Ramblings

The last two days I’ve mulled over what I could write about this week for my post and I actually got nowhere. As I sit down to at my computer to work on my post I still have no clue what to write about and while I should be focusing on the words to put here, my brain is tumbling over and over again on all those tasks I need to get done.

Laundry. Bills. Picking up my son’s glasses and getting my daughter’s new glasses adjusted. The cat needs shots, two dogs need their nails trimmed, and another one needs his tags renewed, the air filter needs changed, we have to get a new one. Hopefully my car will be ready today. Somebody has to do the dishes, probably me again because my girls are down for the count and my boys, well you try getting teenaged boys to wash dishes, by hand, and actually get them all clean.

And in the middle of all this my oldest has called twice in two day having a severe allergic reaction to something. So it’s looking like her sisters aren’t the only ones with severe food allergies.

Now I have a kid home sick from school, so I have to call the doctor, again.

Don’t let anybody ever tell you managing a household isn’t a job.

Half the time when I’m trying to do something, I’m “doing three things at once”, something I tell Bonnie all the time when she asks me why I haven’t done something simple yet, like answer her last question or check my mailbox.

Try talking/typing to someone through AIM while talking to someone on the phone and attempting to work on your own writing, or paying your bills, or whatever else you need to get done while four dogs are loudly announcing someone is at your door and nobody in your house seems to be making any effort to get to the door. Either that or the landline is ringing, which still means going to the front room. Oh, and you’re buried under your computer and a mound of paper work so getting up and getting to the front of the house is a production in and of itself.

(Okay, I’ve actually never had all of that happen all at once, but I’ve sure come close a few times.)

The one good thing about my strong attempt at trying to focus on writing yesterday is that I finally, after a month at least, wrote the next scene, and actually chapter, of my opus. I’m thinking I’m within six chapters of “The End”. I know I only have five events to put in and one of those is basically already written. So much closer. Maybe I’ll be able to get it finished soon.

Now to move on with another chaotic, perfectly normal around here, day.

Smile. Make the day a brighter day.

Time

Have you ever had one of those days, when you're moving right along, everything is going smoothly then you happen to glance at the clock and realize that Time was moving too fast. Suddenly, you didn't have enough hours in the day to finish everything, because just one thing was taking longer than you thought it would?

Well I've had that sort of month!

I'm not going to tell you how many times I've looked at the clock and realized that I'd spent hours more time writing than I'd planned. Nor am I going to tell you how many things I didn't get done when I should have because I was writing.

But this week I actually thought I was doing okay, and managing to get more than just my writing done then just a few minutes ago I realized what little writing I managed yesterday should have been on my blog post not my novel.

I did think about it, but I did that while I was driving to and from doctors appointments. It didn't do me much good, and I sincerely wish there was someway to slow down the sands of time, just for a little while, so I could get more done in a single day.

Until that's possible, I'll just say: Happy writing everyone!

Language and Communication part 2

In my last post I introduced the concept of language shorthand’s within a culture or between a few people. These shorthand’s can and do develop in families.

In my own family, we’ve developed this type of shorthand. You can easily get my kids laughing by saying “three sneezes”, “cheat, cheat”, “now which one are you” or “nobody has shoes on”.

Come to my house sometime and listen to us discuss a dinner menu or shopping list and try to figure out what “death, poison and pain” are. Death we make efforts to at least limit in our house and keep it away from my youngest daughter. Pain we don’t limit, but do keep away from my two daughters (the two living at home). Poison is not only encouraged, but my youngest son will complain about me making him eat it every day (he’s the one who started calling them poison). I’ll gripe that the list of death and pain is growing.

In one of my stories I have an MC convey a whole story to his brother by saying the name of one of their deceased relatives. It quickly got his point across to his brother, then he had to explain himself to everyone else in the room. But the fact is, as family members, they could express a full story with just a name is believable. The scene wouldn’t have been believable if the MC had to tell the whole story to his brother, who already knew it.

At another point in that same story the mother of one of my characters told her, “Don’t pull an Andrea.”

This was referring to the young woman’s sister, but she got the point. Her sister was known for dawdling.

Do we as writers create believable family dynamics with family members who have a shorthand? Do they say things that sound off the wall but make perfect sense to the family members, while being confusing to anybody else? Can your characters convey stories to each other with just a word or two, or a name?

This dynamic doesn’t have to apply to just families, but can also fit people who’ve been around each other a lot, or grown up together.

In the story I mentioned above, I have a scene where the introduction of a simple food item has two characters, who grew up together laughing. Their community’s shared shorthand. A familiar story they both knew that was funny to them. The people in the room with them had to be told what was funny.

Read through your stories and find out where you can use this shorthand.

In the first scene I mentioned, had the MC told his brother what the problem was by telling the story of their deceased relative, the scene would have been completely different, and they would have trooped out of the room faster than I needed them too. However, normal family dynamics got him to relay the story twice, once quickly to his brother, then a second time, in longer format, to everyone else.

In the second scene I mentioned, I can remember the long sentence I had were the mother was telling her not to dawdle, then it occurred to me, the line about not pulling an Andrea was shorter, got the point across, and was consistent with normal family dynamics.

Read through your stories and see if the dynamic is there. Do they have that shorthand? If not can you create one for them.

Smile. Make the day a brighter day.

Doppelgangers

Growing up, I often told people I know who my doppelganger is. It didn’t seem farfetched to me, since, I am an identical twin, but then a recent event got me rethinking that stance, and even thinking about a few things that have happened in the past.

The recent event was I was shopping with my sister-in-law and a woman I did not know started talking to me as if she knew me. 

Needless to say it threw me for a quite a loop because the last time that happened to me was somewhere between 1997 and 1999 when Konnie and I were living in the same city only a few blocks from each other. Now of course, we live in different states.

I actually considered maybe the woman I saw was nuts, until the last couple of days when I recalled a few more instances. The first two happened while I was at college in Rexburg Idaho and Konnie was at home in Tacoma Washington.

The first incident was that one day, as a friend and I arrived at a meeting for a campus club, one of our fellow club members asked me if I’d been in the downtown area that afternoon. I had, so I responded that I’d been shopping. She then glared at me and told me I nearly ran her over in the crosswalk!

I told her she had to be mistaken, since I didn’t even own a car, let alone have a current driver’s license at the time. She still insisted she was positive I was behind the wheel of the car that nearly ran her down.

One week later, my friend and I left to get to that same club meeting earlier than usual. Since, by then I was hobbling around crutches we wanted to give me plenty of time. Anyway, when my accuser from the week before entered the room, she, and the friends she was with, did a double take, completely dumbfounded, because they were positive they’d just seen me walking AWAY from the building our meeting was in sans crutches or cast. To which my friend turned to me and said, “You mean there’s three of you?”

Something I had clearly forgotten when that woman approached me last week. But I’d also forgotten one other event.

This one happened not long after my husband died, and even just a few days after Konnie had returned home from attending his funeral.

I’d gone to the store to pick up some sandwich fixing. It was the first time in years, I’d even done the shopping, and I hadn’t done it without my husband with me in so long that at one point I stopped to look for him.

That’s when I spotted her. For one split second, I thought I saw someone familiar, then I realized the size, shape, and hair color was right, but it couldn’t possibly be Konnie!

I never approached the woman, never talked to her, but I now I know, she must live in town somewhere.

And all that got me thinking about how it feels to discover you do have a doppelganger and wondering if writers ever use that issue in their stories.

I for one have a couple of doppelgangers in my WIP, but that fact is backstory. I don’t have the actual event when they discovered this issue in the story.

Have any of you ever written such a scene? Have you tried? Do you know of any such stories?

I think I’d like to try some time to write a scene where my main character is mistaken for his or her doppelganger, and I think I’m going to have it that they are not twins separated at birth, and are not related at all. But then again maybe not, since them not knowing they could even have a twin, or such a relative would make for a more intriguing story. Don’t you think?

Happy writing everyone!