In my personal reading experience I have found real history to be mixed liberally with fictional history. In my opinion it isn't cheating at all to use the facts as they fit your story and disregard those that don't.

This is alternate history, not factual history, nor pure fiction.

It's Tuesday, you know the drill.

Endings Are Beginnings

As a child, my grandmother used to tell me that whistling girls and crowing hens always came to some bad ends. It never stopped me.

At some point, I realized my grandmother's homily was directed at my mother, not me, for she had taught me to whistle. It was a condemnation of mother's character. She didn't have the social standing grandmother deemed worthy of her only son. Nyet kulturni as the Russians would say. My mother, who could whistle Tchaikovsky's Second Concerto, Katchiturian's Sabre Dance, Gershwin's Porgy and Bess and the Pachelbel Canon.

Those are the things I whistle today.

Lullaby

She'd never asked for bells and whistles.

When she'd left home, it had been in silence after all the shouting and recriminations. Her parents slept while she packed, a couple of net beach bags absorbing her clothes like sponges. In just her socks, she'd padded down to the kitchen for a quick foray into the cookie jar. A pause there, she took them all. The door closed behind her, the merest click still echoed. In like a lion, out like a lamb.

Today, the stillness of the room is loud in her ears as she listens to her baby nursing.

Thanks, Laura! Every once in awhile I need to be reminded that I'm actually telling a story here, and not just engaging in an elaborate intellectual exercise for my own geeky amusement. I'll get the brother home early, because when in doubt, conflict has to win.

Sail, while the first one made me raise a virtual fist in cheer, that last one teared me up.

Sail, I'm loving the story you're telling in vignettes, almost like snapshots. It's lovely.

Glad you guys are enjoying them. I feel like after taking that long break I've got all these words and little stories dammed up and just waiting to flood the thread. Trying really hard here not to submerge you.

Bev, I just can not seem to get that cookie jar out of my system. I've started tagging those as "cookie jar" in my lj, so you can just click on that tag and get all of them.

Oh submerge us! It's been a really long dry spell for the thread. If anybody's writing I think we're all ready to read it.

Sail, I love it! You're writing! And it's awesome.

I just cut the last 50 pages off my manuscript. It had to be done. I realized I'd gone completely in the wrong direction with that part of the story and had to start over again.

But...it felt so good back when I passed the 200 page mark a couple of weeks ago, and now I'm back on p. 181. Sigh. I hate it when I have to do stuff like this...

But it is a real sign of professionalism that you can do it.