Archive | January 2015

Trope Bingo!

Jan4

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

Jan4

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!)

Jan4

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

Jan4

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

Jan4

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.

December Meme Day 14 – Books That Shaped My Life

Jan2

The Meme

Today’s prompt is Books that shaped my life.

This isn’t a meme prompt, but Denise Drespling
posted a blog post in early December that made me start thinking.

A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle – the whole series, really. I can’t pinpoint an exact change-in-thought from these books, but I can still remember the plots of all the stories, and reading them over and over again.

Ogre, Ogre, by Piers Anthony – okay, Piers Anthony and the whole Xanth series have flaws, nice big gaping holes, but this is the first “grown up” book I can remember reading – Mom left it sitting on the couch – and it got me started on a lifetime of reading genre fiction.

What’s more, that was the first time I started writing stories-in-my-head about another author’s worlds – fanfic!

To Sail Beyond the Sunset and Time Enough for Love by Robert A. Heinlein – parents, don’t let your tweens read these books.
I spent a lot of time with a ridiculously screwed up view of what women should be (hypercompetent beautiful 6′ tall geniuses who are dynamite in the sack and never screw up socially), and I went into high school with a mentality on sexuality and sex that was atypical and problematic for socialization. That being said, there’s a lot of really interesting stuff in these books (colonization, history, parenting, relationships).

The Bridge Across Forever: A Love Story by Richard Bach – a book that changed my mindset on love and relationships for a while, among other things. Also, taught me that you have to pay attention to paying taxes.

The Oversoul Seven Trilogy: The Education of Oversoul Seven, The Further Education of Oversoul Seven, Oversoul Seven and the Museum of Time by Jane Roberts. *cough* Well, in addition to really shaping a lot of my thought on reincarnation in my teens, this book set started me thinking about aging and childhood.

Blood and Iron by Elizabeth Bear – I want to be her when I grow up. I want to write as awesomely as she when I get there, and I want to make writing a cast that is diverse in all ways look as effortless as she does.

There are more, I know there are. But this is a tidy short list.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/877758.html. You can comment here or there.

Girl in a Country Song, a story from the New Year’s Eve MiniPromptCall

Jan1

Content… warning…? Implied something uncouth, also kidnapping & rufies. And references to just about every country song ever made. And I actually listen to country.

It was the sort of thing country songs were made of: you go out, you drink with your buddies, you meet a pretty girl in painted-on jeans, you get her in your truck, and you go out to the fields.

It was the sort of thing your weekends had been made of, to be honest, different girls – college girls, sometimes, townies or passing visitors other times – different fields, same truck, same weekend, over and over again.

She had eyes the color of a cloudless sky and hair like wheat just before harvest; she was as perfect as God could make her and you didn’t pay much attention to the strange necklace she was wearing; she was a college girl, she said, majoring in agriculture. They did funny things.

Then you woke up in the back of your truck bed, and someone had used those tie-downs for all the wrong reasons, ’cause you were spread-eagled and couldn’t barely move. And the blonde was drawing on you in what you hoped to God wasn’t actually blood. And, Lord above help you, there was country music blaring from your truck.

“You’re perfect,” the blonde was telling you. “Absolutely perfect. You’ll make the crops grow. You’ll make the babies grow.”

And suddenly the music sounded a lot more ominous.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/877443.html. You can comment here or there.

December Meme Day Twelve – Fictional Characters

Jan1

The Meme

I’m cleaning up!

Today’s prompt is from [personal profile] kay_brooke: How about fictional characters and your feelings? Who do you like the most? Who do you enjoy writing the most? Who do you frequently want to knock some sense into?

Fictional characters! I spend a lot of time thinking about them, you know, although I suppose I think more about scenarios than I do about characters.

When I get into a serial – and this was the flaw with Addergoole 9 not just for the readers but for me, too – I can get into the characters’ heads, and really play along with them.

Shahin, Shahin (From Addergoole: TOS) was a load of fun but I spend the entire series wanting to slap her. Most of the time with Kailani I kind of wanted to shake some sense into her – No, people don’t work that way! – and Jamian I mostly wanted to hug.

When I’m writing short stories, I don’t really have time to get into the characters heads much, so something like 7/10 of my writing can just be put over there in “mostly concept-based, not really about the characters.”

But long-running characters… *grin* Clearly, I love writing Cynara. She’s just fun, and she’s fun at any stage of her development. Her powers are entertaining, but the way she interacts with other people is just so much fun to write. And Luke. Luke harrumphs and grumps his way through life, and it’s fun watching the rug get pulled out from under him.

…these are all Addergoole characters. Whoops.

*big, unabashed grin* All right, side goal for 2015: Get into the heads of at least 2 non-Addergoole characters as thoroughly as I know Luke and Cynara. Doont.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/877177.html. You can comment here or there.