For as much as I complained a couple of days ago about stuffing my half-finished short story (YAWT - Yet Another Working Title) into the Dead Story file, I can't keep myself from thinking about how I might be able to fix it. I love it when my brain works like this because just as often, it doesn't.

In other news, my entry in the Writers of the Future contest - 2nd quarter, came back. While I didn't place anything with them, rejection doesn't really bother me (I learned to deal with it a lot growing up) and so, I rewarded myself by sending the story right back out to another market, to a publication that had good things to say to me last year in a personalized rejection on what I consider now a lesser story. Get back in that saddle, get back on that horse. A-yup, I live for this kind of thing. And while I was at it, I sent WotF an entry for their 3rd quarter contest. That makes six of my stories out there looking for homes, or hopefully at the very least, a word or two of guidance.

Next month, The Car Novel bubbles to the surface again. With the first half edited and the second half's outline nearly complete, I've got no reason to come up short on finishing it this year. Time to dig out my aloha shirts and my favorite Vans, dust off my car, squirt some Uber-Gloss on it, and get the oil changed (finally), and dive back into Cecil, Floyd, and Scratchy's world.

Now if only the weather outside would cooperate. Still having cold, wet, windy late February/early March-like days. Still experiencing near-freezing overnight temperatures. STILL have those geraniums camping out in the garage (under grow lights thank goodness).

It was both actually.

This morning I discovered:

1. I really didn't want to get up but...
2. Snow had been predicted here (across the river from Portland, OR) and...
3. By 10:30 a.m. it actually was snowing and...
4. It was 33 degrees at our house and...
5. Our sidewalks and driveway were nearly covered in ice.
6. I felt worse than I thought I would for not going to a newly created, local writer's group but it couldn't be helped, not so much because of the snow and ice but because...
7. After almost nine years of living here, our master bathroom toilet had rusted a bolt out of the bottom of the tank and was leaking icky water all over our upstairs flooring and...
8. Unbeknownst to me, Steve had been pining for a new, bigger toilet for years. Who knew? Some men want a bigger TV, mine wants a bigger commode.
9. Lowe's has bigger pots. Installation will cost more than the item, slightly less if I choose to keep the old toilet to perhaps, plant with petunias and mount in a highly visible spot in my front yard, but as tacky as that might look, it'd fit in nicely with...
10. A crude drawing of a penis someone (I suspect the new next-door rental house neighbors) drew with a bold, black marker on the development's community mailbox directly across the street overnight.

It's now 9-ish in the p.m. and almost everything is under control. Well as much under control as things could be considering that new toilet won't be here or installed until sometime next week. In the meantime, we have lots of towels.

It hailed and snowed here heavily between 6 and 8 p.m. sticking in the grass, melting on the streets. I should have spent the time writing but it was just so dang pretty and weird at the same time and I was too excited about it to concentrate. Tomorrow, writing, I promise, upon pain of death. YAWT will slide into home plate.

Today, more hail which oddly enough, means more writing. Whatever am I going to do when this neat-o weather finally gives in to spring and summer? Why, dig out that Car Novel and finish it finally, I say. Later, later I convince myself. THAT'LL be a project.

I think I might have that dead story whipped. Don't know for certain. I need Steve's input.

Last night we watched I Am Legend and although it's not very much like the story, as a movie standing alone, I liked most of it. Why we needed the male alpha zombie, who knows, but then again, why do we here in the states feel we need to elect a new one every four years? Whatever. We watched both endings. I kind of liked the one in which Will Smith kills himself better, the other one was way too cheesy for me, but both left me rolling my eyes. Again, whatever. I'll take hokey "The Omega Man" with Charlton Heston any day.

Why does odd weather fill my head with words? I wouldn't complain if they were good words, perhaps words in some kind of pleasing order. I should just jot them down and file them away (far, far away from human sight) until such time when I might rediscover them and deem them good and workable.

Composed during this afternoon's hailstorm:

"It came down hard as bullets knocking both bird and men from the skies, and if I hadn't stepped back, I surely would have been killed when Pete landed exactly where I had stood. He and his machine simultaneously released a heavy grunt when they hit, a harsh departure from the usual soft discharge of air and the snap-sling, snap-sling unbuckling of harness. Pete's head hung low resting against the safety bar, his long, stringy hair dripping with sweat while all around him dying birds dropped and bounced onto the asphalt.

A moment later, moving south across the lot, a storm of red solar bars rained from the skies and in its path, all things were charred to a blackened crisp."

Okay, tell me that's not weird. Better still, tell me what it means!

Steve woke me up to ask if I wanted to see it snizzling outside and because I didn't grow up where it snows, naturally I leaped out of bed to look. One of the weather stations called the fine drizzle passing through the cold air aloft "snizzle" a combination word of snow and drizzle, which I admit sounds a whole lot better than 'snog,' the term a different station the other morning called snowy fog.

I could watch it snow for days I'll bet and then, maybe then, I'd tire of it . . . but only because I'd know how much other stuff I should be accomplishing instead of watching the weather. Do people realize how privileged I feel they are to have grown up where it snows? Probably not, just as I never felt privileged to grow up in the dry heat of Phoenix.

I was watching the teeny-tiny, ultra fine snow coming down and really enjoying it when I began to wonder if it looked the same as when some volcanoes go off. I began thinking about fine ash in the air filtering down, not in an "Oh My God, we're all gonna suffocate" way but in a kind of "This is a normal, every day occurrence" kind of way.

And bing! I had a new short story idea.   Because I'm new to the LJ cut function, you may or may not be stuck with reading it here:



Now why would my mind take something as pretty and innocent as snow and make it into something dark and mysterious? If I don't watch out, I might actually think of myself as a writer.