Days One Hundred and Seven to One Hundred and Sixteen: Waaaay Too Much Stress

Day 107: So, I've had a story idea at the back of my mind since the fall of 2004 and never got around to doing anything with it. It's one of the weirder ideas I've ever had, and I do intend to link this blog to it when I'm finished, but to explain anything more about it right now would totally ruin the ending. I call it "GWIHH" for short. Each of those letters stands for a word, but the phrase is, again, a spoiler for the end of the story, so I won't tell you what it means. Anyway, GWIHH never really happened. I tried pecking away at bits and pieces over the years. I even tried a draft of it for 13 Days of Halloween last year, because while it isn't necessarily scary, it's definitely weird and a little eerie. But no luck. Anyway, something I read online stirred the memory in me, and I ended up writing a completely new scene that kind of gave the characters a backstory and made for a more interesting opening. Here's a snippet:

Headmaster Jenkins had contacted Edward's father about doing some restorations on a rare antique chair. When he came to the store to pick it up, he and Edward's father appeared in the back room only to find - to Mr. Jeffries' utter horror - Edward sitting on the chair, oblivious to all else, eyes flitting fast across the pages of a book.

Mr. Jeffries nearly couldn't breathe he was so angry. His face got all red and splotchy and he couldn't form proper sentences and Edward was so confused as to what was going on that he set the book aside and stood up and offered to get his father a glass of water. Headmaster Jenkins must have been too intrigued to express what Edward would later discover to be his normal boiling rage.

"Why were you sitting in that chair, boy?" he asked in his calm, strange tones.

Edward blinked at him like he was stupid.

"Chairs are made to be sat on."

Headmaster Jenkins' mouth nearly flickered from its normal straight line into a smile. Nearly.

"But surely," he continued, "You are furniture people. And furniture people know that a chair such as this is not just any chair."

"A chair is a chair," Edward said, not liking the way this man spoke, so slow and low, like he was doing you the favor of letting you in on a secret. "And a book is a book. And I'm much more interested in books, thank you. Besides, I'm not furniture people. They are." He nodded toward his father and the open door beyond, where one of his uncles was evident standing with a customer and a lamp.

Day 108: This...

It seems like I write a haiku
When I don't know what else I should do.
Too tired, too stressed -
Ah, you've heard all the rest.
It's kind of a cop-out, that's true.

And so I'll write limericks instead
With words I just pluck from my head.
Not much better, I know,
But it's something, and so
With that done I'm now going to bed.

Day 109 - 110: STRESS... Okay, so this should not have been stressful. I agreed to make a video advertising Summer Reading events at the library for Tweens (Ages 10-12) and Teens (Ages 13-18) so that people from our library could take them out to schools and have Media Specialists at the schools show them to kids. It's pretty standard stuff from a video-making perspective, but there were a couple problems: (1) I'm used to working in the video editing programs on my Mac computer at home, which are unbelievably user-friendly and have a lot of shortcuts so things don't take too long to accomplish. But since this was for work, I had to do it on the PC at work in Powerpoint, then figure out how to adapt the Powerpoint presentation into a video that could be burned onto a DVD. This takes time (since you have to do a lot of things the long way) and (2) It takes focus. Doing this at work while I was also supposed to be doing about twelve other things, including the main part of my job description, which is helping people find books, reshelving, etc... well, it was a miracle I managed to get ONE of the two DVDs done in those 2 days. Technically it was three, because most of my Day 111 was spent finishing the Teen DVD....

Day 111: So I finally finish one DVD on the day when I was supposed to have two ready. I'm stressed out at this point, especially since I'm nearing the end of an 8 hour shift, when my boss (who isn't really involved at all in this project; I'm doing it for someone in a completely different department, so really she shouldn't be sticking her nose in my business) comes over and says she wants to look at the DVD and give me feedback on things I can change. This was about forty-five minutes before it was time to go home for the day, the last day the library would be open before Easter weekend. They needed the DVD the following Monday morning. So she sits down and watches it and comes up with this list of things for me to change, and it's waaaaaay too much to do in 45 freaking minutes. And they're the sort of things that aren't even really important content kind of feedback. It's all stuff that's more a personal-aesthetic kind of decision. So at this point I had to choose between yelling at her or bursting into tears, and I did the latter. It made her feel so bad that she ended up shelving all the books that had amassed on my cart while I was desperately trying to finish the DVD.

BUT... all that being said, the DVD is not my Good Madness for the day. Instead, on my way home I wrote this song in honor of my boss and the way she made me feel:



Day 112: Even though I fully intended to finish the DVDs over the weekend, I needed at least one day away from that insanity to regain a little composure. So I went and hung out with Melissa instead. I got to meet the adorable new kitten Zoe and we had a crafty afternoon, during which I made this picture:



But something about the girl under the tree just didn't seem right to me, so when I got home I ended up cutting out a new figure, so the most recent draft looks like this:



Day 113: Ok, so today I finally sat down and got to work. I worked at home (And got paid to do it! Probably part of Shelley feeling bad about making me cry...) and finished both videos. The sad thing is that all that ridiculous stress was over about four minutes of actual video.

Here's the Teen Summer Reading video:



Here's the Tween one:



Day 114: I watched Amanda Palmer, Ben Folds, Neil Gaiman, and Damian Kulash (of OK Go) lock themselves in a studio for 8 hours and try to write 8 songs. For some reason, this made me feel like creating something unlikely, so while I watched them I made a teacup out of Post-It notes:



I even tried to drink out of it, but it kind of dissolved after the first sip:



Day 115: I started humming and liked the random melody that came, so I recorded it and came up with some harmonies. Here's the "Hum Song" that resulted.



Day 116: It was Dad's 60th birthday, so I decorated the guitar in his honor. Sadly, I don't have a picture but I will update when I get one.

Days Ninety Two to One Hundred and Six: AKA, It's Been A While

Day 92: I made the April-themed bulletin board in the picture book section of the library. No picture, unfortunately, but it's a giant "Poet-TREE" to celebrate National Poetry Month with suggestions of poetry for children.

Day 93: Today Melissa came over to have "craft day." The idea was that we'd both get some long-overdue scrapbooking done. Unfortunately, I didn't get my photos developed in time and my printer was on the fritz, so while Melissa scrapbooked, I compiled a bunch of old "snippets," story beginnings or poems or little pieces of various writing projects that I had printed out while moving files from my laptop to my desktop, and I organized them, hole-punched them, and divided them into different binders. It doesn't seem very creative, but technically I was creating different binders of collected poems, short fiction, and short nonfiction. Plus later after she left I got my printer working again and made them some covers. They were pretty plain, but still: at least that felt a bit more like outright creation.

Day 94: Speaking of compiled poetry, today at work I finished up the last bits and bobs of a project I've been helping with for months now at the library. An afterschool group has been coming to the library once a month for the last 6 months and each time we discussed different kinds of poetry and had them try to write poetry of their own. We went over haiku, limerick, concrete poetry (words form a picture of the thing they describe), and acrostic poems (first letter of each line spells out a word or name). In our last meeting they picked their favorite poem they had written and illustrated it, then my coworker Cheryl scanned and printed all the images and I added an introduction, table of contents, title page, cover, end note, and brief explanations of the poetry types. We then bound it all together as a book. We made five copies in total: one for their school library, one for our branch manager Shelley, one for the principal of the school, one for the head of the afterschool program, and one to be entered into the library system so kids can come in with their parents and check it out. This last copy made me pretty excited, because it meant that since Cheryl and I put the book together we are now both in the system as "authors," which you can see for yourself right HERE.

Day 95: I wrote a little nonsense rhyme that I may eventually make into something more...

How do you do, madam? How do you do?
My name's Anastasia Godiva Carue
Can you solve my riddle? I'll offer some clues,
And perhaps you'll soon see through my ruse.

Day 96: It was a very busy day, as I drove straight from work to meet Mandy and travel down to Savannah for the weekend. By the time we arrived at the hotel, I didn't have much left in the way of creative juices flowing. But I did draw this picture:



And when unpacking I discovered what happens when you accidentally leave a bottle of gummy vitamins in a hot car. Mandy insisted this should count as my Good Madness for the day, even if its creation was unintentional. Behold, the mega-vitamin:



Day 97: While listening to live music in Savannah's city market, I sketched this picture of Mandy:



Day 98: Our last day in Savannah, Mandy and I went to a Fairy and Gnome home festival. There was a contest where people were challenged to build a fairy home using all natural materials. There were some awesome entries, but since the whole thing seemed more geared toward kids I made a "fairy tepee," but didn't officially enter it. Mandy added the beautifying touches, the sprig on the top and the leaves for a path:



Day 99: More "house between worlds," including this scene:

"He can't have gotten far," whispered Hannigan.

"And you know it was that girl," Madeleine said, in a pompous I-know-exactly-what's-going-on tone of voice that made me want to hit her.

Instead, I spread the venom thick in my voice.

"We don't know any such thing," I said.

Only then did Em look up, and she stared straight at me as if seeing something she had somehow missed before.

"I mean," I added hastily,"You know... we can't be sure of anything."

But it was too late. I swear in that moment she knew everything. And that was all it took. It was back - that rage, its scorching hellfire blaze. I saw the thoughts rise in her eyes, watched them swell and take shape: Suspicion. Fury. Revenge.

I knew then that Jason, wherever he is now, is doomed.

And so am I.

Day 100: I got out the charcoal pencils and did a few sketches. The third one is a combination of images that have something to do with my "house between worlds" story and a quote from Neil Gaiman's novel Neverwhere.







Day 101: I wrote the first stanza of a poem and thought, "Ooh... I like this. I should write another stanza." But I couldn't think of anything and I was tired, so...

Day 102: ...I woke up the next morning and wrote a second stanza. Here's the combined total thus far:

She plays among the barrow downs
She knows that's where the ancients keep
Their secrets hidden among bones,
Locked safely in eternal sleep.
She knows that she might lose herself
If ever she crept in too deep
So she ignores the tempting sounds
That whisper from the barrow mounds.

She knows the rings of ancient stone
You'll often see her dancing there
Twirling to some unheard song
Out beneath the open air.
She sees the beauty in lost things
But knows she also must beware
The tug to spend her life alone
Among the cairns of sacred stone.

Day 103: Well, those two stanzas were all well and good, but the poem didn't feel finished. I felt like it needed one more stanza, to tie it all together and almost give it a meaning (if that makes any sense). But whenever I sat down to write, I didn't like anything I came up with. So as of now, it's an unfinished poem.

To prove that I did create today (even if it was fruitless) here are some of my abandoned stanzas:







Day 104: I wrote the following poem, which I also posted as a note on Facebook:

I know of dragons in the deep,
the scary kind that haunt your sleep:
big as mountains, wings spread wide
with eyes that gleam like sparks.
Let me at them, let me try...
On land or sea or even sky.
Let them at me; I won't hide.
Let fire light the dark.

I'd rather be the fool who's dead
than live in a world where people dread
to do the things they wish they'd tried -
shackled by doubt and shame.
I know of dragons, but you see
the dragons also know of me.
In tales they tell at fireside
they tremble at my name.

Day 105: My cat Mr Paws died tonight, and I wrote these haiku:

Every closed door is
Just waiting to be opened
So I can pass through.

Lounging in the sun
Chasing rabbits and squirrels.
Stray cats... stay away!

Wacky, playful cat
A paw darts under the door.
Chase feathers and string

Jingle in the dark
A warm house to come home to
Dear, you will be missed.

Day 106: In honor of Mandy's 25th birthday, I shaped two blocks of Boursin to mold a three-tiered mini-"cake". Mom added the candle on top:

Days Eighty Two to Ninety One: Songs, Zombies, and Unexpected Adventures

Day 82: As many of you probably already know, this July will mark the last big hurrah for my involvement in the Harry Potter fandom. It's the ultimate trifecta: the release of the seventh film, a conference with my fellow fans and wizard rock bands, and a chance to actually visit Hogwarts!! (The theme park, that is). It seems like a good stopping point, because as much as I've loved being this level of obsessed (the costumes, listening to music written from the perspective of fictional characters, obsessing about film adaptations, etc.) it really can't last forever. I've been wanting to figure out a way to say goodbye to the fandom through art, since the conference is going to have a fan art gallery and I thought it would be neat to submit something. So below is the idea I came up with, pretty much verbatim as I wrote it on the submission form:

“Harry Potter Fandom: the Game” is a piece of art, a visual representation of my experiences in the fandom. However, it can also function as a board game for 2-7 players, should anyone be interested in playing.

You can play as one of seven different pieces: Muggle (a newcomer to all things Harry Potter), Squib (an HP fan, but not active in the fandom), Word Witch (avid reader, fanfic writer, etc), Wizard Activist (someone passionate about social change, a card-carrying member of SPEW… or the HPA), Crafty Witch (craftsmen and fan artists), Computer Wizard (someone who frequents fan sites, messageboards, chatrooms, podcasts etc), or Wizard Rocker (someone who expresses their fandom through music). (There are seperate scarves in different house colors that can be attached to each game piece.)

The gameboard winds through many different areas of fandom, taking players from their first discovery of Harry and his world all the way to LeakyCon 2011 and the “End of An Era.” Collect tokens representing significant events (“midnight release,” “fan conference,” “wrock show,” etc.) and gain points for accomplishing fandom-related tasks. The game ends when the first player reaches LeakyCon ‘11, but the winner is decided by a tally of points and tokens. By the end of the game, the players should feel well-equipped for whatever the future may hold. This may be the “End of an Era,” but with these collected experiences and their fellow wizards at their side, the fun is only just beginning.

Day 83: In addition to working at the library I'm also paid to clean the two buildings at my church every week. I'm probably not supposed to do this, but since we don't have a piano at home anymore and my keyboard is too much of a pain to set up and put away frequently I often play a bit on the piano and/or keyboard in the sanctuary while I'm there. The keyboard especially is nice because it has a "record" option where you can record yourself playing then play it back again later. I came up with a nice chord progression and recorded it a few weeks back, then this past weekend when I went to clean I brought my laptop and recorded myself singing along with it. It's short, but it came out better than I expected:



Day 84: If you haven't figured it out by now, I often have ideas for stories, jot them down quickly, and abandon them for several months. Then I pull them out, add a bit more, then set them aside again. In a way this is fun because you get to revisit stories over time and you may have better ideas for them than you would have had if you'd tried writing it all in one go. But mostly this isn't a good habit: you tend to have many beginnings and not nearly enough endings.

Today I worked on another of these story ideas, one I've nicknamed "The February Faery." When I originally had the idea, the thought was to send it out as a belated Christmas letter. The protagonist is a faery who is never on time for anything, so the thought of sending it out as part of a holiday letter a few months late seemed pretty funny. If I manage to work on it later this year, I may finally get around to sending it out by February 2012.

Here's the intro:

Someday when you're bored and tired of being indoors, wander down to the bottom of your garden. This is one of the best places to be near the faery folk. If you're like me, you're bound to have heard many a story about the faeries. You may even count yourself as something of an expert. Surely you'd know that there are many kinds of faeries (from the tiniest pixie to the most towering giant), and that many of them - no, most of them - aren't meek and innocent at all, but wild and mischievous and dangerous. You probably have a favorite kind of faery (I like gnomes myself), and I'm betting you know your fair share of fairy tales.

Have you heard of the Littlewings? Of course you have! That's what my grandmother always used to call the flower faeries, the little winged people mere inches high that have a special bond with the seasons. The Littlewings were always her favorite kind of faery, which is why she told me this story. Have you heard it? Perhaps. Stories like this one tend to spread. But in case you haven't, let us begin the tale of the February Faery.

Day 85: Twice in the past few weeks I've had dreams of zombies. The last one I had was more a body-snatcher-alien kind of zombie. The one I had on this particular night was more of the infecting-virus kind of zombie. It didn't have enough of a narrative for it to make a good "13 Days of Halloween" story candidate, but I did write it up on my other blog, and you can read it HERE.

Day 86: More on the "The House Between Worlds," including this description:

The “For Sale” sign—the kind that hung from its post on two chains—was so old that one of the rusted chains had broken and the faded letterboard now dangled listlessly. The untended yard was a tangle of weeds, the gutters clogged with many years’ worth of dead leaves. The whole place had an air of having been wonderful once, but now it was just tired and sad.

Day 87: Carrie Ryan, author of the Forest of Hands and Teeth trilogy (which, fittingly, is about zombies), is coming to our library to do a reading/signing on May 15. I got to design the flyer:



Day 88: My Oma and Aunt Barbara drove down from Indiana to visit for a few days. In their honor, I switched the message on the chalkboard guitar:



Day 89: More on "The House Between Worlds," including this:

I awoke to the sounds of Em screaming. Not a shriek of something like terror, but more of a loud, deep moan. A horrified sound, and utterly chilling. Like something in her had broken and her soul was seeping out of her mouth.

Day 90: I was hoping to come up with some elaborate April Fool's Day prank that would involve creating something, but alas... inspiration abandoned me. Instead, for some reason I was feeling a little hormonal or something and I wrote this poem:

PANACEA

I troll the internet and books for poems
that will express what it is I feel
because I do not know what it is I feel
but I suspect that reading a poem
will tug at whatever it is,
will dislodge it like a magnet
might tug metal fragments
up to the surface of a wound.

I did not know till now that I was wounded.
I do not feel - really, have not felt,
not felt in a while.
Could this be my wound, then?
And could the very fact that I now
sense this twinge or pulse of something
mean that, though I can't name it,
I'm feeling my own cure?

Day 91: There's an tradition started a couple years ago by author Maureen Johnson called "Blog Every Day in April" (BEDA for short). A lot of YouTubers have adapted it for video blogs, so if you ever see VEDA on the title of a video, that's what it means. Anyway, I figured in addition to Good Madness I'd give BEDA a try this year. Those posts are over on my other blog. I only intend to count a BEDA post as Good Madness if it involves a good amount of thought, effort, or polished writing. The ones that are just me venting, more personal-journal style, won't count.

Anyway, the one I wrote today was about an adventure with a stalled train, a gravel road leading seemingly nowhere, and a hidden graveyard. I posted it as a note on facebook HERE.

Days Seventy Three to Eighty One: Revisiting the Past

Day 73: In addition to that bookmark I made for the library, I also made a brochure of books that both teens and adults would enjoy. Here it is, front, center and back:







Day 74: Perhaps inspired by my birthday, I wrote the following (not very good) poemish thing:

Years are like boxes. They hold things. But some things don't always fit neatly inside.
They spill out, overflow. Some boxes are nearly empty.
Years are like doors - no, that's not really true.
Years are like long lists of things to do.
No, years are cars on that distant road,
things that go by quickly as you're paying attention to something else.
Years are heavy sometimes. They have weight.
And yet they're so light that you don't tend to notice.
Years are grains of sand. Years are like air.
The truth is that years are like the absence of light,
the mechanics of mirrors, or why birds have flight -
they're things that I don't understand and maybe never will.
But I'm okay with that. I'm okay.
Forget about years. I'll just worry about today.

Day 75: I wrote more on the house between worlds, including this excerpt:

There are many ways to be wrong.

There’s the wrong where you know it’s wrong, and everyone else does too, and there’s nothing good that could possibly come from it.

There’s the wrong where you know it’s wrong and other people do too, but they figure it’s for the best so why try to stop it.

There’s the wrong where everyone else thinks it’s wrong but you don’t, not really, and you’re stuck trying to figure out how these people you look up to and trust so much could think something so fundamentally different from you, and whether they’re the ones who are wrong or whether you are.

There are many more, but these are the ones I’ve come across tonight.

It’s wrong to ask for a Second. I know that, Jason knows it, and everyone on the ship knows it too. Nothing good could possibly come of it.

It’s wrong that Jason loves a girl but cannot ever be with her. I know it, he knows it, Em knows it… I know she must. But in the end, I think she reasons it’s better this way. Better to cut it off like this than to give him any hope of an ordinary life when he never will lead one.

It’s wrong that I dream of staying when we, of course, must always leave. It’s wrong that I question the curse, that I wonder if maybe there might be some other way to break it, some important thing the adults are keeping from us somehow. But is it wrong? Am I wrong? Or is Em really the one who’s in error here?

Or is it possible that neither of us are really wrong, that all that’s wrong about this is the problem we find ourselves in, that really we’re just two people trying to make the best of an impossible situation?

I saw Jason leave this morning when the others were asleep. I saw that he took his things with him, all of them. I saw the look in his eyes.

And now we are airborne. Moving on to a new place, and Em assumes Jason is below decks with the others.

Which leads to the biggest question of them all: is it wrong that I haven’t told anyone?

I want to give him as much of a headstart as I can.

Day 76: A difficult day for some reason, so all that came out of it was this haiku...

That mouse over there
Looms above me like a giant.
Yes, I feel that small.

Day 77: I had the most incredible nightmare. Usually, if it's the kind that wakes me up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night all I remember of it is whatever happened right before that, but in this case I remembered an actual story behind the dream and it almost made sense. There wasn't really a beginning to it, but I jotted down what I could remember of the dream and started trying to adapt it into a short story, fixing some of the weirder dream-element parts that would mess with the logic. I won't get too much into it, because it's definitely going to be one of the 13 days of Halloween this year!

Day 78: Using some beads I bought from the art store down near Rebekah's house in Florida, I made a necklace. I accidentally left it out in my car and I'm lazy and don't want to go get it right now, so I'll have to post a picture later.

Day 79: More on the house-between-worlds story. I know, I know... I'm starting to sound like a broken record. But like I said earlier, it's not a short story; it'll be quite long when I'm done. And there are quite a few characters to juggle, so this section isn't about the same people as in day 75. Here's today's snippet:

The ride to school was awkward. Since we were the last two on the bus at this, the final stop on the route, we were wedged into the very back on the broken bus seat that supposedly sat two but only really fit one person comfortably. Technically, Alexander could have sat anywhere he wanted. He was that kind of person: the waters of high school society would part miraculously for him if he so desired. But today it seemed like all he desired was something I wasn’t about to offer up: the knowledge of what exactly it was that I had seen in that window.

Day 80: So, the house-between-worlds story I keep talking about is very much an autumn-y kid of story. It deals with darkness and shadows and the colder time of year, mysteries and some scary stuff. But one of the first "novels" that I ever wrote (if you can count the 50-page document I wrote when I was eleven as a novel) was very much a summer-y kind of tale. It's always secretly been a hope of mine that I'll get around to rewriting that story one day, and with spring kicking into high gear here in North Carolina, I was reminded of it more than ever. I was also reminded of it because of a drawing Rebekah's sister Bess posted on her facebook of Red Riding Hood on horseback riding into the forest.

I should explain: this story (which I nicknamed "Wishbook" for reasons that will become apparent) is about a young girl named Anna who lives in that kind of pseudo-medieval world that a lot of fantasy stories take place in. She hates all the boring stuff that's expected of her as the daughter of a country knight and longs to go off and have adventures. In a strange turn of events she stumbles upon a magical object; she thinks it's merely a blank book and treats it like a diary, but really it holds the power to grant any wish written in it. Action and excitement ensue as all her wildest dreams for adventure become reality, but as things wind more and more out of her control she begins to realize that getting everything you've always wished for isn't all it's cracked up to be.

So yes, her going off on her journey starts out very similarly to that drawing of Bess's: heading into the forest, leaving the safety of home behind and going off to discover what adventures await. So, between that and the weather I sat down and wrote a few scenes for the new-and-improved Wishbook. I don't think it's something I'll seriously pursue this year, but it was a fun diversion for the day.

Day 81: I pulled out my oil pastels and attempted to draw pictures of two of my story heroines: Anna from Wishbook, and Joan from House-Between-Worlds.

Here they are:

Days Sixty One to Seventy Two: On the Road

Day 61: Melissa and I hopped aboard a plane to fly down to Florida and meet up with Rebekah (and Jackson!) for some fun adventuring in New Orleans and Niceville. Being distracted all day by packing and work (you know, trivial things like that), it wasn't until I was buckled into my seat on the plane that I realized I hadn't created anything yet. But a quick inventory of the seat-back pocket solved that for me. There was a blank barf bag, just dying to be... "improved upon." Unfortunately I didn't have my camera on hand to take a picture of it, but here's what I wrote on the back:

Maybe you're a newbie,
or perhaps a travel nut,
but if nervousness or turbulence
wreaks havoc on your gut
and you feel so ill (despite those pills)
you think you're going to yak -
I'll be waiting right here for you,
nestled safe in the seat back.

Day 62: Our first day in New Orleans we visited the children's museum, and I bought some colored chalk in the gift shop. Even with the rain, there were tons of people in the French Quarter, so when we finally found a parking spot nearby, I decided to celebrate by decorating it a bit. (Seriously, New Orleans drivers are INSANE. They like to stop in the middle of the street for no reason whatsoever!)

"New Orleans":



Sun, moon, and star:



Day 63: On our second day in NOLA, we ventured over to City Park where we, among other things, scared seagulls, disappointed ducks (they didn't seem to like Trader Joe's yogurt candy and would have much preferred bread), lounged with lions (of the stone variety), and ended up at the playground. Near the playground was this awesome tree:



I got it into my head to try to climb it, which was kind of insane since I was wearing my Skechers Shape-ups, which are curved on the bottom and not really ideal for gaining traction on tree bark. But after several slightly-embarrassing failures, I made it to the top and took this victory picture:



So, while we all took many pictures on the trip, I'm counting this particular one as my good madness for the day. Because I earned it? Well, mostly because Rebekah told me to. :)

Day 64: A while back I had this random idea for a story about a woman about to sell her deceased father's lake house who must go and make sure things are in order before the sale goes through. She's staying there the weekend to fix things up and make sure everything's set, and it's not until night has fallen that first evening that she realizes she's not alone. It's a horror story, but not in the way you might think, and I don't want to give away any more because I might use it for 13 Days of Halloween this year. But even though I had the idea a while ago, I never actually wrote it. I just jotted it down to save for another time. For some reason, on our drive home from NOLA something brought the memory back. So on our second night in Niceville, I'm afraid I kept the light on way too long (sorry Melissa!) and stayed up writing the beginning of it.

I went old school, writing by hand on a legal pad since I hadn't brought my laptop. This is cool, because you get to see the story unfold in your handwriting. I guess you feel attached to it a little more? If that makes sense... maybe it doesn't. But anyway, the downside is that there's no backspace, and you can't cut and paste blocks of text to change the order, etc. So as you can see there are many scribbles, arrows, and stars to try to indicate what text should be deleted, inserted, or moved:



Day 65: Switching gears back to the house-between-worlds story, I had an idea about one aspect of the story that could involve a symbol. Rather than choosing a pre-existing symbol, I thought it would be cool to invent my own. Still, I wanted it to bring to mind certain meanings or be associated with certain things: protection from danger, life, an Ash tree (don't ask), perhaps a journey. So I looked up other symbols that meant these things from a variety of backgrounds (mostly from Norse, Celtic, and Native American traditions) and jotted them down and spent a good deal of time trying to invent my own. Melissa helped a bit too, and both of us came to the conclusion that it's much harder than it sounds. So while I didn't settle on one particular symbol I liked (and I may or may not abandon the initial idea completely and go in a different direction), I'm counting it as my good madness for the day. Here are two sheets' worth of brainstorming:





Day 66: More on the lake house story. The day before I had taken a walk through Rebekah's neighborhood. While it's mostly newer houses with paved driveways and the like, there's a section of it, kind of tucked away around a bend, that's almost like a trailer park. In one of the yards, I noticed a fallen tree had been moved to the back of one gravel drive as a barrier to keep from driving too far forward into the yard, almost like those concrete dividers at the head of some parking spaces.

This gave me an idea, so my writing that night included the following lines:

She laughed out loud, and the laugh became a wild and hysterical thing, as embarrassment and relief bubbled to the surface. She rolled her windows down and turned the radio on and laughed and laughed and laughed. Which is why she didn't notice the log blocking the driveway until she was already upon it. And by then it was too late.

Day 67: So by today, I was back home again and launched into the ordinary daily routine. Which meant I got home from work and realized, "Wait a second... I haven't created anything today!"

Fortunately, the weather and the night were inspiring. The rain had been pretty steady throughout the day and continued on into the night. So I wrote this poem:

It was raining
You were outside
Spattered, muddy
but in awe
Night had fallen,
dark come early
settled heavy
like a shawl
It was silent
But not really
Night and rain
each have their noise
You were dancing
But not really,
More like stomping
in your joy

You couldn’t see the stars shine overhead
They reflected off the thousand million raindrops instead
You couldn’t see the moon up in the sky
But it was shining in your eyes

There is madness
in the moment
Fierce and freezing
but amazing
If you want it
you must grab it
Or the chance just
will not last.
There are reasons
to stay in
all dry and warm
and safe and sane,
but there is something
in the darkness,
as it crashes from the skies.
There is something
in the rain
and in the night
and in your eyes…

Oh, I rarely see the stars shine overhead
I’m too busy with my eyes closed fast asleep in my bed.
And I tend to miss the moon up in the sky
I’m distracted with the regular routines of my life
But I think next time the night comes, rain or shine,
I may peek my head out anyway and give it a try.
And the next time that I think of you as mine,
I’ll remember how untameable, how wild and alive you were
Wet and muddy with the moon’s glow in your eyes.

Day 68: I took that poem and put a melody to it, making it a song. Only after recording that did I realize that the melody for the verses sounds a bit like part of the Cake Bake Betty song "Eleanor," and that the melody for the chorus sounds a bit like the silly not-really-a-song-but-kind-of "Eocarcharia" I posted on here earlier. So apparently the song is somewhat recycled, but I'm still counting it as my good madness for today.

Day 69: I worked a bit on a children's story/fairy tale idea I've had for a little while about a monkey. It's not finished yet, but to prove I worked on it here's a blurred screencap:



Day 70: Today I drew a picture of the monkey character I wrote about in that story. It's a simple pen and ink drawing, and looks a bit more like a bear than a monkey, but here's the general idea:



Day 71: At the library I made a bookmark of suggestions of adult fiction books that teens might enjoy:



Day 72: I took the song I made from the poem on days 67 and 68 and put together this video:

Days Fifty Five to Sixty: Earth, Air, Fire and... Seuss?

Day 55: We're having another Discovery Place program at the library. This time it's "Electrifying Attractions," all about electricity and magnetism. I designed the poster and flyer for it:



Day 56:

Light a fire
Let it fade to ember
Gaze at stars
And think "That's what we are."
Shining things
People fondly remember,
Long dead
By the time our light reaches this far.

Day 57: This may seem silly, but it's been forever since I've made a paper airplane, so that's exactly what I did. I made a few different kinds, but interestingly the one that flew best was the "test" one I made out of a pink post-it note. Go figure.



Day 58: I used oil pastels to draw two mini pictures: a tree with a stream behind it, and a red coffee cup.





Day 59: More work on the House-Between-the-Worlds story, including these lines:

Sometimes one of the adults has a strange dream, or a sudden inexplicable recollection. It could be anything… the sight of a building at the edge of a new town, a crooked tree, a snatch of conversation. Something triggers one of the memories hidden down deep, one the magic didn’t quite pull away completely. After such things happen, one or another of them may spend minutes, but often hours, writing down in detail all they can recall. They will discuss it with the others, see if it triggers anything else useful, anything more they can add to the never-ending puzzle of How-We-May-One-Day-Break-The-Curse-And-Return-Home-Again.

Day 60: Since it's Dr. Seuss's birthday, we had a Dr. Seuss event at the library. All attendees could enter a raffle to win tickets to the Charlotte Symphony Lollipops performance of Green Eggs and Ham. So I made this "hat" for them to drop their raffle tickets into. (That's where the disappearing pretzel container went, Mom!)



Now I'm off to New Orleans... we'll see what inspires me there!

Days Forty Eight to Fifty Four: Knitting and Puzzles and Attics, Oh My!

Day 48: I'm a dork, so sometimes when I'm alone and surrounded by a particularly lovely day or night, I'll compose a short song on the spot. This is fun because you're creating something that belongs solely to that moment. This is one I vaguely remember:

The shadows of trees cast green and gray clouds on the lawn
As I sit in the glorious sun of a day half-beginning, half-gone...

Another I recall:

There is sunlight on the grasses
Of the fields where I have grown up
And it makes me feel so happy,
Yes it makes me feel alive.

Sometimes, like those two, I remember them easily later. Maybe they have a particularly catchy melody or the words just stick in my head somehow. But countless others songs created like that vanish as quickly as the moment that inspired them.

On Day 48, the moon was huge. Not quite full, but the world outside was blue and bright. So I sang to it. It wasn't a particularly novel lyric, but it was nice. I didn't write it down, though, and have since forgotten the specifics of it.

Here's a recreated "guess":

Great, wise guardian of the night
Thank you, thank you for your light
Day has left and dark is here
But still I feel no fear.

This may not be a heavenly tune
But it's my song for you, dear moon.
Thank you, thank you for your light
That guides me onward in the night.

Day 49: I'm not much good at drawing, but sometimes I stumble onto good luck. I was considering trying to illustrate a little side project that may show up as some of my Good Madness in the future, but before I did this I wanted to see if I could draw a decent kid/knight. These doodles are some of my best attempts:



Day 50: I worked some on a knitting project I'd started ages ago. I meant to give it as a going-away present to a former boss, but said boss has since already gone away, so I'll have to figure out something else to do with it.



Day 51: A while ago I put up an excerpt from a story I'm writing about time travel. I worked more on that today. Here's another excerpt:

I am, of course, in Time as I write this, and you also are within it, further down the river, reading. I guess that makes these words a strange kind of time travel.

What that means is that I cant give you an adequate description of what it’s really like in a place without Time. I’m limited by the language; I have to pick a tense—past, present, future—when none will do. But if you’ll pardon these weaknesses in my prose, I’ll try to tell you what happened next.

First, blinding pain. Inside my head. I can say with conviction and truthfulness that it happened (verb, past tense) because Time still existed as a memory in my brain, if nowhere else outside my mind. The agony. I mentioned a headache before. If you’ve ever had a migraine, you’re closer to the mark, but imagine taking that and magnifying it ten times. Make that a hundred. It was hard to move—if you can call it moving—or to function at all.

Timelessness has a landscape, though again words are limited in describing it. There are things there. There are Beings. There are colors, and what’s cool is that there are colors out of Time that don’t exist within it. The closest I’ve gotten to seeing those colors within Time is while listening to music. A certain swell, a certain harmony or arrangement of notes, and it’s like the color is there, pressing close against the surface of my reality, like a hand pressed flat against glass. My mind almost—almost—grabs hold of it, but it passes backwards and away again in the space of that split second, as the song moves on, measure after measure, the metronome marking the beat like a prison drum.

It could have been all over for me then. Not that anyone would have noticed. Passing from phobia to psychosis, truly losing my grip on reality, would be apparent only to me. To the world outside I was already a nut job. But I mean it. I honestly have no idea how I made it back that first time. Bombarded by the searing pain of a brain not used to existing in Timelessness, disoriented by alien sights and experiences both beautiful and frightening, it was nothing short of a miracle that I was able to gather my thoughts, to remain collected, to envision the natural rhythms of Time and make the leap back in, without doing permanent damage to myself. For a first-timer with no previous exposure to the theory or protocol of the procedure—well, like I said: a miracle.

I arrived back in that moment, the gray moment, on the floor of my bedroom, and the tears started, and I was shaking, and I fumbled for the pain pills on my nightstand. I lay trembling after that, as the grayness shifted and grew more pale. As light descended on the world, I fell into sleep, my mind replaying the things I had just experienced, visions of the impossible.

Day 52: There's this kind of puzzle I love doing that's known as O'ekaki, or Paint By Numbers. It's similar to Sudoku in that you have a grid that you're trying to fill in. It's different, however, in that you aren't filling the boxes with numbers. The numbers are around the edges, and they provide clues that, if decoded properly, help you find the picture in the grid. Each number tells the size of a segment of blocks to fill in on that particular line. By determining which to fill in, and which to leave blank (I denote these with an "X") you solve the puzzle. I've been enjoying solving them for a while, but I wondered how hard it would be to create one. It turns out: VERY. After about five tries, i came up with the very simple O'ekaki puzzle you see below:

Before:



Solved:



Days 53 and 54: I'm lumping them together because I worked on the same thing both days. It's a story I'm writing that's related to the House-Between-Worlds story I told you about before. In fact, if I get my act together they may all be part of the same book one day. I don't want to give away too much plot, but here's a paragraph to give you a taste of what I've been working on:

We’ve been given no names for this world we find ourselves in. We’ve been denied the basic privilege of education. That is to say, what education we get is of Em’s choosing. We are taught what we’d need to know of this place if captured, or if going out to scout. What history we know is mainly our own, of the first rash action with the Door, and how that has led to our misery. What more I’ve learned is from books snatched secretly from attics then hastily returned. Staying up long days reading while my fellow travelers slept. And the photo albums, the sketches. This is how I know about the wars of this world. I read about presidents and princes, dictators and diplomats. And I see firsthand from those photographs just how quickly humans fade to dust.

And finally... a couple weeks ago one of my Good Madness projects involved selecting photographs and formatting a free photo book from Shutterfly. It arrived in the mail! While I can't show every page, here's one: