There is a carnivorous giant snail called the Milky Bar snail and it is the color of hot, extremely soapy water, or of vanilla soft-serve ice cream. And I just wanted to say I'm glad I live on a planet where the previous sentence is a true thing.

Cumulative NaNoWriMo word count: 2,706

I didn't sleep enough last night, I probably haven't been going outside enough this week, I spent a lot of the weekend drinking, and I'm all tired and achy now. Not that I should complain; I brought it on myself, for the most part. The writing's still coming along, and still more fun than frustrating.

Sometimes ( Read more... )

GODDAMN MY HOUSE IS HUGE.

Well, maybe not huge, but sizable, especially when I'm the only person in it. I tend to forget that. Also, my room looks like a big purple storage closet; I can tidy it, but it's hard to escape the general effect. I don't know what to write. My dog is, incredibly, still alive, although he can't see or hear too well and his ( Read more... )

And and and. Back on Monday I wrote this:

Fritz is back at home! He probably has a brain tumor, and he still might not get to stay at home for more than a few days or a week, but he's been put on phenobarbitol and that stopped his seizures to the point that he doesn't need to be in the animal hospital 24/7 anymore. He can't walk very well, and he ( Read more... )

My (exceedingly old) dog has had a seizure. He thrashed around foaming at the mouth for nearly five minutes. He screamed. I had not been aware that dogs could scream. It was fairly disturbing. His eyes didn't roll back-- they were open, but frozen and fixed, not tracking anything. I tried to hold him, which was stupid-- he's a small dog, but it ( Read more... )

Sometimes I feel so full of things to be said that I can't say anything at all, in the end. And it frustrates me that there must be an order, a bird after a bird in a long, long line. I wish I could draw everything up and out and into the world all at once, in an instant. Like Henri in The Passion, I want to write down what I felt and how I was ( Read more... )

My mom's brother's family sent me these excellent shoes (they're tan, what the website calls "bark"). It's my first birthday gift, apart from donations to Full Moon Farm, a sanctuary for wolf-dog hybrids where I've done volunteer work (& which is perpetually short on funds). My mom and I went to our town's annual "Trash to Treasure" sale, which is ( Read more... )

When I was a little girl in Marburg, a swan attacked me by the river one day. I don't know why. I was probably trying to pet it or chase it; maybe I stepped on its nest by accident. Maybe I just came too near. Anyway, swans are attacking things. They don't look as though they would be, but they are. A swan can kick your ass. It came running at me ( Read more... )

Thursday night, my last night at Warren Wilson, I ended up talking and dancing with about every person in the creative writing department who I can actually be bothered to both respect and like down in Rex and Ilinca's room. We were drinking noxious cocktails that looked like they ought to be sizzling in beakers in some B-movie mad scientist's lab ( Read more... )

And sometimes I do feel like a robot girl. My left ear broke. It broke. Only hears the sound of a dead radio station, now. Only hears the sound of the sea: huuuuuh-fwooooooosh. Like a lung doing its job no matter what reserves the mind may have about this whole business of respiration. Like the labored breathing of something the moon won't stop ( Read more... )