In Hiding

It's me, and the mirror: a woman, peeling away the masks.

The first one, flesh and fever, is the woman of today, feeling her age, feeling her systems breaking down. The lips are cautious, the eyeslits come with hoods. This one's about protection against loss.

Beneath that, another: passion, scarlet-painted cheeks, a full ripe mouth, what they see, what they should have seen, when they looked down at her, her body moving under them.

Third mask: the girl who won't die, comedy/tragedy, laughter and tears, tinted with the flame of her need, painted in all the colours of the rainbow.

For today, let me put my mask on. Let me be your Salome; let’s give reality a pass today. Pretend there’s nothing but right now...the sweet taste of chocolate and what happens when our lips touch. Tomorrow will happen soon enough...with its bill paying and my finding the flaws in my face.Tonight I’l be a temptress and give you everything. I’ll be a goddess and make you a world, just to smash. I’ll be a princess and pretend that I rule. I’ll be a clown just to make you smile. I’ll be a naughty schoolgirl and let you give me...detention.(I never have been very disciplined.) I’m a spy on a mission...a detective that needs to make a few confessions herself. For tonight, I’ll be anything but me.

erika, you just broke me.

Me, too.

Mask drabble:

It's ugly, but it works.

The oxygen mask is bulbous rubber in dark olive drab, an elephant's trunk strapped to my face. The weight of the long, thick, stretched concertina of the hose is a constant downward pull, while the top of the mask pushes my cheeks up, giving me a squint and making it difficult to see.

Afterwards I'm left with a red line like a pillow crease across my nose, down both cheeks, and under my chin. I don't mind looking like a clown. I've just flown the Pikes Peak wave to thirty thousand feet without an engine.

Oh, NICE, dcp.

Weirdly, I have a similar one working its way up.

The Natural Look

Women wear make-up like a mask, "putting our face on” before going outside. We complain of feeling naked without it. Some days, it’s lightly done, subtly highlighting things in a way to leave us looking untouched by artifice. Other times, we flaunt it with glitter and gloss, harlequinesque party masks to shine in the dark and draw men like moths to our flame.

My mother’s allergies only allowed her to wear lipstick. Looking at her that last time, I wanted to wipe off the make-up, the mask of death prepared for her then as she never wore it in life.

Wow, Sail, that give me chills.

It was so strange, to see my mother with make-up on. The funeral parlor did a great job, it was totally natural looking. If she had ever wore make-up. It was the thing that really made me realize she was dead. Yeah, chills, even now.

I just got a long email back from Mary Balogh commenting on the first three chapters I sent for her critique. It was thoughtful, thorough, and broadly positive. She praised my writing ability, saying my style was fluent and my pacing good. She said if I had a weakness, it was a tendency to flat narrative--not enough descriptive detail to set the scene or to get my characters' emotional responses across. She likes Jack and Anna and thinks the story has great potential, but suggested I dial down the overt sexual tension until the very end of Ch. 3, when they dance together and end up kissing rather passionately--she thinks that'd have more impact if the *readers* are aware that there's an attraction and potential for romance but the *characters* aren't, and also that doing it that way would be more believable given the class difference between the characters.

I think she's right. Dammit. And I think I would've seen it myself if I hadn't been so damn fixated on making my opening few chapters hit all the notes the opening of a romance is supposed to have and just trusted the characters and the story.

She closed by saying that she liked it, it had great promise, and that it was only on a second read where she asked herself the questions she always asks when revising her own work that she noticed areas for improvement.

So, very cool and helpful, I think.