Tag: fiction

Wednesday Works: The Mirror

She had lived in the old house for as long as she could remember. Her parents had lived in it even longer, and so had their parents and so on and so forth. If she did the math right it was her great x7 grandfather who had built the house for his wife. She had died before it was finished, but he still built it exactly as she had wanted it.

Over the years, family members had added on and changed, but the one thing that remained unchanged was the foyer. The front door had been repainted too many times to count, one over the other, and each morning more multicolored paint chips fell onto the porch. The carpet had been torn up, tacked form, replaced with wood, back to carpet. The rugs needed to be replaced.

The one thing that didn’t change in the foyer was the furniture. A small table by the front door where the lot of the family placed their things when they came home. She still had the scar from where she had smacked into the corner of the table when she was 2 and a 1/2. She still placed her keys there when she came home.

A fancy China cabinet stood across from the front door, taking up space and showing off their fancy China from the civil war era. The China had long been a topic of discussion, from when it was new, to the last 50 years or so when they toppled over and no one could figure out how to open the cabinet and fix them without shattering them. They had simply stayed that way for years.

By far, her favorite was the ornate mirror that hung on the wall near the stairs. It had been there since the very beginning. All her ancestors had used it to catch their last looks before leaving the house.

She used it then to catch her last look before heading out on a date. He would be there any minute.

“You gonna go out looking like a painted up whore?” The reflection of her great great great grandfather’s ghost appeared in the mirror behind her.

In the next instant, her great great great grandmother appeared next to him in the reflection. “Give her a break, Clem,” she said with a reassuring hand on his ghostly shoulder. “That’s the style these days.”

“Thank you, Grammy Charlotte,” She said as the doorbell rang. “You all be good tonight and don’t let Louis argue too much about the china. Nothing can be done yet.”

Grammy Charlotte rolled her eyes. “That man and his damn china.”

November Results and December Goals

Thank Goodness November is finally over. I usually love November for the intense joy of writing, but this November has kicked my butt in too many ways. I’m excited we’re now in December, a brand new month, with brand new goals, but that also means the year is wrapping up. Time to get my butt in gear and finish the year strong.

Here’s how I did in my goals.

November Results

NaNoWriMo

NaNoWriMo could have gone better this year. With oral surgery, a wedding to attend, antibiotics, cough medicine and everything else that went on this month, it was a struggle to find the time and the energy to sit down and write words. At one point, I was even close to 10K behind, but I slowly started to crawl my way back and try to make a dent in the actual novel I should be working on and not all my side projects. Thankfully, the last day of the month, I crossed the finish line on multiple projects and reached the 50K mark.

Continue Edits

This month, edits were stop and go. There were a few days where I was consistent in editing, and then there were more days where I wasn’t consistent at all. Unfortunately there were a lot of zeros on my spreadsheet for editing, but I expected that with it being NaNoWriMo and all. Drafting is definitely quicker than editing and usually gives me more words. But I did learn a decent trick over the last few weeks of editing backwards and keeping the story fresh in my head. Hopefully it helps me edit more words as we roll into December.

One Short Story/Finish a Short Story

This month, I worked a little bit on everything. I started a new short story and added that to my ever-growing list of short stories for the year. I finished two short stories this month and nearly caught up in my short story per month quota. By the end of the year, I hope to have 12 short stories that I can edit next year and see where they end up.

NYC Midnight’s 250 Microfiction Competition

The NYC Midnight Microfiction challenge went well. I was able to throw it together in a few hours, right in the heat of COVID and more than enough cough medicine to kill a horse. The genre was romantic comedy and I hope I caught enough romance and comedy to make it shine in only 250 words. Now I wait for the results.

Word Count: 50,721

Toward the end of October, I fell down my stairs and had to nurse that back to health with a metric ton of Ibuprofen and Tylenol. Then the first week of November I had oral surgery and had a tooth removed and had to take antibiotics and narcotics (which always make me queasy), then finally the week after that, COVID finally caught up with me and kicked my ass. Toward the end of the month, when I finally started to feel like myself again after a few days off, I managed to catch up on all my projects for the month. I really found the community of writers in my local area which helped me find the final push I needed to get some things done.

For the first time, I published some of my microfiction to Medium. You can read it and follow me here.

December Goals

One Short Story

I already have my idea for the short story in December. I already have a good portion of the short story from November mapped out. I’m hoping to work on both in the next month and finish my goal of 12 short stories this year strong. It’s been a really good year for short stories and I’m looking forward to adding another story to my ever-growing list.

Continue Edits

Edits are picking up again after NaNoWriMo and now that I have a direction, I’m ready to get moving and make as much progress as I can before the end of the year. I’m thinking if I spend at least thirty minutes a day doing some kind of editing, I’ll have more than I started with at the beginning of the month.

Poetry

On a whim, I signed up for a poetry competition. I’ve been looking for more publishing opportunities, and that will hopefully include poetry one of these days. The goal for the competition is one poem a day for 21 days. Either way, if I manage to get a few poems down, it’s more than what I started with at the end of the month.

What goal are you trying to wrap up by the end of the year?

Wednesday Works: The Snow Wife

The first day of winter was always the best. The weather getting colder, the first snow falls, the garish sun hiding away so she could be seen again. The first day of winter was the first day of his life for so many years and the last day of winter was the day he went back to his boring human life.

As a young man, he had felt the pull of a winter magic. She was the most beautiful woman he had ever met, and they had had a wonderful winter together, and then as the spring appeared, she told him the truth.

The magic was beautiful, but the magic couldn’t keep her alive past winter. The magic kept her young and beautiful and he promised to visit her year after year. Year after year, she stayed the same, but year after year, he grew older.

He had a feeling one of the years coming up would be his last. The winters were no longer as kind as they used to be. But he would still go back to her, as long as he was living.

Once the drifts of snow got deeper, he pulled himself from his cozy chair and his mountain of blankets, got dressed in his warmest coat and made the trek up toward the hill where they had first met.

With each step, his legs grew heavier, his breath shorter, coming out in puffs of steam. When he reached the top of the hill, exhaustion threatened, not too far off, but he built a snowman anyway. One with a coal smile and a cute little carrot nose. A snowman with gentle arms of sticks, with a pink scarf and the wide brimmed hat she had left behind.

When he was done, he sat down in the snow in a huff to catch his breath. Over the years, the magic had taken longer and longer to work.

Just as he was about to give up and go back home, the thought he was too old for magic swimming in his old head, she appeared.

The snow woman was just as beautiful as he had always remembered. Her dark hair cascading down her shoulders, the wide brimmed hat framing her face as if it were artwork, her eyes warm and bright, even on the coldest day of the year.

“I fear I don’t have much time left,” He said, his words forced out through puffs of air, still trying to catch his breath. “This may be the last winter we have together, my love.”

She simply smiled and sat next to him. As she took his hand in hers, it felt real and solid. “I know,” She said gently. Her smile used to be enough to ease all the pain in the world, but it did little now. “Just lay yourself down and fall asleep in my lap like you used to.” She smoothed his hair gently. “Like that first time, and when you wake up, everything will be new again.”

“Just like the first time,” He said, easing his head onto her lap and looking up at the flurry of snowflakes dancing down upon the earth.

He wished he had brought her a warmer jacket all those years ago.

Wednesday Works: The Secrets of Flowers

Someone was leaving her flowers. Beautiful, bold bouquets with all kinds of arrangements of flowers. Some of them were simple, a small arrangement of daisies and primrose and a few others that were just a few flowers, nothing massive to start. As time went on, they became more wild, more overt. Someone was trying to send her a message, but she could never figure out how they were getting into her bedroom. She was the only one who had the key to her room and it wasn’t as though she was passing it around freely to her other fellow boarders.

It wasn’t as though she invited a gaggle of people into her room either. She had scored a single dorm and wouldn’t have given it up for anything. Somehow, someone was getting in to leave her flowers.

“Maybe it’s a ghost,” her best friend, Tara, said as she painted her nails a dark red in the student lounge. “You do know this used to be the winter home of the famous director, Zatz Katz, right?”

She refused to believe it could be a ghost. A ghost couldn’t lift or move real objects like that. It had to be someone else.

“Melv,” She said next, blowing on her wet nails. “Please back me up here, this place is creepy and totally could be haunted, right?”

Melvin, the hottie with the unfortunate name that had tried to shorten it any way he could just shrugged. “I’m just going to say don’t think Zebras.” He sipped his coffee and continued to scroll through his phone. He was so cool, none of the high school drama seemed to touch him.

He realized they were both looking at him with confusion across their faces. “When you hear galloping, don’t think zebras, think horses?” He asked, as if everyone had heard it before. “Look, there has to be a simpler explanation than a ghost, Syd.”

Just the way he shortened her name, as he did with everyone else, made her chest feel light, but it wasn’t enough to pull her from the mystery at hand.

The next time it happened, she came back from the showers to find a large bouquet of flowers she couldn’t even name, but were the most beautiful flowers she had received yet. She instantly sent a text to Tara and Melv, her two best friends. Maybe they could figure it out.

Tara arrived first, her face mask still on, in the skimpiest pajamas she had ever seen. Obviously, she has caught her by surprise. Melv showed up a few moments after, in his typical silk pajamas, his hair mildly tousled, always the epitome of cool.

“More flowers?” He asked, as if he seemed to know. She hadn’t exactly been thinking straight when she had sent the text message, fear and excitement surging through her.

Words were hard sometimes around Melv, so she just nodded.

“Show me,” he said next.

She blindly led him into her dorm room, thankful it was clean enough. Still, it felt strange to have him (and Tara) there, like a strange invasion of privacy. Thankfully, he seemed to only focus on the bouquet set up perfectly on her desk by the window.

“You have a secret admirer,” he said, once he had looked over the bouquet. “This one means they really like you,” he said pointing to a small bloom. “And this one, well,” he gave a small chuckle. “They want you to see them.”

Tara scoffed, her arms crossed across her chest. “Didn’t know you were so invested in flowers, Melv,” she said. It was obvious she was uncomfortable. Upset about something.

Syd looked at him, really looked at him for the first time. It wasn’t like Melv to be into anything that wasn’t considered cool. Yet, as she looked at him, she realized the bottoms of his silk pajamas were covered with dirt and dust.

“How do you know so much about flowers?” She asked him. “And what happened to your pants?”

He looked at her and truly smiled, finally knowing she understood. “Would you believe that Zatz Katz had secret tunnels built behind the walls and one leads to your very dorm room?”

“And the flowers?” She asked next. How could the popular Melv be interested in her?

“Well,” he said turning back toward the stunning bouquet. “I’m pretty sure this one is saying I want to ask you out.” He pulled it from the bouquet. “What do you say?”

“Yes,” She said with a smile. “But next time don’t sneak into my room.”

Melv just smiled. “Only if you ask me to.”