Go Directly to Starbucks, Do Not Pass Go, Do Not Collect $200

 

This is not me. It is, however, totally awesome.

I have a very hard time getting back into writing when the house is cluttered.  Or at least, beyond the normal threshhold of clutter.  I’m sure it’s just my procrastination gene letting me know it’s fully functional, i.e. “How can I possibly write when there are taxes to do/boxes to unpack/laundry to wash/anything else in the world to do instead?”  But I also can’t bear it when I haven’t written for awhile – I get, for lack of a better term, emotionally constipated.  Yuck.  I really need to find a better term.  Anyway, this weekend I focused on just getting my desk in order so this morning I was able to look at my pristine desk, tell myself that the house was neat, and imagine myself with horse blinders on as I went through the rest of the house.  Do not look right at the piles of mess in the dining room, do not look left at the piles of mess in the living room.  Do not pass Go, do not collect $200, just leave and walk directly to Starbucks with your laptop. 

Yeah, I’m one of those writers.  And speaking on behalf of my kind, while I can’t speak for all of them, for myself I can say it is NOT because I want to be “seen.”  The opposite, in fact.  Stay with me for a second while I explain.  For some reason I can’t write fiction in my own office.  It’s too quiet.  There’s something about the hum of conversations that I don’t have to listen to or take part in that’s very soothing.  Kind of like being a kid and coloring and playing at my own table while the adults are all talking at the big table.  (Hmm.  There’s food for thought.)  And I can’t be at the same coffee shop every day either – I have to mix it up.  I’ve written at IHOP at 2am when I was on a deadline (I just get coffee but I tip really big), I’ve written at the airport,  I write at community colleges that I do not attend, I write at any restaurant where the wait staff doesn’t glare at me and make some sort of comment about “fine dining.”  In fact, I’m working my way up to writing at the IKEA cafeteria – it seems a little weird to go to a furniture store with my laptop but I can’t help it, I’m crazy about those meatballs!

I was sick for a few weeks in January and early February, and then we moved.  Everything is still in boxes although I’m hoping to get through a bunch of them this week.  I’m lucky that I wasn’t too sick to pack the boxes intelligently.  I mean, if it says Master Bedroom on it, it’s highly/mostly/somewhat likely that the items inside do, in fact, belong in the master bedroom. 

My name is Megan Brennek. And I’m a plotaholic.

I confess, I’m addicted to plot.  Complicated spirals of intrigue and ensuing complications.  It makes my mouth water.  So when I read a romance novel and the characters are trapped in a cabin (again) during a snowstorm (yawn)* and they basically just walk from room to room keeping secrets from each other and miscommunicating, I want to tear my hair out.  Not that I’m talking about any specific novel.  At least if they’re going to be trapped in a cabin in the snow there should be a crazed killer on the loose and newborn to take care of!

The thing is, my addiction could cause a problem with our first novel.  I am attempting to wean myself from the exciting plot and focus on the romance, which is also exciting but in a different way.  But alas, the murders and crime scene investigation scenes keep pulling me back for more.  My characters take an airplane flight together and all they want to talk about is the case!  They patently refuse to discuss their relationship.  Grr.  Disobedient characters.  So, stay tuned – this one may turn out to be more of a romantic thriller than a contemporary romance.  I promise to let you know!

*Note: author retains all rights to using this plot device in the future.

The perils of internet dating

Don and I met online long before it was commonplace to do so.  All of my friends said, “He’s probably a serial killer – don’t meet him in a remote place!”  So I didn’t meet him in a remote place — I met him at the airport.  And since we were going hiking, we promptly drove to a remote place.  

The thing is… sometimes you just know. 

Politically Correct

… When we were dating, Megan and I took to creating our own shorthand.  That is certainly not unique to us as a couple, but a few of those little nicknames have stuck around. What once was Girlfriend and Boyfriend, became the commonly used BF and GF, which was then shortened to B and G.  As time went by and we got to know each other better, those were transmuted into a more accurate Btard and Gtard.  No matter how long we’ve been together, we will always, hopefully, find little intimacies like that very very important.  To us, we will always be two people who are dating…

Ctrl+Alt+Delete

Don: I’m hoping there’s going to be room for my humor in these books we’re writing.
Megan:  Well, some of your humor probably shouldn’t go into them.
Don: Like what?
Megan: …Some of your humor is a bit too campy, and some of it is not politically correct enough to share with the world.
Don:  You just named both categories of the jokes I tell!
Megan:  Oops, I thought you wouldn’t pick up on that.
Don: You just pressed Ctrl+Alt+Husband+Delete.

Lions and blankets and stones, oh my!

Years ago, while hunting for the right reading for his brother’s wedding, Don and I came across a poem that has since come to be a favorite of ours.  It has seemed to us the exact right mix of why two people like us, strong independent people in our own right, could find such happiness together. 

I love the part about the lion and the emptiness.  That is exactly how I feel.  The world I see and the world Don sees are so different, due to our different backgrounds and unique ways of looking at things.  And yet there they are together, the everything and the nothing, warm and safe.

Wedding Poem for Schele and Phil

A marriage is risky business these days
Says some old and prudent voice inside.
We don’t need twenty children anymore
To keep the family line alive,
Or gather up the hay before the rain.
No law demands respectability.
Love can arrive without certificate or cash.
History and experience both make clear
That men and women do not hear
The music of the world in the same key,
Rather rolling dissonances doomed to clash.

So what is left to justify a marriage?
Maybe only the hunch that half the world
Will ever be present in any room
With just a single pair of eyes to see it.
Whatever is invisible to one
Is to the other an enormous golden lion
Calm and sleeping in the easy chair.
After many years, if things go right
Both lion and emptiness are always there;
The one never true without the other.

But the dark secret of the ones long married,
A pleasure never mentioned to the young,
Is the sweet heat made from two bodies in a bed
Curled together on a winter night,
The smell of the other always in the quilt,
The hand set quietly on the other’s flank
That carries news from another world
Light-years away from the one inside
That you always thought you inhabited alone.
The heat in that hand could melt a stone.

                                                                     by Bill Holm

Don calls it the stinky blanket poem.

Remembering the frozen north.

The novel we’re working on now is set in Alaska, and a lot of the setting, and even some pieces of the story, is taken from the summer after high school which I spent working in a canning factory, (ahem) years ago.  I’ve never worked in a company town with a company store, either before or since.  And the remoteness of being only accessible by boat or plane was something you could actually feel around you.    Bears strolled through the cannery complex while we were working, and one day the cook had to shoot one because it was hanging around the courtyard where we ate lunch.  It truly was the wild west. 

Hell has officially frozen over.

We are blogging.