with Tom, which left Amelia only men to bunk with, most of them being strangers – liberal and forward-thinking as Amelia might have been, that was just not going to work. But there was also Drew. “Come on, it’s Drew,” Piper said. “You guys are friends. He’s not going to assault you or anything.” She paused then, a very serious consideration, nodding her head. “He might dream about you naked though.”

He he. That’s the start of one of my favorite scenes in the book!

And also, I don’t like tagging people. It makes me feel icky, lol! I don’t want anyone to not be tagged and feel left out. So if you’re reading this, consider yourself tagged! And post a link here in the comments if you do one, so I can read it!

It’s shocking to me how little I’ve managed to say publicly about this book so far, especially when I used to say so much about previous projects. I have my reasons – gun-shy about all those half-written books I didn’t finish (yet), which made me worry I’d never finish a project. That I was incapable.

I’m not incapable, I know now. I just had to find “the right one”, catch the right timing. Everything is kind of like dating, you know?

I’ve also got a great group of girls to babble to about it in private, and I find that’s a much safer option in the early stages of a project.

All that said, I can’t really say this book is in its infancy anymore. If a book was like a child, it wouldn’t even be a snotty pre-schooler, or a moody middle-schooler who thinks she knows everything. It might be a high schooler, that I’ve taught everything I know, and that I’m about to ship out into the real world, ready to stand on her own two legs. Oh how I hope she’ll make me proud! (Okay, that analogy is spent.)

Exactly Where They’d Fall is about many things: friendship, love, betrayal, trust. It’s the story of a group of friends – mainly Jodie, Drew, and Amelia – and what loyalties they owe to each other, or don’t. (more…)

My boy finished his last week of preschool last week. This first year for us – first year of school for him, first year working on anything in a very focused capacity for me – went by sort of unnoticed, I think. We started it, and became immersed in it, and just as soon it was over.

I know it made a big difference for him to be in school. But I spent a lot of the year not feeling like I’d accomplished very much. During the days while he was at school, I’d often find myself on Twitter or blogs. I struggled with the discipline to sit down for those 3-5 solid hours and write for the whole time. For so many years, I’ve trained myself to write in little pockets of time. 20 minutes while he watches a cartoon, or 35 minutes while he’s in the bath, or 15 minutes when some toy has caught his attention, or 45 minutes before bed. So suddenly when I had a stretch of 5 hours uninterrupted, I didn’t know what to do with myself.

I’d like to say I got better at it as the year went on. Maybe I did. It’s hard to measure in any certain capacity. There were days when nothing went according to plan – hubby missed his train and I had to drive him to work, or I had household stuff to do, phone calls to make, errands to run or whatever. There were plenty of days where one, or two, or even all three of us were sick. (Starting school = disease, let me tell you!!!) There were days when one blog after another after another were just so damn interesting that I never got around to the writing, and before I knew it, it was pickup time already. (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.

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.

You recognize a friend’s car when you see it, even if it’s just an ordinary black one, four-door sedan like any number of cars like it in this city. She and Jodie have the same model, because Amelia told her it was a good car. She recommended it. Jodie bought black, and Amelia has it in beige. Jodie got the built-in GPS, but Amelia wanted to spring for the moon-roof instead.

Funny thing is, you don’t forget the car just because you happen to not be friends with that person anymore. You still remember it; you still see it go by and you stop a little.

- Amelia, part of the soon-to-be novel, Exactly Where They’d Fall

notes: and it dawns on me that this excerpt might be a little spoilery for this novel. Ah well, I think from the set up, it’s largely clear these two might run into some trouble along the way, lol!

I’m not really sure what I would have liked from this shot. I’m not sure if I captured it or not. I’m thinking not quite. Maybe I’ll have to make it a project of mine to take pictures of moving cars, lol! Any time I caught a shot of a car moving through the frame, I didn’t like it. It felt ill-placed. But this one has black cars stopped at a light, and I could imagine Amelia walking toward them, as if Jodie was in one of them. Anyway…

I also had a tired four year-old with me, who was exhausted from walking around the city all day.

And I’m pretty sure that guy across the street was wondering what I was taking a picture of, lol!