Invisible

They were put up as cheap row houses, a century ago. Typical to San Francisco, they've been lovingly restored with yuppie money and pride of ownership: stone front stairs, corbels and wainscoting, front doors painted in ice cream colours.

Each stairway ends in one of those pretty doors. Above each door is a window, the fanlight showing golden, offering a yellow welcome to, presumably, all comers.

The rain comes down, washing the stairs, the painted doorways, making the fanlights glitter like gold leaf.

The man with the mismatched shoes and the shopping cart passes them, unwelcome, invisible as a ghost.

He pushes it into her hand awkwardly, and she receives it with surprise and as little grace. She's never received a flower before, from anyone. Never even dared buy them for herself, making do with purloining from gardens or liberating them from place settings.

This one is her own, its delicate golden velvet gentle in her palm, the other hand grasping the thorns too tightly.

She looks up at him slowly, thick with confusion, fear hiding her happiness.

"D..." Her mouth opens and closes, her hands relax.

"I shouldn't have," he mutters and grabs it away, charging for the door.

Murphy brown rules! So want to be her, still. Except for the AA. NSM. I stayed home from somewhere to write today, and what I got? Maybe not worth it. I hate having an image of a better book than I can write in my head.

...and then she caught up to him, kravved him to keep him from getting away, and they lived happily ever after, right? RIGHT?

Once he plucked the blossom from that vital orifice.

Luscious drabbles today. Amazing how color can evoke so many different emotions.

My first clip of 2005 is now live, all bylined and pretty and official-looking: [link]

I've found several winceworthy phrasings that I can't believe I didn't catch on multiple editing passes before I submitted it, but that's just life. I'm sure it'll be 100 times worse when I finally publish a 100K-word novel instead of a 1000-word article.

Susan, that's a nice piece. Of course, I'm biased, since Ringan can see the Tor from the curve at the end of his bit of road, and in the first book, on Jane's first visit to Lumbe's Cottage, she gets stuck circling the Tor in the mud.

Homesick for England. Doesn't happen that often these days.

Today my RWA chapter did a workshop on critiquing and asked for guinea pigs to volunteer to bring in our first seven pages. Being somewhat of a verbal exhibitionist, I was all, "Me! Me! Me!"

Of course when I got there my hands were shaking. What if they ripped it to shreds, politely or otherwise? Sure I go to a critique group every Monday night and have beta readers, intermittent and regular, but I realized once I got there that having your work read aloud to twenty people, some of whom you know well, others NSM, and several of whom are multi-published, is a whole 'nother story.

It worked out fine, though. Got a lot of praise for my scene-setting skills--people saying they could picture it vividly, could taste the road dust, etc. Which made me feel very good, given that it wasn't all that long ago that my critique group would complain week in and week out about not being able to see my scenes. Got conflicting feedback on how I manage backstory--I had to laugh when I looked at the written comments and saw "too much backstory" and "great job working in the backstory" on back-to-back copies! Jack continues to draw near-universal reader love, and I got some good suggestion on how to make Anna more sympathetic and vivid from the start.

Oh, and a couple of the published authors told me I was just so close--a little tweaking here, a little polishing there, and I should have something saleable on my hands. That felt good.

And Deb, I'm really glad you liked the article--makes me feel like I must've managed to capture the atmosphere of the place, and that was my main goal, beyond all the practical "here's what to see" stuff.