Armageddon picks

Here goes:

Finlay vs. Mark Henry (Belfast Brawl): I can't imagine ever rooting for Mark Henry, or ever understanding any push he may receive in his life. Finlay, all the way.

Matt Hardy vs. Kozlov: See above. Matt Hardy.

Rey Mysterio vs CM Punk, IC Tournament: I would have picked Rey, were it not for the recent developments concerning the Tag titles. With Miz and Morrison regaining the tag belts in a most unusual manner, in a house show in nowhere, Ontario, doesn't that just pave the way to new Slammy winner Punk to regaining the IC title? I'm not sure how Rey's height will affect the administration of a GTS, though. Punk for gold.

Eight Diva match: With Michelle McCool's recent heel turn, I doubt her team will work well together. Combine that with the talent resting squarely on the official heel side, and I see Maryse the hometown girl coming out on top.

Batista vs. Orton: Orton has been gearing up since his return, and Batista's only been used to put various heels over. I don't see this trend reversing anytime soon. Orton wins. (Sorry, Dave! You know I love you anyways, right? :-) )

Edge vs. Jeff Hardy vs. HHH: Hardy is looking more and more like a Rumble shoo-in. I see Trips and Jeffro going at each other mercilessly once more, with Edge sneaking in to eke out the win.

John Cena vs. Chris Jericho: They've been building Jericho so far up lately (Superstar of the Year? Really?), it can only be to have Cena fight the good fight and conquer the not-so-big but oh-so-nasty Y2J.

On a side note, I will begin writing again, I promise. I'll even explain why I haven't been writing, and hopefully, it won't sound too much like an excuse. We'll see. But for now, there's wrestling on.

Vista voice recognition

I have just bought a headset and I have been fiddling around with the voice recognition software that comes packaged with Vista. The results are , well , mixed at best . Just look at what it does To punctuation for example , like in the previous sentence . Or that capital T . For what it's worth, it doesn't care one way or the other whether I pronounce it nanoWRImo or nanoREEmo (although everyone knows it should be the former.) But it does yield some choice bits: when I first realized just how slow going this learning curve was going to be, I will admit that I had a few words for my shiny new microphone. The following is what appeared on screen:

Why is it that the machine understands what I’m saying except when I'm trying to write more words and my mother fought king novel.

That interrupted me in mid-rant. Funny as hell but not quite accurate. The bottom line is i need to put this away at least until December because my novel Seven new peace a sheet Is certainly not going to get written within the next century With this thing. Notice that others swear word In the previous sentence?

PS: Please don't judge me by the above disaster. It was dictated to my machine. Random capitalization, spacing and so on are not really my fault. I will take responsibility for swearing at inanimate objects, however.

day 18

And the last week has felt like the second month of a gym membership. That initial oomph has, shall we say, left the building? But I'm plodding on; after the major skid of 0 words over four days last weekend, I've pulled back onto the road and readjusted my targets to complete 50K by the 23, i.e. before Survivor Series starts.

To continue with my gym analogy, I used to use those programmable bikes that had a screen with a computerized "opponent" for you to race. No matter how high I would set it, I would always fight with everything I had to ensure I totally ANNIHILATED its results. Not just keep up with him, not beat him by a nose - no, I had to humiliate the snot out of that pixellated racer. Competitive, moi?

So now I'm out to "beat" NaNo by a whole week. That some people are up to 250K is irrelevant: the target is 30 days, and I need to reach the finish line with plenty of room to spare.

Enough about me. I just wanted to announce that my main character has finally gotten his first GIRLFRIEND. Oooh, kissy, kissy all around...

Next chapter, just over the horizon: her overprotective big brother's gonna find out ;D

day 9

Woot! Weekend target reached...just over 25K, and my main character has finally run away from home. And there I was thinking he'd have left by, oh, chapter 3!

So his childhood took a far greater place on my novel's stage, and here I am, halfway through NaNo, and he's all of 14. But I have a few side plots that got nicely developed, so future plot twists will hopefully make some kind of sense.

So, for the next week, I'm aiming for between 5-10K, depending on the amount of work waiting for me at the office. We'll see how it goes.

day 8-9

Technically, it's day 9, but my word count was updated on day 8. So there.

40% to "winning" NaNoWriMo. I'm gonna try my darnedest to knock another 5K out tonight and tomorrow, so I'll be halfway there by the time the week starts. Yay me!

The next issue raising its ugly head on the horizon is that I sincerely doubt I'll be anywhere near done with my story. Will I stick with it, once the looming threat of NaNo failure has passed? Will I manage to complete my novel? Or will I move on to those other stories that plot bunnies have been whispering to me ever since I started on this crazy adventure. No, seriously - I have a zombie superhero story, an anthropomorphic animal pirate story and a supernatural thriller all floating around my mind. (Yes, I have scribbled down my main ideas so they don't fly back off into the ether...)

Time will tell, but I really am looking forward to seeing my progress bar turn green on the NaNo site. (The one on the right doesn't change colour, I don't think, but the site says it should go from saying "participant" to "winner." Yay!)

day five

I am 37 words away from being 25% done. Wow.

It had improved very, very slightly, but most of it is still utter tripe. And that's OK. Maybe that's why this strange character came along and insisted I write this piece of historical fiction when I had never attempted anything remotely close: to make me hear my own voice. Because that's mainly what's wrong with my novel - it sounds like me, a contemporary woman, rather than the narrator of a piece of historical fiction about a young boy coming of age. Besides, I'm not overly fond of kids, so inventing his childhood has been, well, inconclusive. It would be painful to reread, but that is for another time. If NaNoWriMo teaches me that I can beat the monster that is procrastination into submission, even temporarily, and that I should write what I know, then it will have been a success, even should I choose to delete the file once December 1st comes around. I doubt that I'll do it, but it would be fitting to represent how NaNo is about the experience.

I wrote very little last night, because I was watching So You Think You Can Dance Canada, and constantly flicking to the election coverage on ABC (least nauseating and obviously biased - hell-o, Fox). Two things: if I hadn't posted it before, I've been telling my boyfriend that Nico will take it all. (I was right about the final three on the last season of SYTYCD, right down to the order. Yay Joshua and Twitch!) As for Obama, godspeed, my man, the road ahead is long. But somehow, your presence made my world feel a little safer today.

two days in

...and it's going well. Over 8,000 words in two days, albeit two weekend days after I'd been basically asleep for 48 hours. Nonetheless, I am 16% done with NaNo.

I find that highly worrisome, since starting things is generally not a problem for me. It's what comes next. It's like swimming laps; past the first dive or push off from the wall, I tend to flounder. I wane, I fluster, procrastination seeps in and things fall by the wayside. I have to keep my focus; that, probably much more than any number of words, is my personal challenge in accomplishing NaNoWriMo. (BTW, I even considered adding procrastination as a label for my posts, but that would be giving it too much power; the raging beast will remain anonymous, and I will continue to fight it, sight unseen. Right now, for some odd reason, I've become enthralled with Spider Solitaire. Yeah, I know. Actually, it would probably be Minesweeper but I don't have enough control with the touchpad on my laptop. So Spider Solitaire it is. Nuff said.)

To top it off, I had three puny but nonetheless actual freelance assignments this weekend. Add to that NaNo forums posts and blog entries, and my output has been really significant. Here's to hoping I keep it up.

Still, I'm surprised that it has gotten going with such vigour; I mean, I'm at 8,000 words, and my main character is all of nine years old. Tomorrow's text should cover the event that defines his young life, the turning point for the entire novel's plot. (I knew that plotting out my novel would help propel me forward!) Wish me luck.

life during NaNoWriMo

First off, I'm going to bid adieu to the Word Count listing I have in the right hand column. Its existence was to spur me on to write 50,000 words ASAP, which wound up taking me well over six months, culminating only one week short of the start of NaNoWriMo. So it has accomplished its mission, but you will no longer see any numbers in brackets at the end of my posts. That much has been accomplished.

So far, I'm off to a fairly strong start, although that is to be expected of myself. My problem will usually appear sometime mid-week of week 2, around the 20,000 mark, when it gets to be a real drag to write nearly 2,000 words on a weeknight - probably on Mondays, when Raw is on. I'll try to build up a solid lead so that I can maneuver around, say, impromptu freelance assignments, but I have a feeling things won't go as smoothly as they are right now. Yeah, I know, it's the first friggin' day and I should calm down. But trust me, I know there a wall out there, a wall of my own building, and I'm gonna hit it head on, most likely sooner than later.

After NaNo, I promise myself to read a good book, perhaps to wash away all the crap I've been producing over the last month (and judging by the first 5,000 words, it will be crap. Believe you me.) And maybe lay off the historical fiction for a good long while, and return to my usual bitching...um, I mean editorializing, of my little corner of the universe. On the other hand, I will be sure to blog out my Survivor Series predictions and reactions. Certain things are unavoidable.

writing prompt: i knew there was a reason why i hate snow

I haven't loved snow for years. Since I was about eleven, actually. I will always remember one particular Christmas Eve. Pretty much since I outgrew Santa Claus, family tradition had it that we got together at our house on Christmas Eve, went to midnight mass (except for my father, who had a nap on the couch in the meantime), came back to enjoy my mom's and my aunt's great cooking, and unwrapped our presents at two or so in the morning before heading to bed. Even though we were at home, and our guests were my mother's sister and her husband and two kids, we all dressed up for the occasion. Nice dresses, nylons, dressy shoes - the works.

So this particular year, my mother, my aunt, my two cousins and I crammed ourselves into our sky blue Toyota Corolla and headed out to church, about a mile away. The evening was grey and heavy, but not too chilly. We attended midnight mass and skittered out of church an hour later, anxious to get home and start the festivities. I use the term skittered since that's pretty much what we all did the second we set foot onto the front steps. The freezing rain probably began to fall the second we were all inside, for by the time we emerged, it had already stopped, leaving the entire town coated in a thin sheet of ice.

I should mention that my home town has a hill at one end and a dip in the middle. My mother was always a skittish driver, but this was simply beyond her abilities. We tried one road; fortunately, we were completely alone when he failed to make it up the hill and proceeded to slowly skid back down to our starting point. We tried another. This time, it was my mother who backed off, convinced that we would be unable to control the car's descent and that we were doomed to smash into the old train overpass if we tried. She parked the car back in the church parking lot and declared that we were going to have to walk home. In our dresses, nylons and dress shoes.

We slipped and slid along as best we could, until we got to the parking lot right in the hill where the train passes overhead. At this point, I had begun to understand my mother's fear; I wasn't sure I would be able to make it down that short stretch of sidewalk without doing a faceplant. So much so, in fact, that I pulled my winter jacket as low as it would go under my bottom, and simply slid down the hill without the benefit of a Crazy Carpet. It ruined my nylons, but I was otherwise intact. My mother and aunt had a go at it standing up; if memory serves me correctly, one finished on her derrière as myself, the other had at least a hand on the ground, and may have completed the maneuver facing backwards. The boys instead opted for crossing the street and tramping down the low snowbank that had accumulated there on previous nights. Other than the incline on the other side of this dip, the rest of the trip was uneventful, other than the fact that by the time we got home, our fingers were numb from grabbing any railing, post or icy surface we could to stay upright.

My father had a bemused look on his face when he saw us walk in, and asked us what had taken us so long with a smirk. Nonetheless, the fire in the fireplace may have been the cosiest I've ever experienced, and the rest of that particular Christmas went off as planned, without a hitch.

So what does this have to do with snow? Well, not much at first glance. But it marks the start of my not appreciating winter as a whole. I could also relate the times I tried skiing, or snowboarding, or the time my mother broke her wrist when I tried to teach her to skate. Let's just leave it at "I'm not made for winter climes." If I could hibernate, I would. If I could have a beach house in the Caribbean, I would.

Tonight, my plans have gone awry; I'm waiting for the tow truck to come pull my car out from its forty degree angle in the snowy ditch (although, now that I look at it, it's not a ditch, it's simply the other side of the snowbank.) And as I stand here by the side of the deserted road, I remember: I knew there was a reason why I hate snow.

(777)

ooh, ooh, ooh...groovy new word prompts!

On one of the NaNo forums, someone posted a link to oneword.com, a site that gives readers exactly one minute to write about the word that pops up at the top of the screen. OK, so I'm hijacking it for my own purposes and will post my text here instead. Here goes:

WORD: gentle

More than anything, he enjoyed her touch. There was something about how she approached him, and stroked his skin, so tender, so gentle. No words could convey the same emotion, the same depth of connection and commitment than a simple stroke of her fingertips. He loved her, and she loved him - that much was apparent from the tips of her fingers.

Hey, that was fun! Let's do another!

WORD: satellite

She couldn't remember what it was like before he came into her life. She had felt hopelessly adrift in a sea of despair. He was her rock, her anchor; he was her everything. In fact, her existence, which had been so lonely before, had found its meaning in being a part of his. He was earth, and she was his satellite, in constant elliptical orbit.

Nifty!

(191)

I really should post a warning, so...WARNING

This is the week before the start of NaNoWriMo. My goal is to increase my daily word count to reach a level equivalent to what I'll be writing for the next month.

Therefore, I would like to suggest that anything I have written since, oh, last week or so, and anything I write from now until, well, December 1st, is liable to make very little sense, since it is full-on freewriting with only one aim in mind, that of upping my word count. Therefore, please forgive any horrid grammatical, spelling and syntaxic aberrations that may pop up every other line. It's quantity over quality time.

Don't worry, it'll be over before you know it, and hopefully, I'll have if not a novel, then at least 50,000 words of a novel under my belt. Maybe I'll even share - if you're nice.

(141)

Cassandra

She shut down her computer, its fading lights reminiscent of her dimming interest in her career, or at the very least, her part in this particular corporation's future. She pushed away from her desk, swung her faux leather executive chair to face the twenty-fourth floor windows of her corner office, and looked out on the city that her company virtually owned. Try as she might, she just couldn't be bothered.

Perhaps it was the time; it was late, and she felt the tiredness creep into her bones. But no, that wasn't it. No amount of sleep, save perhaps a quick and merciful death, could refresh her outlook on things. She had slowly slid down the slope of cynicism, and there was no escape. She wondered where her youthful, idealistic self had gone, and why it had been replaced by this drone with an infallible sense of futility. She hated being cynical; she hated it even more when people indubitably proved her right.

Enough was enough.

For a moment, she cursed the fact that skyscrapers weren't built with windows that opened. Not that she would throw herself to the sidewalk far far below; that had never been her scene, and she doubted any amount of corporate indoctrination could push her to such insanities. On the other hand, she would have greatly enjoyed just dangling her feet over the ledge and feeling the breeze at this altitude. She immediately thought of the 911 calls and the cries of "Jump!" barely reaching her from below that such odd behaviour would undoubtedly provoke.

She swiveled back to her desk and pulled out an old, chewed-up #2 pencil from her desk drawer. Ripping a page from her legal pad, she began to write in long slanted strokes. She poured her emotions onto the page, explaining in great eloquent passages why she could no longer keep her position as Vice President of Human Relations for the world's third largest computer chip manufacturer. Most of it had to do with the fact there were no human relations to be experienced anywhere within said firm. Once the sheet was fully covered in blue ink, she rose, crossed the hallway with the page tightly clenched in her left hand, and gently inserted it into the shredder in the copy room. It made a satisfying crunch as it annihilated her seventy-second resignation letter. She shut the lights, closed her office door, locked it to ensure the safety of the crucial human relations secrets of the third largest computer chip manufacturer, and headed for home, where at least, a small gray cat awaited and cared.

(434)

writing prompt: who am i?

I am god, or rather, goddess. I cause the sun to rise and to set, and to return the next morning. I threw the moon in its orbit, and I sprinkled the stars, some would say at random, but I know better. I know all. I am magnetic north that points the way, in some ways, I am the way. I am the waves of amniotic fluid that gives life, I am the raging waves that destroy without even slowing. I am the wind that picks up dust and molds it into man, I am the knife that cuts out a rib to make him woman as companion. I am the earth they all walk on, this world and all others, for I hung them in the sky. I am father time and mother nature, the background and the pacing depend on me. I am. I create. I destroy. I begin anew. I am the writer.

(156)

writing prompt: Yana's collection

Note: This prompt was also picked up from Blogger's just updated blog listing. I didn't manage to click on the link before it faded. I apologize to Yana and her true collection of whatevers for what I have warped them into. Here we go:


She leaned down by her bed and reached beneath it, groping in the dark for her memory box. Her knuckles brushed against the corner; she shifted slightly and gently pulled her treasure out from its darkness. She smiled, a wide grin bordering on the giggles, and plopped back down on her plush bed. She blew on the box lid and wiped the box with her sleeve before setting it down on her pink bed covers.

She lifted the lid with great reverence, in honour of the value of the box contents. Not only did they represent her dearest possessions, but they had also been that of their previous owners. Some may have said that all of these were stolen; she would be adamant that they had been willingly given and that, once given, it would have been rude for anyone to claim them back.

One by one, she pulled them out, and her thoughts went out to the boys - her boys - and the times they had shared. She enjoyed the feeling between her fingers, the lingering warmth, the slick surfaces as she turned each over with great care. She almost dropped one when a knock at her bedroom door shattered her reverie.

"Yana, honey? Dinner will be ready soon." Ever since they had that now-infamous conversation earlier this year, her mother knew better than to try to open the door. Besides, she knew full well it would be locked. Privacy was very important to a young lady, after all.

"All right, mom. I'll be down in a minute," she answered brightly. She paused, listening to her mother's footfall fade as she walked back down the hall, before turning her attentions back to her precious secrets.

For a moment, she thought the one she held still throbbed. For her, of course. Before packing them back away, she pulled them out and lined them up in succession on the edge of her bed. In her haste, she forgot to lay out a towel - oh well, she could always throw everything into the laundry after dinner. It always did please her mom to see her do chores unprompted, too.

Eight little hearts, all in a row. Many a teenaged girl aspires to amass so many, but most draw the line at a virtual collection. Yana was not your run-of-the-mill girl, however. Hearts that were declared hers could never, would never, be pledged to anyone else, ever. Yana made sure of that. She hummed to herself as she packed up her bounty and returned it to its shadows. She almost skipped down the hall to dinner; admiring her collection never failed to lift her spirits.

(444)

10-minute word war

With a sigh, she finished the last page of her favourite novel, with its dog-eared cover and curled pages. That may have been the last thing she could actually savour in this life. A corny B-series vampire novel by a virtually unknown author, who had died of a heroin overdose in a strip motel somewhere off highway six on the outskirts of Orlando. Her favourite book, and its brilliant characters, seemed just as doomed as she. It was time; she had decided this a long time ago, but she wanted everything to be just right. And tonight, it would be.

She picked up her great-grandmother’s inky wool shawl and draped it across her shoulders. There was a chill in the crisp October air, and she sure as heck wasn’t going to spend her last minutes shivering. She gave her bedroom one long, last look. Everything she wanted immediately read was on clear display, and everything else was set in its perfectly orchestrated layout. Stage one was perfect. On to the next step.

Just around the corner from her room, the master bath. She had convinced her parents/boyfriend in a tremendously odd request to have everything tiled in glossy while three inch squares. Oh, and a roman bathtub with lion’s paw feet. Somehow, this was how she pictured it and this was how it was going to be.

She glanced in the mirror; her freshly-set ebony hair reflected the harsh halogen spotlights in the ceiling. She wasn’t sure whether by the time they’d find her, she would have slipped into the water and ruined the effect, but on the odd chance that she would still be in position, she set her long curls with her mother’s hot rollers. How quaint, how old-fashioned, how vampire pinup.

Slowly, she began to disrobe, again paying so close attention to where every item was to be lain. Her clothes per se weren’t of tremendous importance, they just served to enhance the setup. She did, however, pull own her lavender satin robe and her best lingerie. Once she had set these last pieces on the chair by the bath, she started the water, as hot as she could bear it. At the moment she entered the water, she thought it would redden her skin, and she frowned. She consoled herself in that she wouldn’t be found for hours, so her usual pallor would have time to return. She sank deep into the tub, taking care not to wet her hair. With a rapid flick of the wrist, she slit her wrists and laid back with her arms overhanging the tub’s edge. Her blood flowed freely, seeping into the grout of her perfectly tiled room.

It was a successful escape; she was found the next morning, in exact accordance with her wishes.

(465)

goal before bed

In honor of what NaNoWriMo is likely to be, I figured I would find a way to reach my goal of 50K by the end, not of the week, but of this weekend. At the same time, I wanted to write at least those 1,667 words on both weekend days. So here I am, 2,090 words later, just 110 words or so short of the finish line I had drawn in my head. The same one I figured I would never reach this weekend; lo and behold, there it is, just a few lines away. So while I Want to Work for Diddy plays in the background (am I the only one who is amazed that that plus-size African-American lady made it so far ? I remember coming across the show in the first week or so, and thinking there was no way in heck she would survive. Yet there she was, in the final four! But I gotta admit, her dismissal was a glorious bit of karma. But I digress.), I keep rambling away to make sure that my fingers reach over that invisible line in my mind.

Done. Time for bed.

(194)

writing prompt: white

The frozen expanse extends in every direction as far as the eye can see. Any motion, any word will mar than even smoothness, speech rippling across the field like a harsh winter North wind, footsteps dimpling like the pockmarked scars of an acne-ridden teenager.

Yet if I stand very very still and hold my breath, it is my very existence that is put into peril. In fact, we are in a life-or-death struggle. Any gesture or speech on my part is directly reflected like an attack on my enemy, the white sheet.

So to be the victor, I must make my adversary bleed. In this case, the puddles that gather across the white expanse are ink - sometimes regal blue, sometimes China black, and yet other times, when I'm feeling particularly ditzy, a snide attack of glitter gel in multicolour hues.

It was once said that the white page is God's way of showing us what it was like to be him. I think that's a highly interesting point of view, simply because it accurately reflects the infinite possibilities that lay ahead. A blank sheet can remain as is, can bear a single, microscopic dot, a line, a drawing, a sketch, a word, a sentence, a slogan, a paragraph, a story, a picture, in short, anything the mind can conceive.

The question becomes not what can I do with this, it is rather where should I go from here? Of the myriad possibilities, which one do I choose? Where is the path, not the only path, but the one I select, thee one to get to well, wherever. Is that the correct way to select the path, by first determining where the destination is? Or is the path itself worthy of judgment?

In the end, I don't believe the destination should be the focus; then again, neither should the path. I believe that the motion itself is what counts. The resulting words on the page, or the drawing, or the story or grocery list or whatever, are merely the aftereffect of what's important. It's the crysalid that the butterfly leaves behind, but it is not the butterfly itself. The butterfly has long flown, the moment is past, and the experience has been taken in. Well, at least hopefully, I was paying attention while it was happening, and I wasn't too too focused on where I was putting my feet.

(401)

one week to go

And I'm still a little over 2,000 words shy of my target, which was to reach 50,000 on my blog before NaNoWriMo rolled around. That shouldn't pose a problem for this week, considering I haven't been counting some of my other posts, such as PPV predictions and the posts I've logged onto the NaNo forums. Am I making excuses again?

Then again, the evening is still young, and I'm nowhere near tired yet, so there is yet a smidgen of hope. No, I jest, I won't wrack myself in the next hour or so. So you think you can dance is on.

I'm a really, really awful procrastinator. Even when I'm fully aware I'm engaging in it, I refuse to pull away. It's always a choice, I gather...why must instant gratification be so gosh darned gratifying? I guess that's something else I've learned: to do NaNo with any degree of success, flip the laptop Internet switch off until the word count is attained. There. I said it. Whether I actually do it next week is, or at least may be, a whole nother story.

(184)

writing prompt: take a walk

The sound of his footfall was muffled; the wind had picked up, and a storm was coming in. His strides were long and regular, like a heatbeat, or a metronome. The brewing storm was a better reflection of his inner turmoil than the clear spring day it had been when he first set out. Whenever he got upset, or needed to figure things out, he would go for a walk. The fresh air and the mere motion of his body somehow invigorated his senses and made sense of situations that sometimes appeared completely devoid of sense. On he walked, up the hill and past the Joneses, then down again into the valley.

What exactly had gotten him going this time was a matter for debate; while his brother may claim that he had said absolutely nothing to make his elder upset, the fact of the matter was it was fairly obvious from his tightly pursed lips and his ebony glare that he had in fact been provoked in some way.

Off he went, past the Smiths' and the Allens' and the Greenes', never taking his eyes off the edge of the road. He'd been an angry child; it had been his mother who suggested he take a walk to clear his mind, rather than punching the other boys in the schoolyard. He had taken her advice to heart, and had in fact never been in a physical confrontation since. Whatever his mind processed during that time, it seemed to work, although it did make him a fairly taciturn young man.

Past the church and the town square, past the school he once attended, past the other Joneses (unrelated to the first family.) The wind was biting now, and as he walked, he dug his hands in his pockets. He gave no thought to turning around; it appeared he wasn't at least half-through working out today's demon.

He reached the old Simpson farm and passed by without so much as a glance. A few years back, he would have walked the distance just to see Victoria's smile. But those days were long gone. In the pasture, a palomino horse whipped its tail and took off at a canter, attempting to escape the impending downpour. Of the two, he seemed to be the only one aware of his surroundings. The young man pressed on, oblivious.

Not even the first few raindrops shook him from his ambulatory stupor. But soon, the rain fell in great sheets that lashed at his cheeks. That finally pulled him from his reverie. He had been walking for six hours; he was caught in a storm, night had fallen, and his problem still weighed heavily on his heart. He pulled up the collar on his coat, and walked on.

(462)

writing prompt: his brother Charles married soon after

This prompt was actually the title of a blog that was just updated on blogger. Unfortunately, it lead to a scam non-blog. On the other hand, I thought it made for a cool writing prompt, so here we go.

Albert, the eldest son, had already been married for a few years when the war broke out. Charles had been steadily seeing Marie, the mayor's daughter, for several months. He had been happy as a budding businessman in the small town of Oakville. Until he got the news, that is. He opened the letter with the news he'd been dreading at the kitchen table in his parents' home. He'd been drafted. That precipitated things. With the mayor's blessing, Charles married soon after, pledging his undying love to beautiful Marie. He left for the front lines only weeks later. He would never return, leaving Marie a grieving 19 year-old widow heavy with child. Marie herself would perish in childbirth, leaving young Charles James to be adopted by Albert and his wife Edith.

So much tragedy had befallen the family over such a short period of time. But with the country at war, they were only one of the hundreds of families who'd befallen similar fates. Widows, orphans, men who'd returned so changed as to be strangers to their loved ones, abject poverty, pangs of hunger - so many sorrows. Yet they soldiered on, convinced by their governmental leaders that these sacrifices were worthwhile, that liberty and life itself was at stake. They believed, and they suffered.

With Albert head of both a rapidly growing company and a large household, Charles a ghostly victim of the horrors of war, and Emily set to marry a wealthy neighbor, which would ensure the entire family's security, only Harold was left to ponder his uncertain future. A bout of polio had left him lame in the left leg, so the army wanted nothing of him. Such rejection had been a common theme throughout young Harry's life, and if he were to reveal his deep, dark secret, he would surely be disowned by the very people who raised and cared for him when he was ill. His parents were god-fearing people, and they could never be made to understand this desire he felt. No, there was simply no way to explain to them, for them to understand, that their youngest son felt an unnatural attraction to Jeffrey, the young man who lived down the street and worked at the bank.

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