Tagged: Husband
Someone Has To Color In Between The Lines
But not my husband.
I’m working nights now, teaching pastry arts at a local community college. My husband is home with the kiddies, and sometimes they do arts and crafts. I can just see him, gathering the kids at the kitchen table, getting out the crayons, the Wikki-Stix, the Play-doh.
The kiddies sculpt things like this:
Bawk!
After he put them to bed, my husband sculpted this:
Baaaaaaaaaaaawwwk!
On Wikki-Stix night, I came home to this:
And this:
He called her "Bootsie."
And on drawing night, the kiddies made these:
Oh, how I loathe making school lunches.
And my husband drew this after he put them to bed:
It must be made clear that he doesn’t do these things when the kids are awake. Thank goodness! Because I color in between the lines, and I’d have to ask him to cease and desist with the naughty artwork. That would be a shame because I think he has talent…and I’m looking forward to carpentry night.
Writing and Fighting
You might find this hard to believe (not) but I think about work all the time. Right now I’m writing a superhero story under a very tight deadline – September 1st. I usually like a little more time to ponder, edit and revise but this story is really flying out of me (haha). Two reasons for this, I think.
One: I’m thrilled to be writing it. That helps.
Two: I’m becoming a more experienced writer. No, I will not just throw that out there without specifics.
There’s a scene in my head. It always starts with dialogue. Great dialogue can do a lot to paint the scene in a reader’s head, but there has to be some description. What to write? Only the telling details, of course. (Gonna go out on a limb and cite Dwight Swain, here, “Techniques for the Selling Writer.”) As I left my writing session at Starbucks and drove to the grocery store to buy a baguette for dinner last night, I realized I often reject the most telling details and leave them in my head and off the page because they seem too obvious or corny. But guess what? The reader can’t read my MIND! To bring my scene to life, I must put THOSE details on the page.
An Homage to TOO HOT TO TOUCH by Louisa Edwards Coming August 2nd! Love hot chefs? Me too! Yay! Click pic for details.
What does this have to do with fighting? Well, since I’m writing first-draft smut I’m feeling pretty frisky and my husband was annoyed that he was taking the kids to the drive-in last night and wouldn’t be able to take advantage of all that frisk. Since we’ve been together for fifteen years, a lot of our communication was non-verbal. He didn’t actually say this. I inferred it from the sour expression on his face when I told him I had just written a sex scene and I slid my barefoot up his shin and into the leg of his shorts. Seeing that sour expression made me decide not to tease him. Instead, I went into the next room and checked my e-mail at which point he followed me and started a fight because “we were having chatty time and I left to get on the computer AGAIN.” Now, there were all sorts of other factors going on, too. I could tell he’d skipped lunch because he was a bit frenetic. He knows damn well my guilt about all the time I spend working is a hot button for me. We fought for a few minutes, him agressing, me justifying, until he said, “What made you think I didn’t want to talk anymore? I was talking to you!”
I used my new telling details technique to tell him exactly which non-verbals cues had made me leave the kitchen. Until that moment, I hadn’t really been aware of them. I’d just been reacting. I finished up my list with, “And did you eat lunch today? Because you seem a little frantic.” He was floored. And impressed. And suitably repentant. Lest ye think he is anything but perfect, the entire time he was torturing me, he was also making dinner. Pork butt on the rotisserie, zucchini and tomato gratin, french fries, green beans and my contribution, a store-bought baguette (haha).
Good writing and fighting? Pay attention! The difference is in the details.
