Hot hot heat
I hate when they turn the heat on. I hate it--I hate the smell of it, I hate the whistling noise it makes against the air vents once I close them, I hate that my windows are hermetically sealed and impossible to open. It's my sister who turns the heat on upstairs--she gets cold and I get hot, that's the story of our living together.
The weird thing is that I was in the tub and all of a sudden I just wanted to write this story. It's a story I tried writing several months ago and it just didn't take--the time period was different, the narrator was younger, there was too much back story, it got away from what I had wanted it to be; it just didn't work. So once I'm done with my bath, after sort of mentally composing several different chunks of it, I sat down, and by God if I didn't write the story I had wanted to originally write. Well, not all of it, but the interesting parts, which is what's important; my jaws are hurting like hell for some reason (sinus pressure?), so I eventually hit a point where I had nothing left to deal with but the rising action, which is only lightly sketched out in my mind, and decided I'd deal with that tomorrow when (I hope) I don't have a frickin' tension headache. (Yes, I'm strange. After "the interesting parts," generally I write the end first and the beginning second, and everything else falls into place afterward. A lot of writers talk about how drafting a story is a journey, and you end up places you didn't expect, and I'll admit I've done that, but only after I've done some preliminary brainstorming and then started traveling with a destination in mind. I just end up somewhere different, is all. I'm not sure I'm capable of writing something if I haven't figured out what the "so what" of it is, as one of my professors used to say.)
And then my jaw and the heater combined to piss me off so bad that I set it aside for tomorrow. Well, mostly the inspiration had petered out. But I was pleased with myself on the whole.
Note: If you take the most widely-read parody I've written, the one that was archived on Fiction Alley and linked on Mugglenet, and you go through the trouble of taking out all of my 5000 hidden copyright notices and you post it as your own work, but with a different title (MOO HA HA!), I am sure no one will notice. Seriously. You can bet the farm on that. Uh-huh.
In the mood for spooky and/or creepy reading, so here's a few links (and hit me with more if you have 'em):
Joyce Carol Oates' "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" Kids? Don't talk to strangers.
Ambrose Bierce: Present at a Hanging and Other Ghost Stories. Creepiest are the "missing person" stories near the end, if only because Bierce disappeared in Mexico and was never heard from again.
Famous Modern Ghost Stories. Includes Bierce, Poe, Maupassant and Blackwood.
teleute12: "Hey Cleo, would you mind pimping The Breast Cancer Site? It works on the same principle as The Hunger Site, only with funding mammograms for women who couldn't afford them. For the month of October, each contribution is tripled, but they're way behind on their goal and really need help. Can you ask people to click every day for the rest of the month? Thanks a lot!" Sho' thing.
Friggin' huge-ass Harry Potter pics.
Friggin' medium-ass Harry Potter pics.
Anne Rice promises to now write only for the Lord.
Can you trust Wikipedia? Well, no, duh. The kind of things I'm usually looking up there aren't things I need deep accuracy on--last night I wanted to know what a dog rose looked like, and by God, Wikipedia had a picture. As one of the panelists says of one entry, "It's not terrible. But then I wouldn't have thought of using Wikipedia as a serious reference source."
Off to read more of The Lamplighter for class...