Archive | January 4, 2015

Trope Bingo!

My [community profile] trope_bingo card, because Rix had an idea and I like it

1 2 3 4 5
1 accidental marriage:
The Tod’cxeckz’ri Paper Part I
mama didn’t raise no criminal rivals to lovers caffeine failure annoying sibling
2 kidfic secret child presumed dead monster is a mommy telepathy/mindmeld
3 the food poison incident kiss to save the day WILD CARD retail therapy au: steampunk
4 amnesia au: daemons sex pollen obnoxious in-laws screw the money i have rules!
5 empty nest animal transformation au: apocalypse deal with the devil day at the beach

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/878993.html. You can comment here or there.

Agreed, a continuation of Arrangements

Written to SkySailor’s commissioned continuation of
Live-In
and
Arrangements
.

It too Adrian two weeks to decide. Sara tried, during those two weeks, to let him have all the breathing room he needed to decide. She made the most of crock-pot and one-dish recipes, shortcuts and take-out, to make sure he didn’t have to feel like meals were waiting on him; she did cursory cleaning every day, and she tried to get enough work done that it didn’t feel like she was waiting on his decision.

That last Friday, he didn’t make it home until past ten in the evening. His eyes were bloodshot, his hands were shaking, and his skin was ashen. He let Sara chivy him into a bathrobe and slippers without even a pretense of an argument, and sipped the doctored hot cocoa, thick with rum, until his cheeks began to get some color.

“Would… would you tell me what to do? If I agreed to be your housewife?”

Sara hesitated. He was so twitchy right now, it seemed like everything might send him over the edge. “I don’t want to boss you around…”

“But I liked it! When you told me to do things, before, I liked that. My job.. they never tell me, they just yell at me when it’s not done!”

Ah. “Ah. I can do that. I can give you direction.” She found herself smiling. “I can even reward you when you get it all done. right.”

“When? Not if?”

“Hey, I’ve seen what you can do. I might have to up the ante, start giving you bonus round tasks.”

“And you’re really okay with – with supporting me?”

“If you’re really okay with being my housewife. Yeah.”

“I…” He was quiet for a few minutes. Then Adrian nodded. “I’ll quit tomorrow.”

Sara gave Adrian a nice manly apron the day he left his job, and a ruffled one with pink polka-dots the next day. They sat down the next night to the best-tasting meal either of them had had in weeks, months, really; it took them less than a week to fall back into a comfortable routine.

And it was great. He’d ask her what he should do, and she’d tell him. He’d go above and beyond, and she’d do something special for him. Sara went back to getting work done, and Adrian was happy again.

Except…

“So, are you happy, being her bitch?” It was game night, and Ellery had been drinking, but that didn’t excuse it.

“When is he going to stop mooching off of you? I can’t believe he quit his job and you’re okay with him staying here!” Rachael wasn’t the best of Sara’s friends, not by far, but she was a shopping-and-coffee-on-Tuesdays sort of friend. Not that it made her opinion okay, but it definitely made it heard.

“Dude, are you just going to let her tell you what to do? What are you, her housewife?” Sara hadn’t even been telling Adrian what to do – they were watching movies with friends, and he’d asked her what wine she thought was good – when Craig came out with that one.

But it gave Adrian something to answer that he could actually answer. When he came back in from the kitchen, he was wearing his apron. The one with the pink polka dots, even. And somewhere he’d gotten a string of costume pearls.

Sara watched him pull himself up straight and hand Craig a glass of wine. “Yes.”

Their so-called friend had already forgotten. “Yes, what?”

Adrian was smiling. Grinning, really. Sara found that she was, too.

“Yes,” she filled in. “He is my housewife. And a damned good one at that.”

“Well, then.” Ellery was clearly trying to make up for his Game Night slip. “Where are you two registered?”

“Cook’s World,” Adrian answered promptly. And thus the idea for their nonwedding was born.

If you’d like to see more of this story, I bet there’s more to be written. Just drop a tip in the the tip handcuffs:


This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/878812.html. You can comment here or there.

A Week In Alder (And all of 2015 so far!)

Stories
Cleaning House (unicorn/Factory)
In Which Amrit is Amazingly Eloquent
Cali, Femdom, Catgirls, Part II

December Meme Finish-uP
Day Twelve – Fiction Characters
Day Fourteen – Books that Shaped my Life
Day Sixten – Something’s Missing

Serial
Jumping Rings Ch 14 – Valran – Agree
Edally Academy – Chapter 19

Another Landing Page Update – Facets of Dusk here.

The New Years’ Prompt Call
Girl in a Country Song
Cage Match
Failure to Properly Case the Joint
Positively Biblical
Turn, Turn, Turn
After Long Sleep
The Ruins of the Caschitari
After the Fire
Butterfly Mind
Butterfly Colony

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/878353.html. You can comment here or there.

State of the Lyn’s writing in stats

Stories Submitted in December: 1
Stories Accepted in December: 0
Stories Rejected in December: 1

Words written in December: 20,019
2014 total words: 422,180

Published in 2014:

What Follows: How would an Immortal deal with the End Times?

*fireworks*

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/878252.html. You can comment here or there.

December Meme Day Sixtieen – Something’s Missing

The Meme

Today’s prompt is from [personal profile] thnidu: oops! Something’s missing!

Content warning: grief, mourning, and loss.

This year, in addition to the little tin of cookies my aunt gives me every year, she gave me something I’d asked for a while ago – three recipe cards written in my grandmother’s handwriting – and something I hadn’t – the recipe for my grandma’s Leb Kuchen cookies.

I cried.

I’m going to frame the recipes and hang them in my kitchen – I saw the idea on Pinterest, I think, but they’d been flea market finds. These are Grandma’s, and there will never be anything like them again.

My maternal grandmother passed away when I was in my early twenties; I don’t remember her last days very well, although I remember my now-husband, early in our relationship, being the lifesaver, standing behind me at that awful funeral. But I remember Grandma.

My dad worked days and my mom evenings, but the gap times, and when they were building the log cabin that was our home from 1981 on, I spent with my Grandma Dorie. She lived just around the corner – my parents’ house and my aunt and uncle’s house are built on parcels of land cut off from the family farm – within an easy walk, even for a small child.

My memories of Grandma are scattered – playing Uno, making cookies, watching Wheel of Fortune – but they are warm. And at Christmas time…

At Christmastime, something is missing, every year. I eat cookies made from her recipe and remember sitting in her lap.

“Got anything sweet, Grandma?”

“Just me.”

*sniffle* She’s what’s missing, every year.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/878050.html. You can comment here or there.