Sarah Wynde's Blog, page 69

Gloomy Thursday

It’s a grey, gloomy day, perfect for wandering around an office, aimlessly chatting to coworkers and attending unproductive meetings in which everyone wishes it was Friday and no one gets any real work done. It’s been fifteen years since I worked in a real office and most of the time I don’t miss it, but today I could use the co-worker vibe and also the sense that hey, I made it to the office, surely that’s enough productivity for the day? Not that office days were often like that. If I was in a cubicle, I probably wouldn’t even have a chance to notice/appreciate/be depressed by the weather, because my head would be down and I’d be typing away.

But I’m not having a lot of luck focusing today. I’ve really been trying to get back into Grace. I’m so close to the end. I don’t understand why I can’t just polish it off. Seriously, word count wise, it should be a matter of days. Instead I spin my wheels, going back over and over the same scenes, trying to push my way through but instead meandering. I’m not going to put the house on the market until after I finish Grace so really, all my house efforts are pointless. Well, not pointless — just in the wrong order. If I keep this up, I’ll be living in an empty house, pacing through echoing rooms while I try to find a happy ending — even a Happy For Now ending! — for Noah and Grace. Eh, my house is probably too small for the rooms to echo much. But the pacing works.

I’ve been reading about the Snowflake method. I may try it for my next book. I’m yearning to start the next book. I’m not sure which one it will be, whether I’m going to write the next Tassamara book or Fen’s sequel, but I so want to start putting my energy into something new and inspiring, something fun and… oh. Ha. Instant writing revelation. The parts I need to write on Grace now — they’re not fun. They hurt. Noah has to confront what he’s been avoiding for so many years and so does Grace. And it’s cathartic, but hard. And that’s why I’m avoiding it so much. Ugh. All right, I need to just take the plunge and stare at those files for a while and see if I can get my fingers moving. I may have to start posting daily writing updates again for a while, trying to keep myself honest and get myself moving. But for today, staring at the file and refusing to let myself be distracted by bathrooms that need to be cleaned, laundry that needs to be done, old journals that need to be paged through, etc. etc. etc. is probably the place to start. Wish me luck!

Jasmine, maybe

The tree outside my bedroom window is in full bloom. I have no idea what it is, but it has deep green leaves and little white blooms and I imagine that it’s jasmine, even though I’ve never heard of a jasmine tree. But it smells incredible and I’ve never been able to find a description of another white flowering tree that seems to match.

I ate outside this morning, watching the bees start to buzz around the tree, admiring the bright flowers on the (evil) bougainvillea, listening to the birds, and thought, “Am I crazy? How can I let this go?” But it only took me a second to remind myself that the tree doesn’t bloom year-round, that the patio needs pressure-watching to get rid of the mold, that the pool should really be re-surfaced sometime soon, even though my new (expensive) variable-speed pool pump is doing an awesome job, and that I’m guaranteed the occasional beautiful morning in a life on the road, even if many of them wind-up being views of concrete pads and other RVs. It was reassuring.

In other news, my neighborhood is having a community garage sale on April 23rd. Ha. Or argh. I’m not sure which, really. Maybe both. Since the garage is still mostly set up for a sale, I might finish sorting the rest of the house and put stuff out for that sale. It should be a lot easier: no ads, no signs, and a semi-guaranteed customer base. But it will still be well before the time I intend to put the house on the market, so I don’t want to get rid of everything — I don’t want to be living in an empty house for months while I wait for it to sell. Can you imagine how depressing that would be? Ugh. But there’s plenty of kitchen stuff that I didn’t manage to get out and I might see if I can brave the emotional cost of the china again. And the chaos of the house is slowly but surely settling into something I can live with. Two rooms are neat and orderly, three more are only semi-chaotic, and the remaining two — my bedroom and the kitchen — are still in complete disarray, but with potential to be straightened up and acceptable sometime soon.

In yoga today, L, the yoga instructor, read a beautiful piece about non-attachment to objects. So fitting. I tried to find it online so I could post it, but she told me to google “yamas” and there’s so much info out there that I cannot find the right poem. Or prayer. Maybe it was both. Either way, it was perfectly timed.

But speaking of timing, somehow it has gotten late. Today is the start of a new writing chain, so I’d best get moving!

Garage sale highlights

I’m so glad my writing chain wasn’t very long, because there was no way I was writing yesterday. After several days of prepping for the garage sale and two days of having the garage sale, my brain was fried. The garage sale was… wow, so much crazier than I envisioned. I could not possibly have managed without the help from my dad and stepmother and C on Friday and then my friend E and R on Saturday. (R gave me the nicest birthday surprise ever and showed up in Orlando on Friday night. More on that in a bit.)

On Friday, it was impossible to walk in the garage because there was so much stuff in it. I was still trying to price things and get them out on the driveway with people crowding into the narrow corridors between tables and bins and boxes. People were lining up to ask me questions and my dad and C were selling stuff right and left.

The Legos sold in the first ten minutes, as did some Pokemon toys. Other stuff — honestly, I don’t even know. Things went. Not everything and definitely not some of the stuff that I expected to go. I guess the day of Thomas the Tank Engine is over, because that was still there end of the day Saturday. The Playmobil collectors did not show up in force, because I still have plenty of Playmobil and it was really priced very reasonably, IMO. I could definitely have done much better on eBay. A couple of the paintings or prints sold, and a couple of the frames, but there were lots of others of those left, more than I expected. I had a ton of frames, but I guess I’m the only person who buys too many picture frames, and I wasn’t my own customer! But enough stuff sold that it was definitely worth the effort for me.

Highlights: I had a big bin of Bionicles priced as a whole for $50. I’d intended to put out Ziplock bags next to it and also offer a piecemeal price, but I hadn’t gotten around to it. A small boy carrying a gallon-sized Ziplock bag with a dollar bill and some change at the bottom came up with his dad and his dad asked about the Bionicles. He started the explanation that the boy was interested but only had… but I cut him off and said to the boy, “How about if you give me all the money that’s in your bag and you fill your bag with Bionicles?” His eyes went wide and I added, “And you don’t have to close the bag, you can let it overflow.” He looked at the Bionicles and he looked at his money and he looked back at the Bionicles and he was so torn. His face screwed up in concentration. He stared at the Bionicles. He bit his lip. He thought hard. Then his dad leaned over to him and said, “That’s a very good deal,” and the boy burst out, with a fist pump of joy, “Yes! I will do it!” So, so, so cute.

On day 2, an older guy was interested in something. I truly cannot remember what. But I offered it to him for $2. Maybe it was a lantern that I’d had marked for $10? I honestly can’t remember what it was. He took it, saying “All right, that’s too good a deal to resist.” Then he asked about DVDs. I still had a few left so I pointed them out. He was, however, specifically interested in chick flicks. He told me that his girlfriend required him to show up with a chick flick on Saturday nights. I said, hmm, maybe inside, if you want one without a case. He said, yeah, he didn’t need a case. So I went inside and grabbed a DVD holder and brought it back out. Flipping through it, passing the kid movies, Harry Potter, The Future is Wild, I found My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Offered him that, asked how many he was looking for, kept flipping through, found Pride and Prejudice, the 2005 version. Promised him that this was absolutely a chick flick and that his girlfriend would love it, guaranteed. He was laughing at me, but said, okay, yes, he’d take those two movies, how much. I said, hmm, a quarter each. He said, “You are really terrible at this,” and insisted on paying me $1 each. So sweet. I hope his girlfriend loved the movies.

Later in the day, a dad and his son. I’m going to call the son maybe 12. He was pretty tall, but he still looked young. They browsed, the dad picked out some books including the Rick Riordan series and some DVDs, including Eureka’s first season. Obviously a person with excellent taste! The son was looking at a box of old computer games — Zoo Tycoon, Spore, that sort of thing. Maybe eight or ten games in the box, but old computer games require old computers. And to the best of my knowledge, no one else had even looked at the box. They’d checked out everything, drifting around, talking together, looking almost ready to leave, and the son went back to the games. He looked at them, looked at his dad, and the dad prompted him a little, with an encouraging nod. So the boy said, “How much are the games?”

“All of them?” I asked. He nodded. I tipped my head to the side and said, “What is the number that will make you go home thinking, ‘YES! I got such a deal!?'”

He said, “Um…I don’t know.”

I said, “How about three dollars?”

His eyes went wide and then he frowned a little and looked back at the box and said doubtfully, “Each?”

I said, “No, no, of course not, for the whole box.”

That was obviously a right number because his grin was huge. He looked at his dad and his dad nodded. When I went to total him up, I counted the DVDs as $1 and it turned out that R had said .50 for them (which was how I was pricing CDs) which was fine by me, but the dad insisted on paying the $1 price for them, because of the deal on the computer games. And both of them said thank you beautifully. I’m not sure how they wound up at my garage sale — I’m guessing weekend dad, but I could be wrong — but I’m so glad to think those books and DVDs and games are in a home where they will be appreciated.

Speaking of appreciated, on Friday, a woman was interested in some of my great-grandmother’s china, but she wanted–or needed–to haggle. She thought her daughter, into “vintage”, would love the dishes for her quincianara, but she couldn’t spend too much. Now, putting the china out was one of the hardest decisions to make and it mostly wound up being too hard to do. I only put out the serving platters and bowls and some tea cups and saucers, none of which I’ve ever used. My life, even now, does not offer opportunities to use three different sets of formal china, much less tea cups. The rest of it — I just couldn’t let go of it. When the house sells and I have no choice, it will get easier, I hope. Anyway, maybe the woman was just a really good negotiator, but I wound up giving her the cups, the saucers, two platters and two bowls for $14, which was literally all the money she had in her wallet. It was hard. Watching her walk away, I definitely felt pangs. But the idea that a fifteen-year-old girl is going to be thrilled — and her mother promised me that she would be — was comforting and infinitely nicer than dropping the china off in the thrift store box.

Speaking of thrift stores, at about 1PM on Saturday, it was getting hot and I was tired and we hadn’t seen any people at all for a while, I was mentally debating whether I wanted to have another garage sale in a month or so or whether I was ready to be done with the whole thing. It’s a lot of work. And day one, when there was a lot of stuff, was terrific — the money definitely made it worth it. But day two had been very slow, more about getting rid of stuff than making money. There was plenty of stuff left — tons of books, some kitchen things, some knick knacks, Christmas stuff, some toys, frames, art — but not good stuff, not the kind that makes people squeeze into an overcrowded garage.

Finally, I decided. We’d take it to the thrift store. Goodwill has a drop-off spot. We’d load it up into bins and then into the car. It would take a while. There was enough stuff that it could be three or four trips, maybe more with all the books. But my house is a complete and utter chaotic mess and another garage sale would be a lot of work again, for probably not a lot of money since so much had already sold, and I’ve got plenty to do without that. So E and I started piling stuff into bins, carefully and patiently.

A car arrived and a couple women got out. The one asked me about a lantern and I told her she could have it for a dollar. The other started looking into one of the bins that E and I had been packing. I told her that she could have anything in it for free, since we’d been getting ready to go to the thrift store. And then I looked around at all of the stuff that was left and thought, you know, whatever, we’re about to take it all to the thrift store, and offered her almost anything for free.

I made one section of one table not free and put the stuff there that I didn’t want to give away — the Playmobil, a couple prints, some things that E had been interested in, the china that was left, the crate of Bionicles — but apart from that, I waved my arm and said, “Take what you like.” Ironically, three more cars then drove up, and it turned into a whirlwind of people grabbing stuff, but the first two women, they got most of it. When they drove away, their car was stuffed to the ceiling, their laps piled high with clothes and knickknacks and kitchen things. One even stuck the box of lightbulbs that I’d had in the garage (not intending them for sale) and a box of ziplock bags on top of her pile. I let the lightbulbs go but retrieved the bags.

I think the other three cars had fun. A nice young woman picked out a bag of books. An older couple took a pet carrier and were delighted. The third car took some stuff, I’m not sure what. But the first women, they were wildfire, clearing the place out, taking everything they could as quickly as they could, and then having to make choices about what they could fit in their car. If they’d had more room, I bet they would have tried to take everything. Before they left, though, the older woman, walking by me, not looking at me, her eyes straight ahead, said, almost under her breath, so quiet that I could barely hear her, “God bless you.” I got goose bumps. I felt so, so, so blessed. So fortunate, so grateful, so lucky. To have so much that I can give it away and to have given it away to someone who found it a blessing. I’m just… it was a beautiful note on which to end the day.

And along the way, someone slipped a Cybis figurine onto the table of stuff that I was keeping. I don’t know how it wound up there. I kept some of my mom’s Cybis in the box of things that I’m going to store at my brother’s house — a madonna, a unicorn — but I’d run out of room and so let some of it go. Apparently at least one of the people at the garage sale at the end of the day didn’t want me giving that one away for free. The figure is a little girl, holding a doll. It’s named ‘Wendy’. I suspect maybe it meant more to my mom than it meant to me. And under the circumstances, I will be making room for it in my box somehow.

I will have a few trips to the thrift store in my future, or maybe to the library. I still have boxes and boxes of books left, no surprise. But I didn’t spend yesterday afternoon running back and forth. Or, for that matter, cleaning my house. Instead, I relaxed and then took R out to an absolutely fabulous dinner at a place called The Ravenous Pig. It was amazing. Best meal I’ve eaten in years, I think. The salmon appetizer (described as “King Salmon, lardo cured, fava bean panisse, plum sauce, grilled ramp”) was insanely delicious. R and I were both practically whimpering as we ate.

I had the pork porterhouse and possibly one of the highlights of a day already filled with highlights was when R, eating the part of my pork that I couldn’t finish, said, “You know, I hope you don’t take this the wrong way, but although this pork is better than your pork chops, it’s only better by such a tiny, tiny amount that it’s probably not worth the price to me. My steak, though, was the best steak I’d ever tasted. Not meaning to insult your pork chops.” I did not feel insulted. On the contrary, I was very pleased to have my pork chops compared to those of a seriously fantastic restaurant with a professional and very creative chef. The salmon appetizer, though… yeah, it was incredible.

After dinner, R and I stayed up past midnight watching X-Men movies together. There was one neither of us had ever seen and at the end of it, we questioned whether it would have been a better movie in the movie theater or whether the X-Men movie that came after it, which we had both seen, was really just a much better movie. So we watched the next movie to find out — it was a much better movie, and very fun to watch again. I should look up the names, but I feel like I’ve been writing this post forever. But it was so lovely to hang out with him and talk movies and story structure together.

World’s longest blog post! And I should probably have been writing a book or working on smoothing out the chaos of my house, which looks like a tornado spun through it. But there was so much I wanted to remember. My birthday weekend was truly the nicest birthday I’ve had in years. I’m feeling very lucky, very happy, only a little stressed by the chaos of my home (although so grateful the painters aren’t coming tomorrow) and only a little anxious about where my life is going. Life is good.

Garage Sale

My garage.

I’m getting ready for a garage sale today. So much stuff. So much stuff! It’s a strange process, deciding what you can let go of, what you can’t. Even stranger when you start getting into the question of what your belongings are worth. It’s obvious to me, at this point, that financially, I would do a lot better if I started selling all my stuff on eBay and spent as long as it took to do that. I posted an ad on Craig’s list for the sale last Sunday and the emails just started flying in. It motivated me to start looking stuff up and ugh, it’s so strange to see what stuff sells for.

The ugly Victorian pottery that’s been in my family for over a hundred years? Basically worthless. No surprise, it’s ugly. My great-grandmother’s china that I was comfortably ready to sell, believing it basically worthless? Not quite worthless. The sugar bowl and creamer sold for $20 on eBay. I suspect I’ll be lucky if I can get $10. If I tried to sell it on eBay, I’d have to list it and wait and pack it and ship it… such a hassle, and no guarantee that it’ll sell. Ah, but a new idea just struck me — I’ll try to sell it at the garage sale for reasonable prices and if it doesn’t sell, I can list it on eBay instead of giving it to the thrift shop. Perfect compromise.

Meanwhile, the Legos and Playmobil? Argh! So many people emailing me about buying them and of course they all want the bargains and they all want them now. I really hope that I don’t have people sitting outside my house at 7AM tomorrow, waiting to grab the toys out of other people’s hands. I also sort of wish I’d looked up all the eBay prices before I listed prices online. I thought I was setting fair prices — and I am, I suppose, by standards of garage sales of 30 years ago — but online auctions change the market. People know that they can sell this stuff on eBay so probably they do.

And then the books… wow, I have so many books. They’re piled up in bags under tables in my garage. There’s no room to put them anywhere else, at least not yet. I’m envisioning the Playmobil all disappearing in the first twenty minutes and then me lining the table with books. But my guess is that most of the books won’t sell. If they’re selling for .01 online, I can’t exactly undercut that price (except, of course, that all those penny books come with a $3.99 shipping charge.)

It’ll be interesting to see how it goes, anyway. Ironically, I scheduled the day because a friend wanted to bring some stuff to the sale and I knew he was going away for several weeks. As it happens, he can’t make it tomorrow. It may be a long day running it on my own. And I guess I should get back to pricing! Wish me luck.

Blogging microcosm

My parents lived in an RV for a while, shortly after they retired. The one thing I feel safe to say that I learned from them is that there’s a lot to know about RVs before one complacently heads off into the universe in one. So I’ve been looking for blogs about them. First thought: learning is such a different process today than it was twenty years ago. I know we all know that, most of us probably appreciate it on a regular basis, but seriously, so much knowledge exists at my fingertips about so many things. It’s mind-blowing.

But I found a site that’s been helpful, Hitch Up and Go, a huge list of all the blogs on RVs that have been submitted to the creators. By huge, I mean huge, at least several hundred of them. I’ve been slowly but steadily working my way though, looking at each one and then sometimes following links to other places, and it’s fascinating.

The list is like a microcosm of the blogging universe. It includes a tiny smattering of professional blogs, people who are clearly making a living via their online presence and maybe even a pretty good living. It includes a larger group of people who clearly wanted to earn money online, maybe even do, but their blogs don’t look professional and the money they’re making is probably only from sidebar ads. Then there are the active blogs, people who are writing about their lives on the road. Some of them are fascinating, some of them not so much, and some are both on consecutive days.

A fair number are very dry: listing every road they went on, every place they stopped, the people they met, without telling much in the way of stories about their experiences. But those are personal blogs, so maybe they’re saving information for themselves. Still, for a reader there’s such a difference between “We went out for dinner with Tom and Mary. The food was okay.” and “We had dinner with Tom and Mary, old friends from our days in Poughkeepsie. Tom’s retired now from his job at the bottle-cap factory but his collection of bottle caps is impressively weird. For dinner, we ate Mexican at a little place down the street. It looked like a dive, but their chips were delicious. Not so much the refried beans.” Details! Not only important details, but details that give context & meaning. I’ll try to remember this if and when I start to write about traveling — no lists of roads taken without at least trying to say why it matters.

The interesting ones, though, are the dead ones. Plenty end with an ending post, a good-bye as the former travelers settle down. Sometimes it’s sad. One woman ended her blog with the story of her husband’s death and it was heart-wrenching even though it was the first thing I’d ever read about them. But so many just sort of stop. Some day in some month, some year, they wrote a post and then… never again. Sometimes that last post is “I’m sorry it’s been so long, here’s what’s going on.” You get the idea with those that the author has gotten bored with blogging and can assume that they didn’t pick it up again. Other times, though, the post is just another day in the life and then… nothing more. I’ll never get to know what happened to that person. Since I never knew them anyway, it obviously doesn’t matter — but it’s still just an interesting experience. Blogs become books with no endings, stories that never finish. Ghost blogs.

Poor Zelda keeps sticking her cold, wet nose under my arm saying please, can’t we get up, and it’s 8:30, so she’s been incredibly patient with me. So off I go! But reading random blogs has been fun. Maybe tomorrow — or someday soon — I’ll link to the good ones that I’ve found, because there are some people having great adventures and writing entertaining tales about them out there on the internets!

April 4th

Today is my friend Michelle’s birthday. She would have been 49.

Six months before she died I wrote a eulogy for my mom. It took me weeks. In the end, I felt like I’d done it right.

A couple months later, I didn’t write — or even say anything — for my ex-father-in-law. I regretted that after his service. My experience of him was so different from those who spoke that I wished I had shared something about who he was to me, how supported and respected he made me feel. I made some decidedly alternative decisions about how I wanted to parent and of all the people around me, Malcolm — who mostly got described as curmudgeonly by the people who did speak! — was the most willing to change his own mind, not just allow me to be the parent I wanted to be, but to make me feel like he trusted my judgement.

So of course for Michelle I was determined to do it right. I couldn’t. I spoke — probably about three sentences. I said, I think, that she was the only person I’ve ever known who I felt saw me for exactly who I am, truly understood me, and loved me for it. That was all I could do.

And I’ve kept thinking that someday, someday, I would go back and write about her. Describe her. Who she was, how she was, what made her so special. Her creativity, her imagination, her acceptance, her grace. Write something that expressed how much I love her, how much she changed my life, how desperately I miss her. How wrong it is that the world doesn’t have her in it anymore and how even more wrong it is that so much of her life was stolen from her by her illnesses. I want to remember her wonder as we explored Europe together, her pleasure at lying in a flowery field in the sunshine in Greece, our shared amusement at the vagaries of travel, and I want to forget her despair and depression and the slow eroding of her abilities as the tumor ate her brain. And I suppose in some way I’m doing that right now, but it’s not good enough. It’s never good enough.

Someday I’ll find the words.

Today though, I’m going to stop crying and get something useful done. I’m going to write some Grace and do some laundry and keep getting ready for a garage sale (so much work!) and I’m going to appreciate the sunshine if I get a chance to, which I hope I will.

And meanwhile… Happy Birthday, Michelle.

March 31st

I am trying not to beat myself up about the fact that I’ve reached the end of another month and still not finished Grace. If you’d told me this would happen at the end of November, I would have given up. Quit writing, started looking for a real job… maybe I could become a paralegal. That’s always sounded sort of interesting. Or sell insurance? That’s never sounded interesting, but maybe I’d be good at it.

My friend E thinks I should quit beating myself up in general. Not just about writing but about ALL the things. I ate gluten last week at Universal because I was at that stage of sugar-crashing where I could feel myself turning mean. We were getting rained on and the lines were long and I needed to eat ASAP, so I had a chocolate muffin because it was expedient. Later, since I’d already eaten gluten and not particularly enjoyed it, I had pizza. Might as well go for broke. However, broke(n) is how I’ve felt all week. Like I’m coming down with the flu. I’ve had a load of laundry in the dryer for two days and the thought of folding it just seems so overwhelmingly exhausting. Yep, gluten-reaction. I know it’ll happen, and yet I eat the gluten anyway. And before I start being mean to myself and/or whining about that, I’ll stop. I should start feeling better tomorrow, so yay, something to look forward to.

Forty-five minutes ago, when I was walking the dogs on a truly beautiful morning — the sun was rising, the sky was streaked with gorgeous deep pink clouds and a half-moon was still brightly white in the deeper blue sky — I had so many things I wanted to write about. Packing and traveling and memories of the past, books I’m reading, choices I’m making, so many thoughts overflowing my brain. Now that I’m sitting down at the computer, not so much. So maybe I’ll open my most recent file on Grace and stare blankly at it, instead. Yesterday’s writing was definitely progress — probably not quite enough momentum to push me all the way through my rewrites, but I’m getting there, I hope.

First, though, I’ll tag this post “boring.” Sorry!

Sophia

I took the weekend off — yes, my chain is broken and I start it anew today. I have no regrets. My house had hit a place of chaos that was becoming unlivable for me and it was stressing me out. Stuff everywhere. I should post a picture of my coffee table, except that it’s so much better than it was that it wouldn’t accurately represent the chaos.

Instead, how about a picture of a dragon?

On Friday, I took my niece to Universal. She, unfortunately, is not in a phase where she likes roller coasters and the Universal Parks are very roller-coaster centric, so we mostly just wandered, but we had a good time. We watched a couple shows, including the singers in Diagon Alley and the animal training show. During the latter, she leaned over to me and said, “I am completely and utterly happy,” so score, she had at least a few good moments. Her mom has been sick, so her spring break was not the imagined ideal of vacation time. A fire-breathing dragon can’t make up for that entirely, but it’s impressive nonetheless. (It really does breathe fire. You can feel the heat of it on the street below!)

But this morning I was walking the dogs and thinking about Grace and getting back into it and where I was going and I realized again that Sophia is my problem. Some characters are just really determined to steal the show and she is one of them.

With Ghosts, very, very, very belatedly (last fall if you were reading then!), I realized that I did indeed have a classic hero’s journey plot, but it was Dillon’s, not Akira’s. Akira was the mentor character. And this is Ghosts, not Thought, which was much more obviously Dillon’s story. With Grace, I realized on some revision that yes, it wanted to be Dillon’s story again. Maybe that was the third revision? On the fourth, I gave Sophia more story. Now that I’m on the fifth (I think, unless this is the sixth), it’s obvious that she’s not satisfied with what she’s got — she wants even more.

It’s strange: I realize none of you know her yet, so you can’t know what she’s like. But… hmm, an excerpt? Okay, here’s her intro. This is from the first chapter, so it’s not exactly a spoiler, but stop reading if you don’t want to know anything until the book is in your hands (or on your Kindle).

*****

A soldier in desert camouflage was leaning against the same wall. He was young, tan, brown hair cropped short, and he looked solid, just like a living person, but Dillon was almost positive that he was a ghost. Next to him, a woman in a long dark robe, her hair covered by a tight scarf, crouched by a small boy in a blue-and-white striped t-shirt. They had to be ghosts, too, and the teenage girl with a nose ring sprawled across a bench, ignoring the men on whose laps her body rested, was definitely a ghost. Around everyone, cloudy wisps of white light bobbed and floated in the air.

Had all these people died in the courthouse? Dillon paused a careful distance away from any of the ghosts. Two of the living people walked through him, their heads bent together, their conversation low-voiced, indistinguishable in the ambient echoes and sounds of the hallway.

The soldier spotted him. “Hey,” he said, straightening. “Welcome to the party.”

The girl on the bench sat up. She stared at Dillon, her gaze accusing. “Who are you?”

The scrubbing woman lifted her head to look at him. “Oh dear, oh dear,” she mumbled before bending back to her work. “This floor will never get clean if people keep walking on it.”

“Um, hi.” Dillon gave a tentative wave in the direction of the bench. “I’m Dillon.”

The soldier pointed at himself, the woman in the robe, the boy, the teenage girl, the man in the apron, and the cleaning woman. “Joe, Nadira, Misam, Sophia, Chaupi, and Mona. Don’t worry about the others.” He waved a hand through a ball of light drifting near his face, then gestured toward the woman in the long dress and the man who paced. “She sings and he rants and some of the others say stuff once in a while, but they don’t talk to us.” His smile was friendly and his tone matter-of-fact. He seemed welcoming, but not unduly excited.

He must never have met any dangerous ghosts. Dillon hadn’t been so lucky.

But he said, “It’s nice to meet you all,” and glanced from face to face, trying to connect each of the names to its owner. If he had it right, the woman in the robe was Nadira and the little boy was Misam. From their closeness and their matching dark eyes, Dillon suspected they were mother and son.

Sophia, the girl with the nose ring, didn’t look related. She was perched on the bench, hands tucked around the edge as if gripping it, gaze intent on Dillon. With wrists like toothpicks and collarbones jutting forth from thin shoulders, she reminded him of a fledgling bird.

“Hey, you, too.” Joe gave him an easy smile. “The more the merrier, right?”

Dillon wasn’t so sure about that. But Joe’s smile was hard to resist and none of the ghosts seemed threatening, not even the nameless pacing man, so he stepped closer.

His mom was back on her cell phone, talking to his dad. Her presence wasn’t reassuring, exactly—it wasn’t like she could do anything if these ghosts were trouble—but it was comforting to know that he could communicate with her if he needed to.

“So what are you all doing here?” Dillon asked. “Is this where you died?”

Sophia snorted. “Here? With all those metal detectors at the entrance? What do you think, mass poisoning? Bomb?” She rolled her eyes and flopped back down across the laps of the men sitting on the bench.

*****

Posting this makes me want to write, so I’m going back to Grace. But as I head back into the thicket of the middle (yet again!), I’m going to be trying to untangle Sophia’s threads from the rest of the story. If I know where she is going, I think I’ll know how to get to where the story is going. It’s not her story, but her threads are a big part of my current knot, I think. Here’s hoping that insight gives me what I need to make great progress this week!

Cleaning Out

My plan for the day was just to get my house in order. No worrying about writing, other people, getting out of the house, doing anything except clearing up the supremely gigantic mess that has been made of my house over the past two weeks.

It’s now 1PM and I’m feeling like maybe that was an overly ambitious plan. And maybe I should go back to stressing myself out about writing instead, because it’d be easier. Or maybe I should just go back to bed.

It’s strange to drag all of your past out into the light and examine it. Trying to decide what to keep, what should go, what matters, what doesn’t. We have, of course, many DVDs. Not an atypical number, I don’t think, but an assortment. I’ve got four complete seasons of the Simpsons. Keep or sell or discard? My first impulse was keep, of course, because R loved them, but I easily managed to over-ride that impulse. They’re out for the garage sale now and if they don’t sell, they can go to Goodwill. The Sixth Sense. I loved that movie. That DVD goes into a “maybe I’ll watch this again before I decide” pile. Star Wars, Lord of the Rings… garage sale. But the cleaning issue is that every single solitary thing has to get thought about. And with a lot of things, spread everywhere, all that thinking adds up.

Some of the decisions go with the writing that’s connected to my marriage. I spent an hour today reading the journal where I fell in love with my ex. At the end, I threw it in my bedroom trash can. Did I pick the bedroom so that I could change my mind and pull it out in a few hours without worrying about coffee grounds or other ickiness on it? Yeah, I think so. Am I going to? Probably not. If it was filled with happiness, I might, but it wasn’t. The seeds of doom were planted early in that relationship and in retrospect, they were pretty obvious, even that first year.

Yesterday I spent an hour reading another journal, the one from our first break-up. Oh, I wish I could go back in time and yell at my former self. There’s one particular section where I’m agonizing about why he doesn’t trust me and I just wanted to slap myself. I almost saw it, so close, so damn close! He had accused me of reading a letter that he’d left in the room and my feelings were hurt. Why would he think I would do something like that? I would never. Around and around and around about what it meant that he didn’t trust me and never once did I stop to think, “Maybe it means that he is not trustworthy.” Came close once, when I questioned what he was writing that he was worried about me seeing, but if only I’d taken that thought just a little farther. Ugh. And sadly, that was before I married him. If only…

But this isn’t either getting my house clean or getting my words on Grace in, so I should move on. Last week three houses in my neighborhood had sales pending. This week, all three of those sales have fallen through. That probably means that they didn’t get appraised at the prices that people were willing to pay (I think) so the market is heating up but the banks may not be on board yet. Alas. But that’s okay. I keep reminding myself that I don’t have to be in a rush, and I don’t, but I’d really like to move on to the fun part of this big adventure instead of wallowing in the hard part.

I’ll get there, though. And meanwhile, the pile labelled “watch/read before deciding” is big enough to keep me busy for weeks.

Stuff, stuff, and more stuff

I used to think I was sort of minimalist in what I owned. My house, compared to many others I’ve seen, has far too many books but not otherwise a lot of clutter. I had entire rooms that I thought were close to empty. A guest room with nothing in it but a few chairs and lamps. A front room with a chair, a footstool, and three bookcases. The living room with a couch, a chair, a daybed, a dresser-like television stand and a television. Seriously, not much stuff.

Oh, I was so wrong. My house is overflowing with stuff. Stuff, stuff, and more stuff.

I’m trying to balance my competing needs — to take my time looking through it and to get rid of it all as quickly and painlessly as possible. To save what I value but not get bogged down in owning (or being owned by) a lot of things. To respect my past but not wallow in it.

A long time ago, I threw away my high school yearbooks because I didn’t imagine I would ever care. I’ve regretted it since. I don’t want to figuratively do that again, but at the same time, if I owned those yearbooks right now, they would so be going in the trash. I’m trying to cut down the memorabilia to only what will fit inside my mother’s cedar chest and it is requiring me to be ruthless. R has these big thick binders, portfolios, from all of his early school years. So much art, so many stories. Math worksheets, science projects, records of field trips, photos, mementos. So much stuff! Meanwhile, I’ve got letters. I found an envelope with all the letters that R’s dad wrote to me during a year we were separated. Ugh. I’m not sure I want to read them, but I’m also not sure I want to throw them away. Letters from friends, journals from all the years that I wrote journals, baby books, high school awards, scrapbooks, photos, photos and more photos.

Being ruthless is not so easy.

However, I woke up joyful this morning and that was fun. Not joyful about cleaning out the house or the big adventure, but joyful because yesterday, while driving home from Sarasota, I figured out why I’m stuck on Grace. It means going back, but not all the way back, and — much more importantly — it means I see my way forward again. Two weeks ago I would have been so annoyed with myself at the thought of going back at all, but after days of grinding my wheels, being stuck in the mud, I’m just delighted that I’ve got an idea that might bring some movement. Yesterday, in fact, I gave myself permission to not write — it’s been a long week and I was wiped out after spending the day driving to Sarasota and back — but before I went to bed, I wrote a few sentences anyway, because I wanted to write. Wanting to write is such a good feeling!

Tomorrow I’m taking my niece to Universal and then after that spring break is over and I’ll be able to really buckle down and get back to work again. In between throwing away letters and journals and beloved books, that is.