NaNoWriMo Day 20

That character I mentioned in that other snippet, her name was Megs - She's a zombie now, who is also possessed by a rather chatty demon.

Arin is travelling with the very same evil Queen she swore to destroy.

Aaaaaaaaand nothing else has fucking happened.

I think I may have to skip a year of NaNo. These past two years have been an unpleasant, uninspired shit-show. Please don't ask me about them because honestly, I'm not even that excited to talk about it. Ugh, it's like a chore. That's a sign I should probably give it a rest, I suppose.

In other news - Wolfenoot is the 23rd, wee! I'm going to take my Pups to the Dog park whilst wearing my wolfy scarf-hat combo.

NaNoWriMo Day 5 Update

It's that time again!

I didn't bother warning you cuz none of you do it with me anyway. SO instead, this ear, I'm going to try and post updates, with snippets of what I've written in my mad rush to keep up with my word count!

The first update is at 4,613 words on day 5 (WAY behind) And it is a description of one of my main characters, from the perspective of one of my OTHER main characters. Enjoy!

--

Arin’s hair would have been lovely were it longer, but now it was short, feathery and shaved to her scalp on both sides of her head, leaving a trail of chestnut from her brow to the back of her neck. Her left ear was mangled and scarred to the side of her head, spiderwebs of other scars reaching delicate tendrils across that part of her shaved scalp and down into the collar of her shirt to where her arm had been taken from her at he shoulder.

Megs also knew that Arin’s left side was similarly scroed with crack-like scars, all the way down to her knee. None of those tendrils reached past onto the right side, but they were darker than normal scars. Where a normal scar would pink and be lighter than the skin it decorated, Arin’s scars seemed to be darker at the core, as if something had threaded itself through her.

Megs’ father had found her and brought her home. That had been, oh, six years ago? Maybe seven by now?

But Arin’s eyes were so clear and vivid, her right one green and verdant, the left one green but like a cracked marble, veined with that same darker color.

Frightening, her whole visage, at least that's what a lot of normal people thought as they saw her. They shied away from her height - a muscular five foot and ten at least, nearly a whole head taller than Megs. Her nose had been broken in her past, a faint scar on the bridge of it, and her lips were more full on the bottom than the top, but were always seemingly cocked in a smirk, resting above a sharp line of her powerful chin, and below the angled slice of her cheekbones.

In some lights she seemed malnourished, eyes deep set and eerie beneath full expressive eyebrows. Her hairline had the pull of a widow’s peak, which only accented the mohawk of hair she had carved there.

Many people thought she was a man at first glance.

#InstaWriMo Day 4

Why DO I Write?

I hear a voice in my head and it threatens to kill me if I don't.

No just kidding. The voice encourages me to write and then tells me that I HAVE to write, and then if I DON'T write, I feel so incredibly 'normal' and 'boring' and 'sane.'

I prefer rather to be mad, and if I am to write glorisiou, epic dreams, then I shall be mad to do so.

Honestly it is also because I have some fantastic, wonderful, divine dreams that I wish for others to see through their own mind's eye. I wish to share visions of epic wonder with my words. I write so that I can share majesty.

And because I love, love, love to achieve that moment when someone tells me that they could just see what I meant, and that they could feel what I feel.

I suppose that's it.

'Adulting'

Let me tell you about the convention we so lovingly call 'Adulting.'

It's the term we come up with once the glamorous illusions in our childhood are pulled back to reveal an ugly, post-pubescent truth.

I'm certain I wasn't the only one who hoped for 16 to come along so we could drive -hoped for 18 to come along so I could watch rated R movies - hoped for 21 to come along so I could drink and vote and buy lottery and cigarettes and every other taboo thing from our youth.

God. It was like the only goal I had - other than becoming the youngest most popular writer in history. OR a secret agent.

At 16 I discovered that no, I was not the youngest most popular writer in history, nor would I have the chance to BECOME that, because there was some other 15 year old girl out there with her picture on the back cover of the dust jacket of a book I was reading. (I mean it wasn't fantastic, but it was hardcover, and half my class had already read it. So that was it then.)

Somewhere around that time I unearthed the heavy physical demands that becoming a secret agent required, and those hopes were dashed too.

So I went, You know what? I can still become a famous, spiffy, popular writer who gets fan letters and goes to book signings where my vision can be shared with other people, and they can understand these vivid, fantastical dreams of my heart.

So I aimed for that.

And you know what? My goals have gone from that to being able to pay rent every month, feed myself the bare minimum for survival, pay all my life-sucking bills, and still have enough for a smoothie after the gym (whose membership I cannot afford to pay, so I am someone's privileged free-guest.) Writing? In November, during NaNoWriMo, because that's the only thing I seem to be able to do - muster up the gumption to pump out a load of nonsense within 30 days, because it's the only time I feel the encouragement to even try poking at the dead-horse-dream that my inner infant can't let go of.

Everything that dreams filled you with as a kid is slowly and effortlessly drained away by our desires to be adults, that when we get there, we 'understand' the futility of dreams, and easily cast them aside for the 'reality' of life.

THAT is 'Adulting'.

Welcome to Hell.

Welcome, Fellow Adults

DO NOT RENT THROUGH ACORN & OAK.

These guys... OK

SO the first year we live here, all is wonderful. We had Michelle - she was a dream! ALWAYS called back promptly, answered ALL my questions, humored me through the process! She seemed to recognize that we were timely paying renters.

Sure the owner of the place wa sa rude, wacka-doo asshole, but whatever. We didn't have to deal with her. We had Michelle. All was well.

So we decide to rent through A&O AGAIN this past year. Got a cool house.

FIRST red flag should have been the moron they hire for their maintenance. We had black mold. I'm willing to bet the ignorant shit just painted over it. We have a good friend/relative come to do pest stuff for us AT NO COST TO THE OWNER who tells us the moisture/mold threshold in this place if nearing dangerous. We pass that along. As well as EVERY OTHER BULLSHIT NONSENSE wrong with this cute little house.

NOW when we saw the place, we were being handled by a nice lady and her partner, Ryan. But they handed us off to some jack-off known as Derek.

He was nice the first two times I saw him, which were like, within a month of each other. After that, he falls off the map.

TWICE I had to go through the actual business portal for a question that had nothing to do with maintenance. JUST to get his fucking attention about something.

His automated response e-mail makes me want to stab someone, because I get it EVERY FUCKING TIME.

Our lease was up in June.

I STILL DON'T HAVE MY FUCKING PAPERWORK.

He said he put it on hold until he heard from our new room mate. I GAVE him her fucking information. I GAVE IT TO HIM. If he had any business sense at fucking all, he would have CONTACTED HER.

Ryan contacted littleshit when she moved in with us. This is no fucking different.

I get one notice that my grass is too tall, and NOW he send me some snarky-ass e-mail about how it looks awful and has to be done right away,

AND he upped my rent WITHOUT the signed lease forms.

FUCK HIM, FUCK THIS COMPANY.

They don't communicate, there's no management system to speak of, therefore, no one is held accountable for their actions.

AVOID LIKE THE PLAGUE.

I CAN'T WAIT TO MOVE OUTTA HERE.

Today

The world itself is completely broken.

Recently, we have all been trained very well. We are told that abusive partners are evil incarnate.

I agree. Oh, I agree. There is a special place in hell for those people. Anyone who thinks they can take advantage of another person like that for their own gratification should be castrated and fed their excess parts. Anyone who thinks that hitting or abusing another person because they have some twisted right to does not deserve to be in this country or on the planet as a whole.

But the same applies to whose to claim falsely that those things took place. How long is someone a victim when they do nothing about it for years? When they let someone else suffer too; like a child? When they have been telling other stories for years, and then changing it when it suits them? The false accusation is just as bad as the true act.

You'll go down in the same basket, you know. The lie. That lie....

But then - as a casual observer, you are forced to stop. Because of the world today, nothing is black and white. The people who abuse can trick their victims, make them unbelievable, get away with awful things - But the liars know that someone will believe them without questioning the story. They know that given good enough lies, they can 'win' the system and get what they want.

Because NOW, it is not simple. It isn't "YES EVIL DIE VILLAIN."

NOW it is also "WAIT, ARE YOU LYING TO ME?"

And there is no way to tell. None. You can know people as long as your life and they can be villains. You can connect completely with a victim and realize that they were the snake.

This world is impossible. So people chose NOT to pick sides.

...

Shame on all of you.

All of you.

Sawdust

Ever try to do something that you love so much that it hurts, but when you finally have time to indulge, it feels like your brain is made of lead, or your hands are scarecrow fingers, or your heart is a hollow drum?

Did you ever love doing something so much that when you feel like you can't, you end up hating it?

Did you ever love creating something so much that the thought of no one seeing or hearing or feeling what you do causes such an ache in your chest that all you want to do is tear it out and throw it away?

Have you ever felt such incredible remorse and longing and pain and joy that you think you're going mad with it, tearing your hair out batshit, and all you want is a moment of clear, emotionless silence to work out what it all means?

I feel like I have a head full of dry sawdust, and every once and a while it tickles my nose and when I sneeze I'm afraid that I lost an idea and I'll never get it back. And that thought triggers such an incredible panic that I don't know what to do with myself, so I fling open my laptop and stare at a blinking cursor, cursing myself out just so I can get a sentence down. ANYTHING.

Anything.

Day 17, 2018

[No prompt]
Their feet touch their noses as they curl into balls.
Eight little paws, four little eyes, two little noses.
Day and Night these two siblings,
White and tan and black and gray
Troublemaker and suck-up, predator and prey
victim and aggressor, but who is who when?
Both sweet and sincere with their innocent affection
Both full of energy and life and hope
Both loved so dearly and tenderly by me.
Two perfect pups; All mine!

DAY 16 2018

((Wow guys, I didn't think I was going to have so much trouble as I am. I don't seem to be as driven as I have before, So I apologize for the cynicism.))

Fields of Ash [Bradley]

I have such love in my heart
It's vast like the ocean and broad as the desert
It is in every way as viscious and cruel
And in every way as mysterious and beautiful.
And though I can liken it to these things with ease,
There is something these two vistas cannot be.
A landscape much harsher than either and yet;
one would never know what it had before been.
For just as my love expands and evolves and consumes,
That is as much as it destroys in it's wake;
for unlike a forest or swamp or a steppe
Ny love is as fields of ash.

Day 15 2018

This poem isn't going to be as fancy as all that, in fact I intend for it to be pretty basic, because what I'm writing about is pretty basic, like four ingredients in total, all of which combine to make this delectable, gooey mess that crackles when you bite into it, you know depending on how stale it is, and even if it's stale it is damn delicious and sugary and sticky and you can even mold them into shapes before you eat them, I know because on Halloween we made them into pumpkin shapes with food coloring to make them orange and then we stuck a cut up piece of peppermint leaf gummy into the top for a stem, and then of course there was this picture online of some one's creative masterpiece, which was of course a giant confectionery imitation of a turkey with M&Ms spilling out of where the thanksgiving stuffing would have been on the real thing, and I thought: I would totally eat that.

Day 14 2018

[No Prompt]

The wind is blowing madly and the sky is dark
within the heart, a stillness lies, silently apart.
The little ones fret, and pace and bark
as I struggle to complete my art
Alas, The poetry is dry this season
And I am busy with future and plans
my heart is forced to witness reason
and my mind all logic bans

Day 13 2018

Electrical Fire [Bradley]

It burns and it burns there
Lit like a split hair

Bursts into bright light
Crackling in the night

Smoldering smell of ozone
Charred down to the bone

Day 12 2018

Tiny gnat Big Forest [Frida Scofield]

One big day,
a bright big glorious day,
there was a gnat.
A tiny gnat,
A dark little spot of a gnat.
And this tiny gnat
with it's flappy buzzy wings
realized with much certainty
that they were in a forest
A big, huge forest
with huge, brown trees,
Broad, Thick, Tall trees.
And this gnat, awestruck it was!
This humble gnat
saw this forest as grand!
It was a Great, Grand, Awesome forest!
And it buzzed and swooped and
loop-de-looped among the leaves,
the wavy, green leaves,
and this simple gnat
was elated -
over joyed, bewildered, euphoric
dwarfed by this forest
and it's trees
and the trees' leaves
and their broad trunks
and it loved it so!
And this humble gnat then,
quite tired, quite old by the end of the day,
Settled upon one tiny vein
in a great big leaf
and it let out a sigh,
and happily died.

Day 11 2018

Memory brought about by a smell [Zsuzsa Manna]

I'm sick in bed.
The curtains are drawn,
and the glow of a full sun shines behind
leaving a halo of a healthy world
past my sick room.
The items I possess are stagnant.
Their creator sullied by flu
Their life on pause and stilled.
None of them talk to me this way.
When the door opens and a trail of aroma follows
little things animate;
Cinnamon bear and Toby blink sleepily
and the dollhouse lights come on
And Sarah peers at me through her tiny bedroom window
And she gives me a thumbs up
with her carefully sutured doll-arm.
It's hot tea, sleepytime,
a comforts now and forever as a vast, sighing 'OK'
to finally get some rest.
ANd when I awake, the room will be brighter.
And the colorful trinkets of my life will grin
to see me ready to play again.

Day Ten 2018

Intangible to Tangible [Ryan Plummer]

Style: Tanka

Some dreams are shadow
lurking in our deepest heart
Beyond achieving
But then reach out and touch them,
and see that they are in reach.

Day Nine

A Raindrop [Shana Rasmus]

A nother spring day,

R inging birdcall and blue skies
A labaster clouds hang low and light
I nviting watery descent.
N earest I can tell, peering up there,
D ownpours are certain soon
R iveting thunder and lightning too
O r else, more sun, after the last
P inging raindrops fall.

Day Eight

Poem for Jayce

When you came out of the mold
The whimsical craft team in the aether giggled
And the people-construction team frowned.
"Wait a sec," one said to the other
scratching the back of their head.
"That doesn't seem right.
There's too much suave under those curly locks;
and the piercing level of those eyes
is way too high!
I thought we were just making
a normal, average guy?"
The second people-constructor looked at you
and then pointed at the bottom
"Well actually see there?
This one's meant for another
So we gatta be sure they fit together
and the other one likes fun
and suave, and piercing eyes."
So they shrug and construct then passed you down the line
and you arrived just in time
to be mine.

Day Seven

Euphoria [Elena Martinez-Vidal]

Look at those faces.
Those big cute eyes and those cold button snoots.
The quirky eyebrows and the little toes
Oh my GOD the toes
and when they hop
like little foxes
up into my lap
as if they aren't growing steadily too big
and then peer up at me
with those EYES
And then there's the SNUGGLING
Oh my GOD the snuggles
And its like pup heaven
and I'm done.

Day Six

Wet Footprints [Thank you Carey Rasmus.]

I do not often visit the beach
though I can enjoy it when I go.
I like the sun,
the cool ocean winds
the warm sand and blue sky.
But walking in the sand is like dwelling in the past:
If you linger, you sink
and when you pull away to move forward
those imprints fade
and when you turn to look at where you've been
there's nothing but more sand.

Day Five

Theme is Hunger [Thank you Elena Martinez-Vidal]

Free Lunch; A Haiku

Something I love now
Once work has carried on long
Is the free food. Yum.

Day 4

Butterflies & Sunflowers. (But scary butterflies.) [Thank you, Morgan]

Their big yellow faces turned up to the sun
the birds and the bees are out havin' fun
the sunflowers taller and sunnier too
but something scary is lurking there too.
Colorful wings and delicate forms
flutter about like magical storms
And though they are pretty and vibrant and small
They really aren't all that harmless at all.
Eye-shapes on wings; a frightening trait,
and one butterfly wing can change all of fate.
Subtly and softly and mystically fierce
such a small thing can all of time pierce.
Delicately perched on a sunflower tall;
These butterflies are actually watching us all.

Day Three

First Day

Click click tap
Ding!
*yawn* "Hmm, breakfast aromas."
Psssssssssshtpsht psht psht whirrrrrr
drip drip drip sizzzzzzzle
tap tap tap
"Ha ha ha ha! beautiful weather!"
crinkle, vrrrrrip bap tink clunk.
Psssssssssshtpsht psht psht whirrrrrr
drip drip drip sizzzzzzzle
Shunka shunka shunka shunka
click click tap
Ding!
munch munch *gulp*
"Who is Antonio and may I hug him?"
click click tap
Ding!
swish swish, dribble splat wipe
Psssssssssshtpsht psht psht whirrrrrr
drip drip drip sizzzzzzzle
squeak click tap WHIIIIRRRRRRRRRRRR
Psssssssssshtpsht psht psht whirrrrrr
drip drip drip sizzzzzzzle
BAM
*yawn* "Whoa, what time is it?"
crickity crack snap pop streeeeeeeeeetch
Psssssssssshtpsht psht psht whirrrrrr
drip drip drip sizzzzzzzle
swish swish dribble splat wipe
Click click tap
Ding!

Poetry Month

Hey all you loyal followers of the intrepid Oru!

I would have posted this yesterday, but I didn't want you guys to think I was joking! But, since this IS the day of my birth, as w well as a beautiful spring morning, I will announce this months activity!

April is POETRY MONTH! AND since I missed yesterday I shall be granting you 2 poems to enjoy!

April 1st
**Fool's Gold**
A shining day
A gleaming sun and pale blue sky
An Easter Egg day in pastel.
Early and brilliant
Rise and shine like early birds
Worship what you will and how,
And if you are lucky:
It's more fun than this poem.

April 2nd
**Device**
I've contemplated my device
A thousand things to do on it,
Not one real face or voice,
All filtered through the screen.
I've received the best wishes
And the congratulations
And I've read and reread the jokes,
The political opinions, rants
Spiritual epitaphs for inspiration.
I like to peruse the arts,
The fictions and the factoids,
I see thousands of smiling faces,
And hundreds more sad eyes.
And if only
If only
Only
Wonder if those sad eyes
Could be made happy
By seeing a smiling face in person,
Close enough to be a screen
But in such greater, glorious, flawed
High definition.