And I can't believe I totally left out the heavy old black dial phone! The one made of ...that stuff. Mid century, pre-plastic. Can't recall what it is called. Thermolite? I know the smell though. They still have it. Some of the other stuff is gone. I loved getting access to that box.

I swear, I do these drabbles to recover buried memories. (ooh, the spool wheeled trains! The poured iron dog figures and cannon replicas and lead deposit from my grandpa's shop. This stuff was largely from my parents' childhood and travels. Pure gold.)

The one made of ...that stuff. Mid century, pre-plastic. Can't recall what it is called.

Bakelite.

Yup. We've got one sitting on our telephone stand. It's, err, hardwired to the wall, so I'm not apt to move it.

It's almost sad that modern folk have no experience with the old fashioned party line, ie, one phone line for several households. You learned your own ring and resisted the temptation to pick up the phone very quietly when it rang for the folks up the road *again*.

This reminiscence brought to you by the mention of the bakelite phone.

Prayers of the People (100 words)

Her rosary sits in a box on my closet shelf, untouched for a decade. One day, net-surfing, I see the words again, and her voice is in my ear, her loving hands upon my shoulders. I weep, uncontrollably, the way I did at that endless memorial, so wracked by tears I could not pay her proper tribute. I reach out, claim my faith, claim the struggle, grapple with a God I don't nderstand and can't always honestly claim to love. But by any God you care to name, I loved her. For me, God has always worn my grandmother's face.

I know that all y'all know that the drabbles can be fiction

See, I'm glad you posted this, because I haven't been doing the drabbles and want to start, but I don't like writing only non-fictional autobiographical stuff, and I wasn't sure if made-up stuff was allowed.

And your drabble made me laugh: My step-mother sent me all my stuff that was still in my old house (hers now), including a box with my homecoming corsages. I'm from the part of the world where girls get decorated like prize heifers for homecoming, so these were masses of 3-foot-long ribbons with random shit attached to them. Little gold football helmets, horseshoes, things like that. One of them had a rabbit's foot.

Let me tell you, when your husband pulls a 20-year-old skeletal rabbit claw off of the grease spot it's stuck to, he's going to want an explanation.

--------------------

So, writerly types: help me? On a whim I submitted a story for a contest. Wrote it in a couple days, mostly because I don't do enough creative stuff anymore and wanted the exercise. It got selected for publishing (don't they know I can't write?), but the editors have asked for revisions. What works for you when revising a story? I've revised term papers and government reports, but I've never let anyone see my creative writing before, so this is new to me.

The editors comments are slightly helpful in some respects, but, and this is the weird thing, they've decided that the anthology will be fantasy/sci-fi stories on the original contest theme. So they want me to make my story fantasy/sci-fi. And provided no insight as to how I might, or what they saw in the story that made them think it could work as fantasy/sci-fi.

I had a brief urge to stick in a telepathic dragon and call it good, but I'm now thinking there will be serious re-writes. What if it comes out way different than the story they originally selected?

blink

Raq, wow. That's a bit of a shift on their part.

I have no problem with revisions, but this sounds like more than that. If you think it would be helpful, I'm happy to take a look (I've been deciphering copy-editor stuff in the past few days, so my brain is actually in that space anyway), at least at the basic, with the editor's suggestions as a guideline. The caveat is that scifi/fantasy is the one (two?) genre set/subset in which I'm completely clueless.

But I'm happy to take a look, if you'd like.

Thanks, deb. Once I get this next pass done and add in the fantastical elements, I will beg for readers.

Reading back over it, I think it's better than the last book I read, but that was a vampire-with-a-soul Navajo cop thing. Wait! That's, like, fantasy, right?

(grinning) Sounds like fantasy to me....

Raq, going from whim to getting published is pretty darn cool. The editors switch to sci-fi is odd. It sounds like you have it figured out, but if you want help adding something fantastic, well, let's just say that I kept expecting a time-travel reveal in Great Expectations and I'd be more than happy to look for seeds of fantasy in yours.