Organizational Peeves

I love my Roomie dearly. Best friends for eight and a half years. She’s a lovely person with many fine qualities.

When I look at her bookshelf I want to punch her in the tooth.

It has nothing to do with her tastes in reading. I’m absolutely of a to-each-his-own mentality when it comes to that. Read whatever you want. I am not, however, so open minded when it comes to the organization of one’s bookshelf.

You see, the Roomie does not separate fiction from non-fiction and it fills me with burning fury.

Having just written that sentence, I want to make it clear that, yes, I do realize how ridiculous I sound. 

But it just drives me so crazy.

I don’t expect her to arrange it exactly as I do – non-fiction then fiction, with sub-sections of genre – though, let’s face it, it would be nice. Nor do I expect her to start using library cards like the one another friend gave me, that have me itching to lend out my books. (It came with a date stamp and everything!)

But seriously, fiction and non-fiction all mixed up? I go in there to peruse the shelves and, with the exception of Harry Potter, have no idea what I’m going to pull.

It’s anarchy.

Just makes me want to sneak in there and set things right.

Then I realize I’m having a Sheldon Cooper moment and resist.

But it’s not easy.

Okay, now that I’ve shared my weekly does of crazy, let’s hear yours.

Oh, you don’t have any?

Just me that’s crazy, huh?

Well, that’s fine, too.

*awkward crickets*

No boughs of holly, but still...

I don’t know about you, but my halls are all sorts of decked. The Roomie and I don’t have an enormous amount of space to work with, but we make it festive. Well, technically, I do the decorating whilst Roomie fulfils her holiday tradition of napping on the couch in red sweatpants and a Santa hat. But, regardless, we both play our roles and the apartment gets its seasonal makeover.

It would be really difficult for me to pick a favorite decoration, but for the sake of my efforts here, I’m going to discuss the Department 56 houses. While every decoration reminds me of a story, the houses are the only ones that can be set up to tell one on their own.

I grew up setting these houses up. My mom collected them and I liked to sit and watch their little lights twinkle and myself stories about where in the village or city I would live (the yellow house that generally sat atop the kitchen cabinets) and where I would work (the movie theater that constantly showed White Christmas). At least this is what I thought about when I wasn’t being tortured by questions of why the people were doomed to grow to such heights that they could never fit into the doors of the buildings where they lived.

Even crouched over, Gramps here is about a story tall.

Over the years I started collecting them as well, sometimes receiving them as gifts, sometimes taking them from my mother’s horde under the dark of night.

Whoops, guess the cat’s out of the bag. 

(Tangent: Why are we carrying cats around in bags in the first place? 

Seems like a great way to get scratched.)

Our apartment is not quite large enough for me to showcase all of my houses every year and for whatever reason, the Roomie will not agree to sleeping in her closet for the month of December so I can transform her bedroom into a showroom. She’s selfish that way.

Still, I manage to do some sort of display whenever the holidays roll around. It takes me hours to get it all together and decide not only where the buildings are situated this year, but also how all the city folks are going to be interacting.

She’s covering her mouth to hide a smile. He totally said he was going to come courting and never did. 

Serves him right to get jumped on by a wet dog. Even if that middle-of-the-face beard is hard to resist.

And then I’ve got the folks who are new to town. This gentleman, for instance, only found his way to my city this year.

He goes by Melvin and is my soul mate: 

Carrying way too many books and kind of blurry. 

What more can a girl ask for?

How about you? Any holiday decorations that you look forward to every year?

Helpful, Meet Your Opposite

So, as I’ve mentioned, sometimes when I’m starting a story I like to use the people around me as sounding boards for my brainstorming.

Roomie’s not a fan of this choice (mostly because it's remarkably easy to creep her out). And as a result of the number of times I’ve annoyed her with my open ended questions, she's developed ways of thwarting me. One of her favorites is to list the names of books, movies, or characters that are tangentially related to what I’m talking about, while also totally irrelevant, and often nonsensical.

For instance, yesterday we had a conversation that went something like this:

Me: I’m trying to decide on a villain.

Roomie: I don’t want to be part of this conversation.

Me: Should it be the guy calling in all the money owed on the family home and threatening to throw them out into the street? Or maybe –

Roomie: What kind of fairy tale has tax evasion?

Me: No, it’s not tax evasion. It’s more like a balloon payment.

Roomie: What kind of fairy tale has a balloon payment?

Me: You’ve never read a story where the hero's journey starts to save the family home?

Roomie: That’s very Hansel & Gretel of you.

Me: That doesn’t even make sense.

Roomie: You know, breadcrumbs.

Me: Stop it.

Roomie: Ursula. Villian. Boomsa.

Me: You are the definition of unhelpful.

I'm going to leave it up to you to decide which one of us deserves the title of "poor, put-upon roommate."

Character Inspiration

My Roomie is a male gargoyle.

At least on the page.

She’s the inspiration behind a tertiary character in my most recent story. A stone beast with a poor memory and an (only mildly irrational) animosity toward birds.

In real life, Roomie’s very different. She’s a human female with a poor memory and a slight wariness regarding birds.

See? Worlds apart.

When I went to the Backspace conference this past May, I had the opportunity to listen to several talented authors discuss the different ways they come up with characters. I was particularly interested in the conversations regarding how much they drew from the people around them. Some felt they based a lot of character developments on their friends and family. Others tried to avoid this as much as possible.

I’m not solidly on either end of this spectrum.

I don’t think I’ve ever written any character that was entirely modeled after any one person in my life, but I definitely have made choices based on specific traits or relationships of those around me. Roomie and my immediate family are the sounding boards for a lot of my initial character development. I will occasionally ask them all the same question and then see if any of their answers fit with the character I’m working on. Or sometimes I’ll just see a friend or family member react to something and think, That’s perfect for what’s that one character’s going through or That’s exactly how those two characters need to interact.

But there are a couple rules I try to hold myself to.

I take the good stuff from the people around me. The moments that inspire me. The most kick-ass traits and quirks that my loved ones possess. Those make it into my characters. My characters’ negative traits? Those come from me, from news stories, and from whatever happens to be the most frightening to me in the moment I’m writing.

And if I’m mocking someone on the page? Then I must be mocked too. It’s only fair.

Which is why, in the story, I’m a male gargoyle too. His memory’s great and he doesn’t have any issues with birds. But he is clumsy, out of shape, and has a tendency toward the dramatic.

Together, they are snapshots of the Roomie and me at our most buffoonish. The mythical equivalent of “bros.” And make me smile every time I think of them.

 A peek into my creative process.

How about the rest of you writers out there? Do any of your nearest and dearest ever make it on to the page?

The Olympics: Fostering Goodwill....at least in our apartment

I am not what you would call an athletic person.

I think the Roomie could accept this fact if I at least had some interest in watching sporting events. Which I don’t. Almost ever.

If you want me to watch something sports related, your best bet is a Disney movie. (Even I can't resist a knucklepuck.)

This isn’t to say I don’t ever try to appreciate the more sporty sides of life. I go to root on the Roomie at the occasional soccer performance. To prove that I’m paying attention and not plotting the next couple of chapters of the story I’m working on, I have taken to texting her every few minutes to comment on something I saw on the field. She has told me that coming back to find thirty-two texts after a sixty minute game is not the athletic appreciation she is looking for. And to stop calling them soccer performances. And that “Break a leg!” is not an appropriate way to wish her luck before a game.

As I’m sure you can see, she’s fairly high maintenance.

We have however found one athletic topic we can agree on: The Olympics are awesome.

Watching the best of the best from countries all over the world is just inspiring. I may root hard for the U.S., but that doesn’t take away from the genuine awe I feel watching the athletes from other countries do their thing. I am consistently floored by the feats all of the Olympians can get their bodies to complete.

Plus, at times it is like you’re watching a Disney sports movie, given the dramatic statements frequently made by the commentators. Things like “The question is, would you go for the throat while your opponent is sobbing?” And the twice repeated “They will, as champions always do, walk together forever.” If only there was a Queen song playing over all of this, it would be absolute perfection.

So for now, the Roomie and I are in sync in our viewing choices for the evening. And in feeling mildly floored that most of the Fab Five were born the year the Magnificent Seven won the gold (which sadly means they probably totally missed out on choices like getting an Amanda Borden haircut).

In conclusion, peace has settled over the apartment.

At least until the twelfth.

And the strange dreams continue...

This one, though, was not nearly as fun as my ghostly employment opportunity.

In the dream, my sister was possessed by a candle. The best way I can figure it out is that the candle acted in the same vein as a horcrux. The longer she was in proximity to the waxy thing, the more evil she became.

I knew that destroying it was the only way to get my sister back, but every time I tried to, she would thwart me. Thinking back on it, she was kind of acting like the little girl from The Bad Seed.

In the dream my sister also had the crazy eyes that this young lady is sporting. 
Plus, those bangs? Straight out of old family photos of the little sis. Except hers were shorter. 
Which is really more terrifying than anything else I’ve discussed here.

But, finally, I was able to get rid of the thing, but by that time, she had done some evil magic on a can of paint. So, the horcrux-ish nature of the candle was now in the paint can. And the paint can was on a wall of paint cans.

I was just getting ready to start the laborious process of figuring out which paint can to destroy (destroying all the paint cans never occurred to me, for some reason), I woke up.

Now, I don’t know why my dreams have been particularly vivid lately. Roomie has accused me of having the weirdest dreams of anyone she's ever known, but I think that's an exaggeration due to the fact that her craziest dreams generally have to do with being late to work or picking out which shoes to wear. Riveting stuff. She did once dream about walking down a street where all the trees were on fire. That was kind of cool. She blamed me for it. Not entirely sure how I caused such a mental wandering, but I'm happy to take credit. (One of the earliest signs of my zombieist tendencies.)

Anyway, back to my recent dreams. They’ve had Harry Potter elements throughout. The only explanation I have for that is that I haven’t read any HP books or watched any of the movies since last summer and maybe my mind is rebelling against that and once I read the books again, the weird dreams will disperse.

Or the candle one could have just been my sister getting back at me for all the times I was a dream jerk to her.

Regardless of the reason, I’m going to steer the sister away from candles and paint for the time being. You know.....just in case.

In conclusion, I'm basically a metaphorical zombie

As I’ve mentioned, I regularly ask Roomie weird questions without any sort of context. Sometimes they’re related to a story I’m working on, sometimes they’re just what happened to pop into my head at that moment. But last night something shocking happened. Something that was completely unprecedented in our years of friendship.

Roomie asked me one.

I waiting to order my quesadilla and she asked, “If you were to wake up tomorrow and I wasn’t there and then you gradually realized that no one was there and that no electronics worked, what would you do?”

I stared for a second in shock at the uncharacteristic query, then got some clarification before answering. To be clear, in her question, I did not wake up to some post-apocalyptic slaughtering ground. No bodies. Everyone had just disappeared. The lack of electronics ensured that I could not call or see on the TV if this was world wide or just within the city in which I live. Roomie allowed that my car would probably work, but I’m guessing that navigational systems and gas pumps would be a no go.

My answer:

I would pack a bag of books and kitchen knifes (in case this all really goes sideways and turns into a zombie-type situation). Then I’d get in the car and drive as far as I could in the direction of my childhood home in search of other people. Once I ran out of gas, I’d continue on foot.

My choice in destination was two fold, as my family all still lives in that area and I could find it without the help of a navigational system. And there are not many places that I could say that about.

Roomie then gave her answer:

I would gather all the food I could and find a home base I could hide it in. Probably not our apartment. I’d find a nice house. I’d go to the grocery store and fill the granny-cart with jugs and jugs of water. Once I’d secured that I might drive around to see if I could find other people. I wouldn’t take too many of my supplies cause that would make the car heavier and slow me down.

I found out after I had her answer that Roomie was mildly disgusted that food and water never even entered in to my thought process. Whoops. Guess you don’t want to be stuck with me in a post-apocalyptic world. Unless you’re a fan of brevity. When Roomie demanded to know what in all the world I would bring a bag of books with me, I explained that if I get stuck somewhere, I don’t want to have just dwell on the fact that I may starve to death if things go well and the zombies don’t find me first. I’d like the option of enjoying a nice story.

What it comes down to, I guess, is that if everyone in the world started to disappear, Roomie would make sure you had shelter and sustenance, while I would be prepared to entertain and fight zombies to the death on your behalf. So, really, you’re best chance of happy survival is for neither of us to disappear.

As this conversation was coming to a close, I had to ask what prompted Roomie’s question. Her voice got a little high as she said, “You ask me weird questions all the time!” Believe me, I wasn’t complaining. So, I explained that I just wanted to know what inspired this so I could ensure that it would happen again in the future. She gave me a little smile and shrugged, clearly unable to pinpoint the origin of this thought process.

And that’s when I came to a shocking, yet satisfying, realization. In the story of Roomie’s life, I am the zombie.

It’s taken me almost eight years, but I’ve finally gotten to her brain.  

In other terrifying news, here is the Squirrel Menace Update: Do not be distracted if they pull the old “ears on fire” trick. It is just a distraction!

Biding Her Time

Back in the old college days, Roomie and I used to share a room.

She often would head off to sleep earlier than I, as I had episodes of X-Files to watch (which she hated). One night, after hours of rooting for Mulder and Scully’s paranormal crime-solving skills – I, too, want to believe.– I decided it was time to go to bed.

When I walked into the room, Roomie was sitting straight up in her bed, just staring at the door. Her face was totally blank. Having spent as much time as I had watching the mysterious and creepifying, I, quite naturally I think, jumped. She gave no indication of having noticed my surprise. Instead she said, in complete monotone, “I just woke up,” and promptly fell back on her bed, grumbling for a few minutes before, once again, falling silent.

She had no recollection of this in the morning.

Well, I was sufficiently creeped out, but I’d never heard her talk in her sleep before, so I figured it was a weird anomaly. Sadly, not so.

Over the next few weeks, I heard random, short bursts of words coming from her side of the room as I fell asleep. And then one night, she uttered the most terrifying words ever spoken.

“Roommate alterations.”

I sat up and stared over at her bed, but nothing else came. That was it. “Roommate alterations,” then silence.

What could that possibly mean?

Me being me, I started envisioning the horrible things this alteration process might entail.

Her in a white lab coat and me strapped to a table as she began to cut open my head. On a far table, sits a jar with poor Abby Normal’s brain floating around in formaldehyde.

I’m being submerged into a tank of water, with large needles sticking out of my arms and legs. Through the hazy liquid I see her pull the switch, pumping Adamantium into my body. But I don’t have the healing mutation! I’ll never survive!

She straps me into a chair, attaching a helmet of jumper cables to my head. She paces the floor, whispering to herself, maniacally, as I wait for her to pull the switch.
The possibilities were equally endless and nightmarish.

I informed her the next morning that I knew of her plans. That I was on to her. That forewarned was forearmed. That Goonies never say die. That nobody puts Baby in a corner! (Yeah, I might have lost the thread a little bit there, but she got the point.)

Roomie laughed and said she didn’t remember saying that. She even agreed that it was a truly creepy thing to say. And wasn’t it all just so weird?

Sure, all the words were right, but I knew. Behind the sunny smile and blonde curls lay a mad scientist. Just waiting to get out.

Four years have passed since her terrifying mumbling and, as far as I’m aware, she has not attempted the fruition of her dastardly plot. But every once in awhile, she’ll look at me in a certain way and I wonder if, maybe, just maybe, she’s playing the long game.

Informal Research

My loved ones have to put up with a lot when I’m writing. Most of this burden comes in the form of disturbing questions. I don’t always remember that, as they’re not in my mind with me, they don’t necessarily know that I’m researching plot lines. So, when I call my nurse mother and, without providing any context, ask her if there are any medications that could have the side effect of causing seizures followed by a coma-like state, she responds with “What’s going on? Is someone seizing?” After which, I think, Why would someone be seizing? Then the writing haze finally clears and I realize I sound like a crazy person. So, I clear up the fact that this is all for the sake of fiction and my mother laughs, relieved, and pulls out her medical books to see if she can find anything that might fit the bill.

Most people I’m close to are subjected to such questions. Dad generally gets obscure law enforcement procedure queries. My sister gets a lot of “How would you feel if….” followed traditionally by something that prompts her to respond with “What’s wrong with you?” My brother and I discuss the finer points of time travel. And all my friends field whatever I randomly happen to think about when I’m with them.

Living with me, Roomie deals with my questions on a fairly regular basis. I can’t say that she is quite as enthusiastic about them as some, but this may or may not be because I ask her things I know are going to disturb her (*cartoon villainess laugh*). See, for instance, the below gchat:



Me: Strange question, do you know anything about dislocations? It’s for my writing.

Roomie: You’re gross, that’s what I know.

Me: Answer my questions. If you were to dislocate something, like a finger or shoulder, would it make any noise when the bone was popped back in its socket?

Roomie: I don’t know, but my guess would be yes.

Me: You don’t know? You’re supposed to be my resident expert on injuries. You’ve broken everything. Twice.

Roomie: I’ve never dislocated anything. I just looked at a couple things and I believe it would. Read Step 6: http://www.livestrong.com/article/32254-put-dislocated-shoulder-back-place/#ixzz0qYUZSh1P

Me: You know, if you were to pull your finger out of its socket and then pop it back in, it would probably be the best way to find out.

Roomie: That’s probably true. And most logical.

Me: Exactly. I’m going with the clicking sound, for now. Sound good?

Roomie: I think "gross" would be more appropriate. But, yeah.

Me: Excellent. Thank you for your assistance in this matter.

Roomie: I EXPECT ROYALTIES.

Me: Well, I’ll allow you to call me Your Majesty, if you’d like.



In addition, to taking issue with my queries regarding injuries, she also is excessively wigged out by fantasy creatures. This doesn’t stop me from telling her about them, though. Of course, I think this is fair turn around. Sure, she has to listen to my ponderings on centicores, lamassus and banshees, but she once made me go into the Shore Store. It’s a toss up as to which is more terrifying. (Except, not really. One is clearly a more scarring experience than the other.)