Averil Dean's Blog, page 9

Dipping

Let’s talk about you:

Where’s the farthest you have been from home? If you could return to another point in your lifetime and start again from there, where would you go? Have you ever been skinny-dipping? When’s the last time you lost your temper, and do you regret it now? Tell me one secret. Tell me one lie.

Spiral

Over the weekend I took a look through all the writing projects I’ve started and abandoned over the past couple of years. There are so many. Short stories and first chapters and failed attempts at poetry. Scenes and parts of scenes. Outlines, character sketches, intriguing settings and strange milieus. So many files, so many spiral notebooks. Such a monumental mess.

Part of what’s happened, I think, is that along the way I’ve lost confidence in my own judgment. I’ll get a short way into a ne...

The Donald Chronicles

A new chapter this week in the Chronicles: people are starting to say out loud that the Republican nominee for President of the United States might actually be crazy. Not crazy as in zany, ha-ha, or crazy like a fox, or politically incorrect or imprudent or what have you, but crazy as in, Holy shit, this country might be about to elect a sociopath.

It’s an opinion that has crept upon us slowly, in part because it sounds so hyperbolic. You tell the other guy his party’s nominee may have some...

French Vegetable Soup

Soup therapy. Is that a thing? Can we agree that it should be? If so, may I suggest this recipe, with the idea that lots of therapeutic chopping followed by a long, slow cooking process is a pretty good cure for whatever ails you–unless you’re trying to make this on a Monday night after work, in which case these qualities will have the exact opposite effect.

Anyway, if the soup doesn’t work, you can always watch a Trump stump speech and play a drinking game around the number of times he says,...

Daddy Issues

Holy moly, what a show we’re having in the U.S. We’ve got idiots left and (mostly) right, with a racist, know-nothing carnival barker playing to the rubes and a know-all history maker with decades of both service and scandal behind her, and millions of Americans suddenly acting like our once beloved country is some third-world hellhole that can’t be improved except by installing this sociopathic blowhard who bellows from the podium, “I alone can fix this,” who invites a foreign government to...

Camo

Saturday night, my husband and I went out for dinner and ended up afterward at a dive bar about half a mile from home. It was karaoke night (actually, every night is karaoke night according to the misspelled sign out front), and there was no shortage of performers. One chick got up and muttered the lyrics to some Taylor Swift revenge song; a balding hipster tried on Wonderwall. The woman operating the computer filled the gaps with standard drinking songs (Linda Ronstadt, Jimmy Buffett), and s...

Cowboy

Last month I took a new job managing a start-up physical therapy clinic. I’ll admit the word “manage” is a little bit tongue-in-cheek at this point, since I’m the only employee for the only provider and a busy day would have us seeing about five patients. I’m sure it won’t take us long to build a full schedule, but for now I often have the place to myself and spend a good bit of time writing, when I’m not gazing out the window at the playground across the parking lot, sucking on dum-dums from...

Kittens

Derring-do. Photo by Vivian Maier.

Well, hello. I’m very glad you’re here. It’s been nineteen months since I’ve posted (shades of AA), and it saddens me to report that I’ve accomplished fuck-all in the interim. I’ve completed nothing new, have made no breakthroughs, performed no feats of derring-do. No tightropes walked, no kittens rescued from the elms. I’m boring as hell, as you may or may not remember.

Yes, I hear you saying. I remember.

I’ve been trying to think of an appropriate explanat...

junk & cherry

Hello, stranger. It’s so nice to see you. I hope you’re doing well, writing lots of lovely words and whatnot. I’ve been doing the same, and am continuing to push forward on my WIP with the hope that I’ll have another book finished within the next few months.

I’m only popping in now to say that I’ve started a new blog called junk & cherry. It’s a busy, non-linear sort of space where I can collect inspiration for my writing and tell stories about the people I meet—working-class people, most of...

The End

Here we are again. Only a few squares left on the calendar, a couple of pots of coffee, two more rounds of ‘good morning’ at the office and this year will belong to the past. I was thinking of where we were last year. Knocking back shots of tequila, if memory serves, to celebrate the release of my first (well, first bookstore) novel. We were playing Truth or Dare, remember? Me asking inappropriate questions, you trying to get out of answering them. Good times. The year before, I spent New Yea...