Some days the writing just flows right.  Like today.

I polished up a new story for JosephsDiabetes.com.  Multiple-choice style.  Your substitute teacher…

a) swam in from the sea.
b) has pickle-like appendages.
c) is the meanest sub ever.
d) loves spaghetti.

Which will it be?  Find out soon.

“I hate you.”

“Get out of my face!”

“You touch me and I’ll turn you into an inkwell.”

I’m wondering about mining emotions for sympathetic mood scenes in my writing, as a way of sparking the day’s flow. Tension hums, dialogue flies, events erupt.  And my own mind’s wounds get cauterized, sympathized, soothed.

Reluctantly, I am coming to terms with my “feminine” side–”I feel this” and “I feel that” seem to squirm their way out even when, practically speaking, it doesn’t matter.  In the past, denial has helped me to think straight and avoid trouble.  Now I’m pregnant and all there are are emotions.  Well, if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.  And use ‘em.

Sleeping with sword at the foot of my bed, glass shards around it, and frigid air to keep intruders away tonight.  Never mind that said (plastic) sword just didn’t get put away, said shards from broken lantern just didn’t get vacuumed before sleep time, and said air is just always freezing in the basement.  I still feel protected.

Protected from what?

Crickets.  The nasty ones that crawl in your nose in the middle of the night–may they be sliced to shreds.

We have a hole!  They dug it yesterday and today.  If I were there I’d sleep in it, homeless no longer.

I joined up with Facebook.  After three years of spraying invite repellant above my “work” computer.  Tonight, my lack of social life clashed bloodily with my e-info paranoia and won.  It’s such a relief to see everyone.  I’m going to suffer identity theft at any moment, but at this moment, at least I have an identity.

All last week my family and I stayed at the Catamaran Resort Hotel and Spa in San Diego, CA.  The location is fabulous–Mission Bay out the back gate and Beach across the road.  I forgot the sunscreen, so the the first morning’s perfect ocean breeze cooled a roasting burn that bloomed into its angry entirety a few hours later.  No spa for me.  We smeared aloe and lotion treatments all over each other, though, several times a day, which maybe was better because we all got to “enjoy” it together.  We’re still peeling like lizards.

One afternoon, as I rinsed pails my children built their dams with–instinctively trying to contest the waves, the littles they’d played with said my kids had “a weird sense of human.”  At first I thought they meant “humor”–it’s true in our family–but I’d heard their conversations and they hadn’t been joking, just working.  I nodded and said “Yes, they do.”  They said, “Tia’s sense of human was nice.”

Suddenly I wondered what their sense of human was, and their family’s, and my own in their deep brown eyes.  A positive reflection of humanity, I hope.