Velvet Verbosity

He is a porcelain doll writ large, too tall for grace and yet, it is all he possesses in every gesture and every motion.  Even the way he eats cake is graceful, when the length of his limbs says it shouldn’t be anything but awkward.  He carries the refined features and low brow of the German or Dutch, and sits in the common modern repose - face over laptop - but his bend is different.  Perhaps it is the ghost of a smile that plays upon his perfect mouth as though his face could split open into laughter at any moment.  Perhaps it is nothing more than that strange sense of “other” we pretend doesn’t exist, but is betrayed by our constant fascination.  I let myself imagine that he is blissfully unaware of his outer beauty, so that when and if he ever looks up at another person, the smile he will surely gift will be innocent, for it is too tragic to think that such physical perfection corrupts the soul.

With love,

Place - Unaware

She was born fierce, never knowing her place whether that be her position, her race, her size, her gender, her skills, or her economic status.  Wherever she was, whoever with, her place was there, in that moment.  She vaporized boundaries on a minute by minute basis, unnerving most everyone she came into contact with. It was only after she had confronted the hoodlums that night, in the darkness of her own yard, that she would sit in wonder at her lack of awareness of the limits of her power, and a shiver ripped through her at what might have happened.

My pick of the week is newcomer Daddybookins.  We found each other on Twitter and he was excited to try his pen at the 100 word challenge, and he immediately set to work with his young son to create a whimsical 100 word poem on Place.  Head over to PeasandBananas to check it out, and remember to give him some extra special blog love.

In other words…

• The torture of not feeling place…(I,Rodius)
• If anyone has figured out how to see AuroraLee’s entry, please let me know.
• Give me the shivers… (Angelgal)
• “He needs a place…” (Lceel)
• She’s so not a chicken… (Patsy)
• The places you don’t want to go… (Laura)

That wraps up last week’s challenge.  For those of you that are new, welcome!  And for those of you lurking, visiting, or serendipitously stumbling your way here, speak up, we’d love to hear what you have to say in 100 words.  (If you need a debriefing on the challenge, go here but ignore the timelines in there.)

Between building a new website, starting a new business, working on a re-design of Velvet Verbosity (I’m so excited), and the general chaos of life, I’ve had no time to read anything this week.  In fact, do you hear that?  That’s the slow silent scream of all my plants drying up.  So this week’s word comes from an oldie but goodie, Jonathan Livingston Seagull, by Richard Bach.

Falter

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go water my plants before they stage a coup.

With love,

I’m on a copywriting deadline that is giving me a bit of a headache. Great gig, but trying to make copy for something completely uninteresting sound interesting is a bit of a challenge.  So hold tight folks, I’ll be back tomorrow with the roundup.  Or late late tonight if my eyes are still open.  To hold you over, a photo taken today on the drive home.  Couldn’t pass it up.

Rain - Lets Get Cozy

Sunday rain.  Bring out the tea, the blankets, the knitting and soft lights.  Bring out the apples and flour and brown sugar.  Bring out the warm socks, the fuzzy robes, and the old slippers.  Bring out the books, the fairy tales, the mysteries, and the legends.  Bring out the crockpot, the beef, the celery, onions and potatoes.  Bring out the spices and let’s make delicious smells and joyful noise in the kitchen while the rain sogs all the fallen leaves.  Tonight, while we sleep with the lingering smells of warm food, the rain will turn to snow. Let’s get cozy.

I did actually wake up to a rainy Sunday today, and while I didn’t do all of the above, I did do some housekeeping, some cooking, and some blog design updating.  It’s still a work in progress, as always.  My pick of the week is Angelgal.  She’s building a story and used the last two challenges to add to it.

In other words…

• The ironies of being God.
• When all hope is lost…
• Physicists in the rain (welcome newcomer Laura from Down Under!)

That wraps up last week’s challenge.  For those of you that are new, welcome!  And for those of you lurking, visiting, or serendipitously stumbling your way here, speak up, we’d love to hear what you have to say in 100 words.  (If you need a debriefing on the challenge, go here but ignore the timelines in there.)

This week the writing challenge comes from Welcome to the Monkey House: Stories - Kurt Vonnegut.  Haven’t read the whole thing. This is one of the many books that sits on my bathroom book shelf for bath time reading.

Place

See you soon!

With love,

Montreal - Outside B&B sometime around 2000

“The Bear” in 2005

PHOTOHUNT

With love,

He moves through the light and sound of his efficient machine, pulling levers here, pushing buttons there, trusting the process, a business acumen akin to faith.  He presents a mystery I don’t care to unravel, but now sitting across from me there is talk, and then there are the words between lines, unspoken but heard like thunderclaps.  We chatter about things pulled from the air to fill the space, idly taking inventory of possibilities.

He shifts, always moving, not just in body, but in mind.  Emotions and attention flicker and I wonder where the line is between his confidence and his fears. He would hate to know how he morphs so easily into awkward.  It would help him to know that awkward isn’t so bad. It is the awkward in all of us that endears us to others, wrapping tiny fragile tendrils around hearts.  It is the juice and gristle of compassion.  The very ground of tenderness.  The places we are all afraid to go.

I listen, watch, am perplexed and amused, but unmoved.  What he says means little since I am aware that it means little.  Instead I study the landscape of his face, for it is a curiosity to me, the bodies that our minds inhabit, and how the perception of the “who” is influenced by the “what”.  Peripherally I am aware of his collar because of its close proximity to his neck.  Some little corner of my mind collects the possibility of his scent, measures the pulse, and calculates the arc of electricity I would find if I touched my face there to breathe him in.  For it is in these crooks, these vulnerable joinings of this bone to that, softened by flesh, that we find the most extraordinary thing - the pulse of mortality.

Photo: The Searing Sound of Light - Ian Duncan Anderson (courtesy of)

I have been wanting to return to my own writing, so this week instead of a quote, my own 100 words on the challenge.

Lemonade - The Sweet and the Sour

They are 10 years old, the best of friends, still in overalls and pigtails, running a lemonade stand out on the front walk.  They sing to their customers hoping for big tips, and they are rewarded.  Everyone loves 10-year-old, blond, blue-eyed, budding entrepreneurs.  It’s sort of like puppies, or kittens, or baby coos.  Something about getting close to that innocence from which it is still possible to experience unfettered joy.  In just a few short years, these girls will shift hard into adolescence, and hurricanes of hormones, and clouds of self-doubt will begin to creep in.

It’s always hard to make my pick of the week.  Often it’s more about what kind of mood I’m in and what resonates with me more than anything else.  Sometimes life throws us curve balls, and in the wake of life altering events we search desperately to make sense of things, to go back in our mind again and again to find the moment where we could have done something differently.  We need to feel we have some kind of control over our fate, and that we aren’t just puppets knocking about on Fate’s stage.   Patsy captures this well with her piece this week.

In other words…

• More sweet and sour metaphors…
• A lemonade ghost story.

That wraps up last week’s challenge.  For those of you that are new, welcome!  And for those of you lurking, visiting, or serendipitously stumbling your way here, speak up, we’d love to hear what you have to say in 100 words.  (If you need a debriefing on the challenge, go here but ignore the timelines in there.)

This week the writing challenge comes from The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold again.  I just finished the book a couple of nights ago.  It was stunning, really.  I’d love to hear what you think if you’ve read it.  If you haven’t, don’t be scared away by the subject matter, just read the first chapter and you’ll be hooked.

Rain

I’ve been doing some other writing lately, and I may start sharing it here, so check back!

With love,

“I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear.” ~Martin Luther King Jr.

Feeling a little, no, a lot overwhelmed this week, and it’s only Monday!  Oy.  Not to mention I’m one of those people that suffers from Seasonal Affective Disorder, and it’s already starting to kick in.  But, the good news is that I still have a hard drive!

Last week the word was BEAR, which has a few different meanings.  I was curious to see which way you would handle it.  LouCeel is my pick of the week, with his interesting and moving piece on “This I Cannot Bear”.

In other words…

• Beware the morning bear.
• What a bear won’t do for….
• Bearing witness to self.

That wraps up last week’s challenge.  For those of you that are new, welcome!  And for those of you lurking, visiting, or serendipitously stumbling your way here, speak up, we’d love to hear what you have to say in 100 words.  (If you need a debriefing on the challenge, go here but ignore the timelines in there.)

This week the writing challenge comes from The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold.  This has been out for a little while and I had heard a lot about it, but hadn’t yet read it.  I came across it while grocery shopping and decided to pick it up, and now I can’t put it down!  I don’t know what to tell you about it, except READ IT.  NOW.

Lemonade

Not really the season for it, but let it bring some cheer as we begin the descent into winter.

With love,

I am sitting at Apple Care with a dead laptop.  My only laptop.  My only computer.  All evidence suggests a dead hard-drive, but hope springs eternal and I won’t cry until my personal Apple genius looks me in the eye and tells me it’s over.   Four minutes til my appointment.

***Update: My hard drive had some file corruption but no reported failures.   Nevertheless, I added 1TB to my storage arsenal bringing my total external hard drive space to 1,750 GB, plus another two free GBs from soonr.com, you know, just in case.  I spent 12 hours today between the Apple Genius Bar, choosing which kick-ass external hard drive would be my back up puppy, and then setting up some various back up solutions.  I already had the most important stuff backed up, but holy heck, you don’t know terror until you’re staring a potential hard drive failure in the eye.

So, all that to say that the new 100 Word challenge will be up by tomorrow night.  I’m reading a great book so I’ve been excited all week to choose a word from it.

In the meantime, why don’t you spend this unexpected free time backing up your hard drive like your Mama told you, eh?