The Necessity of Fresh Eyes

I'm giving in to the idea of self-sufficiency.

Yes, I know I can buy my own pickles cheaply. Yes, it does make my kitchen hot and steamy when I'm canning. Yes, sometimes things go wrong and shit explodes everywhere and you end up with welts. But I'm still very into the idea of making my own food, and its not because I want everything organic or that I'm afraid of chemicals and preservatives.

It's because I want to look smug when the end of civilization comes and I'm doing alright :)

If you want to learn more about my survival strategies, check out my video below from about survival... and black jelly beans.

Recently I decided it was time to expand from vegetables and canning into an herb garden. I had a nice spot picked out in the side yard and was waiting to borrow my mother's tiller to make the dream a reality, when ugly necessity reared its head.

I have a stone path following the fence around my pond. The area immediately to the left of the path has been a weedy, troublesome problem for three years, mostly because the rocks themselves sat there for a good long while and encouraged all kinds of weed growth and simultaneously discouraged mower blades.

So I got the tiller, and prioritized. The weeds were an eyesore, a shoulder-height testament to my inabilities as a lawn owner. The combined energies of my wrath, a mower and a Mantis took the smirk off their little green faces, but by then I had realized that I didn't have any grass seed and wouldn't have time to get any until the weeds had recouped and mounted their second assault. Meanwhile, my herbs were setting on the back porch, drooping dejectedly as they waited for their home away from Lowe's.

I got all pouty, drank some ice tea, and my mom came over to see how the herb garden was coming. I told her all my problems - the feisty weeds, the depressed herbs, the unbroken lawn waiting to become a garden, my lack of grass seed. She looked at me and said:

"So why don't you just put your herb garden in the ground you tilled up instead of grass?"

And the clouds parted, the Hallelujah Chorus played, and I saw all the advantages: I could harvest my herbs from my little stone path, I had much easier access to water than in the side yard, converting that ground to garden meant less mowing around the steeply sloped banks of the pond, and... (BONUS) it was already tilled, I wouldn't have to buy grass seed, and my herbs would be happy.

The only addition my mom had was, "Well, duh."

I needed mom's fresh eyes to alert me to the lack of common sense I was displaying, and sometimes we need that in writing too. As writers, we'll have our heart set on certain actions, dialogue, even events, that simply aren't what's best for the story itself in the big picture.

We need our beta readers and crit buddies to say to us, "Hey, why not try this?"

And, if they tack on, "Well, duh," try to remember you love them for a reason.

The House of Writing Metaphors - Hell's Chimney

Part of the charm of having an old house is chimneys. Real brick chimneys that shoot straight through two floors of house, right out of the roof. But I've got one in particular that doesn't seem to end. This bugger has a locatable top (predictably, on the roof), but the bottom seems to keep on going... straight down to, uh, whatever is down there. Also, there's not a fire*place*, just a chimney. Yes, Mindy’s HoWM really is a quirky place.

As a writer, how often are you asked this question: "Where do you get your ideas?"

That's a tough one, 'cause hell - I don't know! Sometimes I can trace the origin back to a dream, or something I observed in my people watching that bloomed into a story. But usually I have no idea, and I don't question it. Inspiration is so fleeting that I don't search for the source, I'm grateful that it's there, and to whatever muse feels like I'm the right person to drop it on.

Much like Hell's Chimney, I don't ask. I just go with it, decorate around it, and watch what unfolds.

What's your source of inspiration?

The House of Writing Metaphors - The Prophetic Rot of A Leaky Toilet

One of the more endearing aspects of the Bathroom of Self-Loathing is the seashell shaped toilet seat. We all need to think about sitting on brittle pieces of dead mollusks in order to feel like going to the bathroom. How else to explain the popularity of such an unsightly object?

Not only is the seat a blight upon the eye, the actual potty part doesn't function all that well. Actually, it functions too well, constantly circulating water and not always doing the right thing with it. For example, it likes to take a fair amount of it and drip it down through the basement beams, which luckily have held for a century and might be able to take it until I do something radical, like call a plumber.

Our brains are like that, as writers. We're constantly circulating little ideas, drops of dialogue, splashes of scenes, and the occasional wave of a freshwater WIP. But do we do the right thing with it? Do we take that one second to jot it down on a piece of paper or email ourselves? Or do we let it slip away, drip down into our brain stem where it'll rot a hole in our spine and our heads fall off?

OK so that last bit might be a tad melodramatic, but it's important to write those flashes of inspiration down, because they are only brief flashes. And when they're gone, you're left in the dark basement searching for words, while cold potty water drips on your noggin.