Sneaking one in under the wire. Porny.

There's No "i" in Pose

Pose, poise. So many different meanings, shadings, variations, ways to use them both, ways to get them confused.

Posed: me, dressed to blend with the backstage curtains, dusky velvet. Poised: Your head twisted sideways, your hands above the keyboard, waiting for the piano cue from the lead guitar.

Or posed: me, hands out, palms up and open in surrender, not moving, not breathing, the dusky velvet dress on your bedroom floor. poised: you, naked above me.

In the end? I still confuse those two words, those meanings and shadings, those imperfect memories, the two of us in time, posed, poised.

New drabble topic!

Challenge #85 (pose[s]) is now closed.

Challenge #86 is lost and found. NB: that's one topic, inclusive -- lostandfound, if you will. Not two separate topics.

....or I could come up with a different topic?

I like it -- I'm just letting it brew a bit.

I'm still thinking... not a bad topic, just not like "write about apples" There are a couple places I could take that...

I'm first? Well, I went with some of my other obsessions this morning

My Life, Season Thirty: The Wire Season Two

“This isn’t a war. Wars end.”

Out there, I’m nobody. Out there, it’s sprawling and hot, and I left my direction in my other pants.I am, to mix my worlds a little, “a no-job-having motherfucker” who deeply longs to be a “working man”(A “working girl” being a completely different beast and not likely since I can’t stand to have someone drink from my glass. My hooker name would be Lady MacBeth. But I can’t stand to have my sex disrespected so I think again. I want to be a...citizen. Strong, solid, gender-neutral.Contributing.)

In here, it’s cloudy...there’s a breeze off the docks and the lines are blurry in a way I recognize from my own life where I frequently give spelling tips to those who, in theory, at least, have power over me. I have told one the kinds of questions to ask when she talks to her daughter’s teacher about her failures in English. It’s not hard to imagine that the barrier between cop and criminal might get...soft, like that, too. In the little bits of Baltimore I see on TV, though, they can admit it, which makes it less like my life, unless suddenly cops began turning to young dealers, pages in hand, and saying “Are you getting everything you need?”

And I keep up my end by not making a cornerboy reply like “Fuck, no. Where’s my props, yo? I represent.” Sometimes I think I understand the quest for respect, although so far I’m both uncoordinated and peaceful enough to undertake it without weapons, although out there I’m relatively young. There’s still time.

In the Simonverse, I might have been somebody’s baby mama or jailed a couple times by now, a veteran of a war secretly declared and mostly lost.

I don’t really understand the battles I fight out there, either.

Cheerios: Ha. I'll bet y'all will read that and think "God, couldn't she go back to writing about the editor that won't fuck her again?! It's boring, too, but it makes sense. And doesn't have a language rating." I hope not, but I wouldn't blame you too much. I think it is the first drabble I've written with a teaser, though.(I wish I could've given you the quote with the Wire-style black screen and white type, though. It's a thing.)

erika, that piece is stunning, right at the edge of devastating - but it isn't a drabble, so much as it is an essay. Your life as reality TV, and it's got some teeth.

Well, there would be more I could say...finding those shows turned out to be as important to my development as " Buffy" Maybe I will some time, even if it's for a small crowd.

So, SMP asked me to write the catalogue copy for Cruel Sister, and I didn't want to, so my angelic buddy Laura Anne Gilman did it for me:

When Penelope (“Penny”) Wintercraft-Hawkes gets a call from her older brother Stephen, she's delighted to learn that he and his wife Tamsin have returned from Hong Kong, and are finally planning to build their dream house, a reproduction Elizabethan manor, on their London riverside property. Since Penny's longtime companion, traditional musician Ringan Laine, is an expert on period architecture, he signs on as an adviser to the construction crew.

Shortly after the project begins, however, they learn that the site is supposedly haunted by a bomb disposal officer, killed on the site in 1948. Their joint fear - that Penny's sensitivity to the unseen world will be triggered somehow by song - while still present, is tempered by the knowledge that this ghost, at least, has no connection to music.

But this time, it's Ringan himself who begins to hear and see things he can't explain: A ghostly pack of hounds, baying and on the hunt. Voices no one else can hear. A horrifying vision, shared by Penny, of a red-haired girl named Margaret, drowning her sister in the Thames. None of this, however, seems to connect to the site's resident ghost.

More distubingly, Ringan is seeing through the eyes of a long-ago musician by the name of Pietro Bendone, Ringan and Penny finally realize that the visions they're experiencing are from a far more distant time. And if the truth isn't uncovered, Ringan may find himself caught in the body – and sharing the fate – of a man who died a terrible death four centuries earlier.

Their desperate search leads Penny and Ringan on a historical hunt, to a royal wedding nearly five centuries ago, to murder and terrible retribution, to the Bodleian library in Oxford, and, in the end, to hidden letters describing a terrible secret from the Royal Court of Henry VIII…

In CRUEL SISTER, noted author Deborah Grabien blends historical accuracy and supernatural mystery into a tense, satisfying whodunit.

"Penny and Ringan may be the most appealing couple of modern mystery, and Grabien again provides terrific historical tidbits." - Kirkus Reviews, Matty Groves

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Damn, she's good.