I found a book at the little freebie library called "The Hello Fears Challenge" by Michelle Poler. It's a 100-Day Journal for self-discovery. I thought this was pretty cool, and someone had already written on the first couple of pages. It feels a little voyeuristic to see their answers.... their fears. They wrote something extremely intimate on the pages that breaks my heart. I wonder who they are. I wish I could comfort them.
What do you say to someone whose inner demons are so loud that they can't hear anything beyond it? How do you comfort them? Would they even hear what you had to say, or would it be like a sandcastle too close to the shore? The waves sweep in, and suddenly, all that work is just gone?
I just want this specific person to know that I read your words. I heard you. I hope you are well. I pray the book was placed in the box because you realized that you are worthy of good things, and I hope you choose yourself every time. I hope you walked away from what has stopped serving you as a higher being.
I'm borrowing a really beautiful scarf from Sue. We went walking in the hills by the commune, and I was exhausted. She's doing this every day and offered to have me come up to walk with her, but man, I was dragging my feet by the time we were barely up hill, and when the sun goes down.... call it superstitious, but I sort of want to be inside. She showed me the spot called "the coyote run," which is a path the coyotes move through. It's dark on that path and so covered with trees that you can't see far into the space.
I had a chance to pet so many dogs on our walk. Of course, they were all friendly. She remembers the names of every single dog and which ones are polite and which ones you shouldn't pet. It was a pretty cool little night. I did laundry at the commune because it costs so much money to do laundry here at our apartment.
The commune is talking about breaking up and moving off. Darlene wants to head out of state, but she's still trying to figure out where exactly to go. She's thinking about Florida, and having lived in Florida myself, I told her she needs to be there in the summer because when Jeffrey came to visit us, he had a really hard time with the heat. I don't think they would have as bad a time, but they should be aware that it's so muggy that it feels like you're in a sauna 24/7 during the summer. The storms are pretty cool, though.
Darlene and Mr. M are on a huge yacht right now in Santa Barbara. Mr. M sent a picture of a seal on the edge of his yacht. It's crazy! The seal looks as big as a beluga whale. I wonder if it weighs as much?
I think that if everyone leaves California.... I don't know if I'd stay, either. It's so expensive here. The Arizona commune is asking us to sell our things and move back in. Last time we were there, it was so much fun. I cooked 12 banana bread pans to feed everyone. That only lasted a few days. We'd all go swimming together. We'd eat together. We took turns cooking. We have someone who knows how to sew, so we often get our clothes fixed. We would go to rummage sales as a group. It was a lot of fun, and then when I moved out, it was almost too quiet.
Writing Update
S.H. I did it. I went back and deleted a few hundred words from chapter 1 that I felt didn't move the story in the direction I wanted. I'm almost done editing chapter 2 as we speak. This story has so much room for details, but the chapters are already pretty long. I have one chapter that's 12,000 words. Yep, I'm going to cut that down into three chapters. I don't want anything longer than 4,000+ at the most. I can't believe I originally posted this story. It has every beginner mistake a person can make. Too much "tell" and not enough "show," which I am slowly fixing. The paragraphs are long with too many ideas that could be cut into different paragraphs. I can see what people said about my writing years ago. It's really a lot of fun going back to this early project and saying, "I see the bones. Time to cut the fat."
B.N.F. I'm frustrated with this. It's a very lean story. It needs more personality. I'm not sure if I should abandon this one. I still need to send this off to my NaNoWriMo mate, who said she wanted to read it. I wanted it to be a little better put together before I sent it to her.... But it really reads like an outline. I think this is the one I stayed up all night to work on while she worked on her NaNoWriMo project. We had snacks. We partied when we started to get too sleepy. We stopped writing long enough to read the very LAST paragraph we worked on every thirty minutes, so a lot of "out of context" reading. It was one of the best nights I've had as a writer. It was a writer retreat of sorts, but in our own fashion.
E.W. I was asked if I ever wrote people I know into my stories.... I got to chapter 6 on this and yep, there it is. I wrote Jeffrey into my book. I don't know if I should tell him, or if I should change the character or if I should leave it in. I stopped reading when I saw him there. I will go back and finish reading. I need to see where exactly I need to change the story, because my last reader said that the ending was a little unbelievable and the fight scene was more like a young adult book. I think I was afraid of writing darker stories back then. I'm not so shy now. I will torture my final girl to hell and back! She can take it. I had this dream of utter violence and I want to incorporate it into the book in Stephen King style. Doesn't he get a lot of ideas from his nightmares too?
