Porch is now open for business.

[twopoint]

Last week it was snowing - this week it's in the 80's.  I had no choice but to dust off the candles on the porch and make the annual migration from kitchen table to jasmine covered porch.  Last night, I sat there scribbling in the notebook for an hour or so and noticed that a length of jasmine had wrapped itself around my arm.  Always the writing arm.  I forget about this over the winter and discover it again each year like a secret botanical love affair.  Someone might be able to give me a lofty, scientific explanation for why my jasmine reaches out and tangles in my hair, taps against my fingers and hooks itself into my clothes - but I really don't want to hear it.  This jasmine is the ideal consort - always happy to see me and pleased to see me writing.  It never asks me to fix things or organize a schedule.  It's not a boy-crush or a girl-crush, it's a jasmine crush.

Fixing things:  Apparently my eltro-magnetic field is off because everything is breaking.  I need only stand near a jump standard in the riding ring and a gust of wind will blow up from nowhere and knock a jump down, cracking the thing in two.  Double-ended snaps, padlocks, electric fencing, not working at all.  After sitting untouched for days, a light in the truck came on and nothing would make it turn off.  I'm running into door frames and getting splinters in my fingers.  Grace is a word that's been used to describe me only if the friend is half-drunk and laughing their ass off after seeing me stumble on air - but enough is enough. 

I think I've forgotten how to write (feared this would happen) but the word count is holding steady at 69k for the year.  I used the porch and jasmine to write a good portion of FT Chap 3 last night and I hope to have it revised by the end of the week.  But - god I write battles like a girl, all thoughts and feelings and not nearly enough hacking and gore.  I've come to terms with the fact that I'm really only interested in love stories and will soon be back to the original point of the fic in due time.  Who needs plot?

So I will go revise, but only after I watch this video of monkeys riding giant ROUS's in a Japanese zoo.  Sent to me by a fellow monkey-phobe, the only thing that could make this worse for me is if there was a clown standing in the corner of the frame.

Monkeys Ride Giant Rodents

Comments

[ahpookishere.livejournal.com]

How is that video scary?




I think I'm in love with them. >_

[two-point.livejournal.com]

The rodents are fabulous. The little monkeys, well, they have fingers and toes and a well-developed reasoning process and they're usually up to no damn good. But they are rather cute if I tilt my head to the left and squint my eyes.

[levadegratchets.livejournal.com]

that comment about the jasmine...that just snagged my mind and wouldn't let go. Hope you don't mind my silly little jaunt into your world...meep! For you and hoping here's a better week left.
*hugs*


He had escaped the banquet, escaped the warmth of the hall, the music, the light of a thousand candles. Escaped and climbed up to the highest balcony, one no one ever used any longer. Too high, too near the turbulent rush of a waterfall exuberant with the spring thaw.

Erestor loved it for its solitude. Loved it for the view of Ithil through the boughs of the two old pines, lone sentinels of this place. Leaning against the stonework, he sighed and let the peace of night wrap around him like a lover’s cloak. How beautiful the stars. They filled him with an aching longing that normally found its way into song, but tonight…. No, tonight, it was words. Carefully placing the bag he had brought with him, the one from long ago, carefully mended and tended, nursed and a bit ragged but oh…so beloved, he pulled out his inkwell, parchment and quill.

No feathers. Erestor liked to gnaw on the end of it as he silenced his thoughts and let the inward turn outward.

Whither did his thoughts roam this night? To a battlefield so far away, so near in the hearts of so many?

It would not go well. His heart told him this.

He hoped even so.

Hope was a hard thing, harder still for the eldest in his fair city. Hope was behind, and ahead… They knew not what lay before them and for that some of the people of the white city would not hope.

They waited.

Something touched his arm, and Erestor turned his head, looking down to see if someone had come near without him being aware.

No… No one. Then what…? It inched closer, curling around his arm, heavy-scented white blossoms dropping on the black of his tunic, filling the warmth of the night with floral perfume.
Erestor smiled and touched the tendril of Jasmine. It dared a bit more, white, white blossoms, waxy, touched with delicate pink, dropped into ebony, caressing the satin of his hair.

Content with this unforeseen companion, Erestor looked up and began to write.

[two-point.livejournal.com]

*faints*

*faints again*

This is, without a doubt, the best image ever. This is our Erestor. And when he's older and crabby and hardened by the world and desperately missing something that he'll never say out loud, the jasmine will remind him that "Hope was behind, and ahead . . ." (love that, by the way).

Everything you touch is filled with such lovely, careful hope - just enough, never too much. You hold the sadness and transform it into a subtle reminder of beauty. Your images always bring me into the present and won't let me forget that something remarkable is about to happen.

". . .the light of a thousand candles." I can feel this, and then the coolness as he climbs up, and the water.

Forget the week, this little story made my month/year. Have you considered going into the muse business? I hear there's quite a need for it right now.

[levadegratchets.livejournal.com]

Reporting for muse duty, sure! I'd do that.

and thank you. You write lovely things that make me smile.