Adventures in Writing, part 1

After way too long, it was time for me to write again and I had no ideas. None. I couldn't even dredge up any of my old familiar standby characters for a good romp or a kill. Or both. How lame could I possibly be? How defective am I?

The timer ticked on. Never mind that it was digital and didn't actually TICK. I could hear it. Deep inside my brain, I could hear it. Stupid brain. Apparently, I was more defective than I thought.

Pulling back from my laptop, I glared at the blinking cursor on the blank page. Evil little fucker. Why must it mock me so?

There was only one thing I could do. Drink. I could drink brandy -- What the hell?! I always seem to be out of scotch and whiskey. -- or I could drink tea. A glance at the clock reminded it me that it was only a little after 10am. Maybe tea would be the better the choice.

Fifteen minutes later, a warm cup of tea in my hands, I closed my eyes and let myself drift. Somewhere in the depths of my mind were characters and story ideas. Clearly I'd just forgotten how to access them, to summon them. I let the sharp aroma of my tea carry me deeper into the recesses of the twisted maze that is my mind. I knocked away cobwebs in areas not accessed for far too long. I felt like an explorer, only less mobile and a lot more appalled. When the hell did I last use my brain?

I pushed deeper, past thicker cobwebs with strange creatures and ideas both trapped in the cobwebs and scurrying past them. I'm fairly certain I don't want to know what the fuzzy thing that just ran over my foot was. Not today, anyway. I cringed at the layers of dust and grime covering every surface. No wonder I have headaches. My brain is corroding from lack of use.

I'd vaguely recognized some of the ideas I often let roam free trapped in the cobwebs, but only a few of them. Where were the rest? Where were all my characters?

I screamed and called out them, hoping they'd hear me, hoping they'd come to me. They didn't. I pushed onward with loud apologies for neglecting them, promises to not let it happen again, and pleas for help. All I got in return was that damned ticking, more dust and grime, and thicker cobwebs.

I continued onward until, finally, sighing in defeat, I sank to my knees on a pile of dust -- dear God, I hope that's just dust and not the remains of a character that died from neglect -- and cradled my head in my hands. Feeling abandoned, disheartened, and hopelessly lost, I started to cry.

Abandoned. My characters had every right to abandon me. This was my fault. There was no way around that. I had created a fantastic world for them and then let it fall to ruins from lack of attention. I had ignored and neglected a part of me that I very dearly loved and it had withered and died.

And I didn't know how to fix it.

So, I cried.

I cried hard and loud, but not out of self-pity. I cried in mourning for all I had created then destroyed with my carelessness. I cried hot tears of self-loathing. I didn't deserve to be the creator of such fantastic people and places. I couldn't care for them properly. I cried tiny rivers, which flowed over my cheeks and fell to the floor to mix with the dust beneath my knees, making small puddles of mud. I cried with body-wrenching sobs until I was exhausted. And then I slept; slept in the mud of my own making, completely unaware of the changes happening around me.


=========

Love and bondage,
Rubi Jayne <3<3

snippet #004

Happy New Year. I had great plans for the #JournalingGame prompt "nothing separating us but skin"... and then a friend landed in the hospital with a heart attack and my assassin threw a temper tantrum then took over my brain. It sucks. It's crapdraft quality. But, hey, look! I wrote something! Ta-da.

=========

My dearest,

You're so far from me now, but soon that will change. Soon you'll be by my side, in my arms, again. The waiting is torture.

I'm eager to kiss you - your lips, your eyelids, your cheeks, your chin, your neck, your whole body. I want to run my fingers through your hair and nibble on your shoulders right where it makes you tremble and exhale those low moans I love so much. I want to undress you, covering each bit of exposed skin with nibbling kisses, worshiping the heavenly gift that you are. I want to touch and taste every part of you until you're writhing and aching for me as much as I ache for you. Then I want to get closer to you until there's nothing separating us but skin, and even that feels like it's searing away under the heat of our passion.

Come home soon, love. I'm waiting for you. I miss you.

Yours. Always.


Ophelia sprinkled pounce over the parchment and leaned back in her chair. Her gaze drifted across the dimly lit dungeon to the limp figure of a man hanging on her wall. He was responsible for Shadow being gone.

After a long, thoughtful moment, the assassin tapped the pounce back into its pot and sealed the letter to her husband. She looked at the man on the wall again. "You will tell me where he is, you know. It's just a matter of time. You'll either tell me or I'll rip it out of your mind." She smiled coldly when she stood and walked to him to tap him on the chest. "And trust me when I tell you that's not the option you want to choose."

A girlish giggle came from the darkest corner of the dungeon. "The last person she did that to..." Ophelia's sister, Fay, emerged from the darkness and more gleeful giggling echoed off the stone walls. "I've never seen a human body do that and I've seen it all, baby. I want to see it again."

Both girls looked at the man shackled and hanging against the wall of Ophelia's dungeon, the man responsible for her husband's disappearance. Both girls flashed cold, dark, sinister grins. Somebody was about to have a very, very bad day.

=========

Love and bondage,
Rubi Jayne <3<3

My NaNo2009 experience in a nutshell

What prompted this post is an email I read this afternoon. It's time stamped two days ago (I haven't really had time to READ my mail, just skim through every few days for important notices & such) and tells me, at length, how pathetic and what a loser I am for not completing NaNo again this year.

Awesome. Good to hear from you. *delete*

How that email came about is that sometime in the later half of November (I don't remember the date, exactly, and not in a place where I could look it up right now) I got into a very short but heated argument with an author I'm acquainted with online. She's the published author of a couple of e-books and, if I'm not mistaken, at least one story in print. I only know her online, and don't even know that much about her. At best, we're acquaintances. At worst, we're strangers that occasionally bump into one another in writing communities online.

She caught me online one night and chastised me for not updating my NaNo word count. I explained that it hadn't been updated because I hadn't written anything beyond where it was at that time, that life had gotten more than a little hectic and I just hadn't had the time. And, without warning, that's when she took me to the mat. She told me that I was making excuses again, that other people manage to juggle life and writing, and that in the time she's known me (not quite 3 years) all I ever did was make excuses for why I didn't write.

I sat staring at the messages popping up on my screen, just one thought my mind. "What. The. Fuck." I didn't respond right away, very simply because I didn't know what to say. She, however, had plenty to say.

There were a lot of short, rapid-fire messages from her and, to sum it up, she went on to tell me that she no longer wanted to hear from me because I obviously wasn't serious about writing and she didn't have time for pretenders. She let me know that I would never be published, that I would never be successful, and that I should stop wasting people's time by bothering them when I had no intention of actively pursuing a writing career. She told me that I had to be willing to make the hard choices and make the sacrifices and do whatever it takes to make time to write because nothing was more important than that.

And that's about when I snapped. I wasn't nice in my response. I was downright bitchy. I basically told her to go her merry way, told where she could stick her judgments of me, and gave some explicit instructions on how to use them. I signed off without waiting for a response and cried myself to sleep.

Ok, so maybe it wasn't really an ARGUMENT so much as a verbal whipping and some heated lashing back and virtual stomping off. Still...

I know that I should be ashamed for my behaviour that night, but in all honesty, I'm not. I can't bring myself to be. I'm not sure yet how I feel about that, but now that the chaos in my life is starting to settle (or maybe I'm just juggling betting these days), I'll have some time to think about it.

What I do know is that NaNo is supposed to be fun. FUN. It's not some writer's rite of passage. It's not mandatory for publication. It's not even mandatory participation. It's voluntary, and it's supposed to be fun. It's about the companionship of getting together with local writers you didn't know existed. It's about meeting people. It's about sharing the experience.

Unfortunately, November is a REALLY bad month for me to try to add social activities AND extra word count to my calendar. It's hard enough trying to add just one of those to my calendar in the last three months of the year. My life starts exploding into flurries of chaos right around the middle of October every year and doesn't stop until mid-January. It's been like that for the past 20 years and this year was even worse.

I went into NaNo 2009 knowing that I needed to be done by the 21st, or at the very least be within 8k of being done by that day. Pure and simple. I HAD to be done by then in order to set up and cook for Thanksgiving. There would be no writing on the days immediately preceding Thanksgiving because I'd be shopping and cooking and generally preparing for the gathering of family. There was also my birthday to deal with and, thanks to my husband's travel plans in December, I had to jump on Christmas preparations before Thanksgiving even arrived. I had it all worked out. I started planning everything back in October.

What I didn't expect was that during the second week of November, my 91-year-old grandfather would be diagnosed with cancer (again) and told he had to start treatment right away because it was already so dangerously progressed. My mother couldn't take the time off from work to take him to the 32 daily radiation therapy sessions the doctor said my grandfather needed. My aunt (the one that lives with my grandparents) couldn't... wouldn't... whatever... do it. My other aunt lives in another city. There is no one else.

When presented with the options of letting the side of my 91-year-old grandfather's face and jaw be, literally, eaten by cancer or writing, it wasn't even a hard choice. There ARE some things more important than writing, and anyone that says otherwise is a damned fool.

My mom fought me on my choice at first. She said I shouldn't have to drive in to take him to the doctor. No, I shouldn't. But since no one else could or would, I would. And I do. Daily. Well, almost daily. Mom takes one day off a week and she takes him on those days, and she has vacation coming up.

It's a minimum 40 minute drive from my apartment to my grandfather's house. One way. In the morning, depending on the traffic and weather conditions, it's closer to 65 minutes. It's roughly an hour for my grandfather's appointment, including the travel time from his house to the radiation center and back. Most days it doesn't take quite that long. Some days it takes longer. Then I have the drive home.

That three hours or so I'm using to take my grandfather to get his face cooked is all of my allotted writing time in a day. And that's if... IF... I don't actually spend any time with my grandparents. If I just pick them up, go to the radiation center, then drop them back off at their house. If I actually spend any time with them, I pretty much don't get anything else done for the day. And, in all honesty, I have to say it's worth it, even on bad days when my grandmother can't remember what was said three minutes prior and is being verbally abusive and generally nasty to everyone around her. It won't be too much longer before she doesn't even know who I am or before they're both dead. Not many 40-year-olds can say they still have grandparents who are alive.

I also didn't expect my cousin's troubles to eat up more than a few hours of my time, and I'm not even directly involved in that chaos. Yet. The whole mess is still eating up my mother's weekends. And I can't even start thinking about what it will bring in the next 5 months or the 9 or so months after that. My head will explode.

I didn't expect a lot of the chaos that happened in November. Maybe I should have.

But then again, maybe not. I'm only human.

And, apparently, a pretty pathetic and useless one at that. Because I only wrote 11k and change this year for NaNoWriMo.

Awesome. Just... fucking awesome.

Love and bondage,
Rubi Jayne <3<3

snippet #003

The prompt was “Then, hand in hand, they went out onto the balcony to meet the dawn.” for the #Journaling Game.

With summer chaos in full-swing, I didn't have much time to dedicate to this one, but I'm happy with the way it came out. It's very raw, very rough, so very first draft quality. Eventually I'll polish it and expand it. When I do, it'll probably end up on the blue (non-sex/YA/safe-for-my-child-to-read) side of my writing.

Also, I don't normally do vampire stories, but the prompt just begged for it.

=========

"I can't kill you, Nadia. I mean, I could, but I don't want to."

Nadia quirked her lips into a hint of a smile and whispered, "Ditto, Lea."

Leander shook his head and chuckled. "After one hundred and ninety-four ye--"

"Seven," Nadia interjected.

"Seven?"

Nadia nodded. "One hundred and ninety-seven years."

Leander frowned. "Are you sure?"

It was Nadia's turn to chuckle. "Yeah, I'm sure. You turned me outside of Petrograd in the spring of 1812."

He frowned deeper, calculating in his head. "One hundred and ninety-four."

Nadia shook her head and sighed. "You never could count. Trust me on this one, my love, it's one-hundred and ninety-seven." She flashed him a charming smile. "A girl may lie about how old she is, but she never forgets."

"Ok, ok. So one hundred and ninety-seven years together, and this is what it comes to." He tipped his head thoughtfully. "What did they offer you?"

Nadia laid her sword on the coffee table and curled into her favorite chair. “If I kill you, I get to live.”

Leander nodded and tossed his machete on the table, dropping onto the couch. “Ditto.” He sighed and ran a hand over his bare scalp. “So, what do we do, Nadia?”

“I don’t know, my love. There aren’t many options open to us, are there?”

“Not really.”

Nadia bowed her head and listened to the minutes tick before uncurling herself from her chair. "If we run, they'll hunt us." She eased on the couch next to him.

Leander wrapped an arm around Nadia and cuddled her close to his side. “They will.”

Snuggling into his embrace, Nadia laid her head on his shoulder. “They want one of us dead.”

“Or both of us.”

Nadia sat still and silent for several minutes before she whispered in agreement, “Or both of us.”

Leander nodded and nuzzled into her hair, murmuring, “Truth be told, my sweet, I’d rather die than continue without you.”

Nadia nodded gently. “Ditto, my love.”

The pair sat holding each other in silence for half an hour before Leander sighed. “Is that the answer then?”

Nadia whispered, “As much as I hate to admit it, yeah, I think so. We either take the matter into our own hands or wait for them to find us.”

“If we make them hunt us, they won’t end it quickly. They’ll take some fun out of us before they kill us.”

Nadia shuddered, her whisper little more than a growl. “I’d rather not give them the satisfaction.”

“Ditto," Leander muttered, pulling her closer to his side.

***

Leander caressed Nadia's cheek and whispered, "It's time, my sweet."

Nadia squinted at the light of the morning sun coming through the open french doors. Barely nodding, she whispered with a tremor in her voice. "I'm scared."

Leander wrapped an arm around her and pulled her close, brushing his lips across her forehead. "I know."

"There's no other way..."

He shook his head. "There's no other way." Turning her face toward him with a finger on her chin, he looked into the watery dark eyes that had captivated him nearly two hundred years earlier. "I wish there were. I promised you eternity. I'm sorry I wasn't able to give it to you."

A tear slipped from each eye when Nadia blinked. "Oh, no, Leander, don't be." She reached up to cup his stubbled jaw in her hand. "You gave me more years than I could have hoped for."

Leander leaned close and savored a tender taste of her lips, then wrapped her in his arms. The little kiss bloomed, growing deeper but remaining slow and tender, until it became what it was intended to be: one last kiss.

Tears streaked Nadia's cheeks when they pulled apart and laced their fingers together. Then, hand in hand, they went out onto the balcony to meet the dawn.


=========
Love and bondage,
Rubi Jayne <3<3