Marian Allen's Blog, page 469

Quick One

It's thunderating today, so Imma just refer you to the Recipes tab up there in lieu of posting a recipe. Except that I made Pat's Hot Chicken Salad with portobello mushrooms instead of chicken and it was MOST tasty!

WRITING PROMPT: A character goes to a friend's house and finds that the friend cooks vegetarian. The character is appalled. What does he/she do?

MA

Sunday In New Albany, Japan

Click picture to enlarge

Sunday, Mom and I went to An Asian Garden Tour and Culture Workshop sponsored by The Center for Cultural Resources and the Students for Diversity Club of Indiana University Southeast. The "gardens" were not what we in the Western tradition think of as gardens: lots of plants, preferably with flowers on them. These gardens were little jewels, little bites of richness to be savored for quality rather than quantity.

Here's the only picture I took on the tour. The other spaces were so intimate and complex, they wouldn't have come across in a photograph.

We also received packets listing the nine design techniques and seven basic elements of Japanese gardens.

Design Techniques

enclosure and entry
void and accent
balance and asymmetry
planes and volume
symbology
borrowed scenery
mitate (one thing standing in for another)
pathways and bridges
master planning (letting the garden grow and flow with landscape and materials)

Design Elements

rocks
white sand
water
plantings
bridges
sculptured ornaments
walls and fences

We were invited to make our own small zen gardens to take home, but I declined. I used to have a zen garden in the house, until the cats discovered it and did some of their own organic composition and raking.

I'm posting today at Fatal Foodies on Julie Hyzy's White House Chef mystery EGGSECUTIVE ORDERS and at Echelon Exploration on more of the origin and transformation of FORCE OF HABIT.

WRITING PROMPT: Would your main character be interested in having a zen garden? Why or why not? Write a paragraph in which he or she HAS to make one.

MA

 

To Fanfic – AND BEYOND!!!

First, an announcement: My short story collections, MA'S MONTHLY HOT FLASHES: 2002-2007; LONNIE, ME AND THE HOUND OF HELL and THE KING OF CHEROKEE CREEK, are each now priced at $0.99. Go. Buy. Amazon. Smashwords.

Now. Last Monday, I told about the beginning of My Creative Past. This post is about passing notes out of class.

In high school, I discovered that I wasn't the only one who made up stories based on stories I read and watched, nor was I the only one who injected myself or a stand-in for myself into those borrowed worlds. Yeah, you know who you are. ~grin~ My friends and I didn't have classes together–Jane went to an entirely different school–so we passed notes OUT of class.

These notes were running shared-world serial stories, often with humorous bits, usually with romantic bits. We would decide on the show we were going to "do" and choose up boyfriends. I believe my boyfriend in Star Trek (TOS) was Scotty. I've always been a sucker for a Scottish accent, even a bad one. Everything else, we wrote as we went along. Fictioneer A would begin, would write a note establishing the context and the initial conflict and pass the note to Fictioneer B. Fictioneer B would write the next bit from her point of view, moving her romance and the story forward, and pass it on. And so forth.

We thought we were just having fun, but we were also learning some writing lessons. Each of our little episodes moved the story forward, from the situation as it was handed to us to the different situation as we handed it on. Part of the fun was writing characterization and dialog as close as possible to things the borrowed characters would do and say while tweaking them and motivating them to suit ourselves. We were juggling at least two–sometimes more–plots/subplots, keeping in mind the individual subplots each of our co-writers had going for her characters. The stories didn't just ramble around; they had tension and arcs and did, eventually, wrap up.

Some of us also wrote our own fanfic (That's fan fiction, in case you don't know.). For me, these tended to go farther afield. While I still based the stories in borrowed worlds (Star Trek, Dark Shadows), and I still had a stand-in (what the fanfic community calls a "Mary Sue"), I was more likely to do a change-of-pace that went right off the deep end into full-out farce. In this, I was strongly influenced by a friend named Lelia Lindsay, who started it all with her "Spock Shocks", which were pretty much baggy-pants vaudeville with Vulcans in.

Devra Langsam, instigator and kingpin of the fanzine Maziform D, published some of my stuff (under my maiden name of Marian Turner and then under my current name). Eventually, I stretched the tether so thin it broke completely, and I was writing original books and stories. I had a fondness for the old pieces, though (you can find most of them at my old blahg here) and, in a process called "filing off the serial numbers", rewrote the first short story into a novel, FORCE OF HABIT. Coming full circle, I took one of the characters from that novel, Mary Sued Devra Langsam, Holly Jahangiri and Jim Overturf's detective Kurt Maxxon, and wrote a short story based in my own invented world. "By the Book" will be released soon, as will FORCE OF HABIT. I'll let you know.

Is it fanfiction if it's your own work you're pirating? Should I sue myself? Which one of us pays the court costs?

WRITING PROMPT: What was your favorite imaginary world when you were a kid? Did you and your friends play out the stories you had seen or heard or read, or did you make up your own? Did you fight over who got to play Peter Pan and who had to be Hook, or did you just assume Pan and Hook and all take subsidiary parts?

MA

Sample Sunday – Three Creepies

Here are some more flash fiction pieces. These three were published in G. W. Thomas' wonderful Flashshot, which I recommend for a daily shot of … well … flash fiction.

MEMENTO MORRY

by Marian Allen

It nestled in the grass. I shivered at its empty eye-sockets — a tiny shiver for a tiny skull.

I had fed a squirrel all spring. Called him Morry. I hadn't seen him since he and my cat hit the deck at the same time. This skull reminded me of him; it was about the right size.

I picked it up and found a stick. At home, I glue-gunned them together. Candle-snuffer. Very Goth.

My cat won't come in anymore, not since a taper I had just put out flared up again and singed his tail.

Weird, eh?

HYENAS

by Marian Allen

This was a nice quiet hotel until two loudmouths checked in upstairs. I came out onto the balcony for a little peace.

Naturally, they came out, too.

I'm about to go in when I hear the guy upstairs and one room over tell them to pipe down. They laugh and get louder.

"Shut up!" he goes, and claps his hands twice–sounds like pop, pop.

No more noise.

"Thanks, man," I call.

"No problem."

I sit down to enjoy the quiet. Then two red streams trickle over the edge of the upstairs balcony, like two spilled glasses of sangria.

CYCLE

by Marian Allen

She loves driving on the freeway. Flanked by emptiness or parallel movement, she feels paroled.

She exits, and the iron grid of streets clangs around her. Traffic slows to a crawl.

Red and blue lights. Police vehicles triangulate the scene, but nothing stops her seeing the spoked wheels and crushed frame under the Toyota, handlebars reaching out like pleading arms.

Nothing stops her seeing, burned in her memory, fixed in her dreams, the burst of sun on chrome, the bike bearing his son by the woman he wouldn't leave, and the steering wheel beneath her hands.

WRITING PROMPT: Write a paragraph with a squirrel in it.

MA

Flash Non-Fiction

This past Thursday, I posted about how our #4 daughter and I made a backyard goldfish pond that was doomed from the start. The fish, on the other hand, thrived. I believe we lost one out of the four, but the others thrived and grew fat.

The pond, not being deep enough, had to be abandoned when winter came, so we moved the fish indoors. They did so well, they got too big for the tank. When they were too big to be used as piranha food, we traded them in at the pet store for an equal number of small fish and raised those up to be fat and sassy. Our trade-ins were quarantined until their health was certain, then they were sold to people with big ponds who wanted to start out with big fish.

The Coming of Flash

Photo Credit: Ryan Hill

If you've kept fish, you know they don't poop rainbows. No, not even trout. And a healthy tank is a tank you have to clean algae off of ALL the TIME. So, to help us out, we got a dojo loach. I don't have a picture of him, alas. The picture here is from a wonderful website called Fish Lore, which I wish I had had available back when we had fish. This is just what our dojo loach looked like, though.

The dojo loach seemed disinterested, not to say bored, with the whole tank thing. He spent so much time doing nothing much, we named him Flash. Irony, you see.

I don't know if he stopped worrying about what the cool kids would think, or outgrew being all emo or what, but he perked up after a while and lived up to his name. All the fish recognized me as the Food Lady, and danced around at the top of the tank when I came into the room. Flash would nibble at my fingers if I stuck them into the water.

Flash Got Game

And here's the thing: Flash played with our #4 daughter. She stuck her face up against the tank wall. Flash leapt up like he'd just been goosed and flashed across to the other side of the tank. She moved to that side and stuck her face up to the tank. Leap! Flash!

He would only do that with her. If she didn't come play, he swam back and forth to lure her, or came to the surface and splashed with his tail to get her attention.

The Passing of Flash

One day, we were all out at various places. I came home, and Flash was gone. Just gone. As in nowhere to be seen in that tank. I knew he liked to burrow, so I wasn't worried at first, but it was time for a cleaning; I cleaned out the tank, which involved rinsing the gravel in the bottom, and…no Flash.

Weeping and cursing, I finished cleaning the tank and treating the water and put the horrible, monstrous, loach-eating cannibal goldfish back.

I can never do anything without slopping some of it on the floor, so I got out the broom and relieved my feelings by cleaning up the gravel. I moved a chair to sweep under it–and there was Flash! Halfway across the floor from the tank!

Not even I could accidentally drop something the size of a cigar and not notice it, so he had to have been there all the time. I'd been home for an hour–how long had he been out of the tank?

I put his dry carcass into a bowl of water. Why? I don't know. #4 daughter and Charlie came home, and I suggested a funeral, which #4 seconded.

But– Flash was alive! Now I see this on Fish Lore:

They are accomplished escape artists and will find any open holes in the top of the tank. Make sure your tank hood is well secured. It is interesting to note that this fish can breathe in air when the oxygen levels in the water become depleted. So, if yours has jumped from the tank, try putting it back in the tank as soon as possible. You never know…

Sure enough, Flash lived another couple of years.

I don't know what happened at last. They told me at the pet store that the water company changed the chemicals they used or something; all I know for certain is that, in spite of letting the water air out and adding treatment drops to it, all the fish, including Flash, went belly-up one day. If you've never kept fish, you may not know how much it hurts to lose fish, but it hurts really bad. We decided we wouldn't put any more fish in the way of such a death, and cleaned out the tank for the final time.

But Flash…. Flash will always live in memory.

WRITING PROMPT: Give a character in your book, work-in-progress or imagination a childhood pet.

MA

Friday Recommends – So Stylish!

Thanks, Perry Block!

Perry Block, who is still cute, despite the title of his blog (Nouveau Old, Formerly Cute), gave me a Stylish Blogger Award today. I'm apoza thank him–thank you,Perry!–and tell seven random facts about myself, then pass the award on to others. The number varies. Perry said five, but only passed it on to three. We'll see how many I do when I get to that part.

First, the random facts, as if I don't pass along enough of those in the general course of things.

I'm on the wacky ELMM diet plan. ELMM stands for Eat Less, Move More. It's so darn crazy, it just might work! Of course, considering how sedentary I am, I would move more if all I did was blink twice as often. We'll see how that works.
I love puns. I think punning is atavistic: a throwback to language acquisition, when words are mastered to a sufficient extent that one can play with them, manipulate them. I make no apologies for my delight in any form of wordplay.
No surprise that two of my signature jokes, guaranteed to make the kids groan, are puns. 1) The toothless termite walked into a bar and asked, "Where's the bar tender?" and 2) Two peanuts were walking down the road and one was a salted. ~drumroll~
I love Twitter and Facebook. No Farmville, no nothingville, though. Just connections. I love connections.
Coffee is my drug of choice.
And chocolate.
If I'm standing up, I dance like a penguin. If I'm sitting down, I dance like a Muppet.

Now I pass the award on to more bloggers. I choose three.

Audrey Lintner of Puns and Posies. Whether it's Green Monday, Weird Wednesday or Free Range Friday, she shares the adventure and pleasure of life spent paying attention to nature.

Johanna Harness, of Johanna's Big Thoughts and Mama of #amwriting. Thanks for mountains of encouragement and truly useful information, Johanna!

Alicia McCalla of Stories In Color. Alicia advocates thinking multiculturally when writing speculative fiction. Our world isn't monocultural, so why should another one be?

Enjoy the weekend, folksies! I'll be here tomorrow morning with the tale of Flash.

WRITING PROMPT: What bloggers would your main character find intriguing?

MA

Animals! Gone! Wild!

Click picture to enlarge

I was walking home from Mom's last night, and spotted this turtle at the side of the road. I knew our #1 daughter was on her way home from work and, afraid the turtle would run out into the road and be killed, I reached down to pick the turtle up and move it to the other side. Then I saw what it was doing. Click on the picture to enlarge it.

"Oh! Sorry, Madam," I said, and took a picture. Yes, we're about to be the proud godparents of a clutch of hatchlings.

I finally got a snappie of the lizard who lives on the back porch. Probably one of many. Lizards make me happy. Yes, I'm a Democrat. Shut up. It's only a very small picture because I had to stand so far away, to keep the li'l speedster from running away before I could snap it.

And I told Damyanti I would post about Flash sometime, so here is the background. Tomorrow is Friday Recommends, so Flash will come into it on Saturday.

Once upon a time, my husband went out west for a week or so to bring our #2 daughter home from her summer internship. Before he left, our #4 daughter said, "I sure wish we could make a goldfish pond. But if we ask Daddy, he'll either say no or he'll do it himself." So we laid our plans. We got books and made lists and, as soon as he was well on his way, we went to the store. We already had a galvanized tub in the basement, and the scraps of a pool-liner, so we dug a hole, shoved the tub in it, lined the tub with the pool liner, and filled it with water. We put sand in the bottom and bricks by ones and stacks of twos, to hold the water plants at various heights. Then we got goldfish.

When Charlie got home, we had a well-established little ecosystem going. The cats were interested, but the fish had plenty of places of refuge, and the cats decided the pond was just another kind of television.

Then the weather started turning cold, and we realized the fatal flaw in our plan: The pond wasn't deep enough for the fish to overwinter. We had to buy an aquarium and bring the fish indoors. We had to drain the tub. And just like that, our pond was gone. Charlie took up the tub so it wouldn't rust or be in the way when he mowed, and the dream was over.

But–ah!–it was sweet while it lasted!

Saturday: The Coming of Flash.

WRITING PROMPT: Have a character throw himself/herself into a Do-It-Yourself project without thinking it all the way through.

MA

Another Non-Sacrifice

I just joined SparkPeople, a diet support and planning site. It's free, so the price was right. I was delighted to find they have a fairly extensive collection of vegetarian recipes. Here's the one we had last night:

Vegetarian Lentil Meatloaf

Ingredients

2 cups water

1 teaspoon salt

1 cup lentils

1 small onion , diced

1 cup quick-cooking oats

3/4 cup grated cheese (cheddar, swiss, jack or american)

1 egg , beaten

4 1/2 ounces spaghetti sauce or tomato sauce

1 teaspoon garlic powder

1 teaspoon dried basil

1 tablespoon dried parsley

1/4 teaspoon black pepper

Directions

-Boil salted water in a saucepan.

-Add lentils and simmer covered for about 30 minutes (varies with the type of lentils). Boil until the lentils are soft and most of the water is absorbed.

-Drain and partially mash the lentils.

-Scrape into a mixing bowl and allow to cool slightly.

-Stir in onion, oats, and cheese.

-Add egg, tomato sauce, garlic, basil, parsley, and pepper and mix.

-Scrape into a loaf pan that has been sprayed generously with pam non-stick cooking spray.

-Smooth the top of the loaf.

-Bake at 350 degrees for 30-45 minutes until top of loaf is dry, firm, and golden brown.

-Cool in pan for 10 minutes.

-Run a knife along the edges of pan, then turn out loaf into a serving plate.

-Makes 4 generous servings

"Generous". Ha! Even I couldn't have eaten a fourth of that size loaf. Maybe if I didn't have anything else. But how could I eat meatloaf without mashed potatoes and corn? I'm asking you: How could I? Well, I couldn't, that's how.

Couple of things I did differently: I put some carrots and celery and peppers into the mix. I used crushed tomatoes rather than sauce, and poured spaghetti sauce over the hot loaf after I turned it out.

What I'll do differently next time: I'll use the spaghetti sauce IN the loaf rather than crushed tomatoes AND put the sauce on the top.

Two thumbs up. Lots of leftovers, too. Om nom!

WRITING PROMPT: Is your main character happy with his/her weight? Is it a question that would even come to mind? If not, why not?

MA

Bob Sanchez and His Little Mountain

No, this is not an off-color political joke. My pal Bob Sanchez is on a blog book tour and he was fool–I mean nice enough to visit me along the way. Little Mountain is the name of his book, and it really deserves better than for me to make cheap jokes.

Bob is the author of When Pigs Fly, (an iUniverse Star book), Getting Lucky, and Little Mountain, associate editor and webmaster of The Internet Review of Books, active in the El Paso Writers' League, Mesilla Valley Writers, and the Internet Writing Workshop.

I asked Bob to share something about his character creation.

Take it away, Bob!

~   ~   ~   ~   ~   ~

Thanks for hosting me, Marian! I appreciate your generosity in lending me your corner of cyberspace.

Where do a novel's characters come from? In the case of my novels, no one needs to worry that I've based a character on him. Or her. Not yet.

Largely, my characters are built from a combination of traits: this guy's beer gut, that gal's tattoo. Lots of the characters have a sliver of my personality: how I am, how I'd like to be, or what I fear I could become. But characters can and do arise completely out of my imagination, like Ace and Frosty in When Pigs Fly. How stupid could these two shoplifters be and still be entertaining? My operating theory as a writer is that criminals are inherently stupid. That's not necessarily true, but it affords a license to look for laughs at their expense. (Ace and Frosty live in Massachusetts but do much of their shoplifting in New Hampshire to avoid the sales tax.)

Two of my main characters began life as the same person. During my own childhood, a neighborhood bully named Mike Durgin used to torment me. The kid was a rat, but even rats deserve second chances, so one of my fictional good guys became Mack Durgin of When Pigs Fly. He might once have been a problem child, but he matured into a decent man like—well, like me. And not strikingly handsome, but much closer to Brad Pitt than to Herman Munster. Then I needed him again in Getting Lucky, where he developed a bit differently—still a good guy but with a darker past. So I created Clay Webster from Mack Durgin's literary DNA. They're similar in lots of ways, but I'd rather have a beer with Mack. He'd never punch me out.

[image error]My latest hero is Sambath "Sam" Long of Little Mountain. He is an American homicide cop who survived the killing fields of Cambodia. His father's dying act was to spit in his killer's eye, and Sam hopes to measure up to his father's courage. Sam has a lot of American traits and strong moral values. When his personal wish conflicts with his professional duty, he does his duty. My goal in creating Sam was to try to show someone transitioning from one culture to another—he knows where he's going and respects where he's been. All of my lead characters are good men at their core—but Mack is the funniest, Clay the edgiest, and Sam the most honorable. At a bar, Mack or Clay would be good company, but Sam would pay for the beer.

All of these are available as ebooks and paperbacks, and you can find out more about them at my blog, bobsanchez1.blogspot.com. Be sure to leave a comment for a chance to win an e-copy of your choice of these books, or to win the grand prize of all three signed paperbacks.

~   ~   ~   ~   ~   ~

Click here for Bob's entire tour schedule.

WRITING PROMPT: Pick somebody you know. Make a list of his or her character qualities, life events, habits, etc. Create three different characters by emphasizing some of these over others or selecting some and eliminating or changing others.

MA

My Creative Past

As I say in my website side-bar there, right under the picture of the Pillsbury Dough-Boy's grandmother–er, I mean me–I've been making up stories for as long as I can remember. I loved having stories read to me and my grandfather used to make up cautionary tales about, say, a little squirrel who didn't look both ways before he tried to cross the street. Tv and movies were participatory activities long before Rocky Horror. How well I remember the time my mother and grandmother took wee me to the movie theater to see THE TEN COMMANDMENTS; when the Egyptian army drove ominously toward the trapped refugees and the music rose in dramatic crescendo, I stood up and shouted, "Your rod, Moses! USE YOUR ROD!"

The point is, I can't remember a time when stories were just stories. They were always templates, not documents, if you see what I mean. What if this happened instead of that? What if a character secretly had this other plan or motivation? What if the good guy were really a bad guy, or the bad guy had a soft spot for kids or….

Yes, I saved the day in a lot of those variations. I was the little girl who rode through the storm to bring the doctor to Mother's sickbed. I was the little girl who, forbidden to go help put out the prairie fire, found and extinguished the wind-carried spark that could have burned down the house. I tamed the Big Bad Wolf with kindness when we first met on my way to Grandma's and took him home as a pet.

Once my mother told me that creative writing was a career path, there was never anything else I wanted to do.

Now I do it.

Happily ever after.

Next week on Writerly Monday: passing notes out of class

WRITING PROMPT: How would your main character deal with a traditional fairy tale villain?

MA