I wrote this as I thought of it, didn't edit at all, so it needs betas. And it's not finished: WHY I GOT MY TATTOO(it needs a title, too) When I was a little girl, the current mainstream tattooing trend hadn't started yet. But every once in a while, I'd see a guy wearing a home- or jail-inked one.They were usually greenish, and I was not allowed to ask about them, ever. Kind of like other people and my chair(but people always asked, anyway) But I wouldn't, because even though I was very curious, I was the kind of girl who didn't like to hurt people's feelings. I wondered why somebody would get something others would have to be stopped from staring at. I would give mine up in a minute.
In the 1990s, the first tattoos start showing up at my high school.Only the wilder kids from the class I call idiot math, and the people in the back in newspaper that get mad when they are not allowed to write about local bands or hemp have them.Or maybe I just don't see ankles and backs in AP history or Accelerated English. We are learning How To Make Good Impressions. I wear pink sweaters and end sentences as questions a lot. I'm convinced that my disability will only be a minor roadblock to my success, but I never even ask, because that will break my unwritten rule against talking about it, which I do in the classroom four times in three years. The fourth year I leave it in the offices of either the vocational counselor or the Occupational therapist, two nice but very vague people who forget who I am every week.I decide tattoos are not very responsible and look down on people that have them. _More-

I finally move out of my parents' house when I am nineteen.Yay, Freedom, right? Not exactly. I'm now living in a "licensed setting" so I can learn "independent living skills." So I try to learn them, from people who make out on the overnight shift, and eat tacos left in their cars overnight. But when they are with me, they are paid to recreate a place I think of as "America 1954". Where everybody likes meat with their breakfast, June Cleaver keeps surfaces clutter-free, and women like to be called "ladies".
I try to resist but the acculturation is too strong. Maybe the fact that they pay the electric bill does mean they can tell me to get a haircut. I keep my hair long and shaggy for a year. I hate it, but they hate it more.My body is not my body, just something on somebody's checklist. I barely care enough to pick my clothes. What's the difference? It's just the same old me in there. The few funky or low-cut things stay buried in the closet...they are not appropriate. And it important for us to look "appropriate" in the "community" so that we reflect well on the program. The fact that the staff smell like taverns sometimes is not part of this discussion, because that's personal. Getting personal with me is "furthering an independent-living goal." So someone is always there to tell me if my bra fits or I need to shave more often. I already think I live in the community...there it is, right outside my door, full of fat women in tube tops and students in Manson t-shirts.

erika, this is so powerful. Get it down, all you can, then it can be edited just a tiny bit. But wow. Bite. And truth, and clear sight.

Thanks. I know it needs work, my internal editor hasn't even seen it yet. But I'm glad there's good stuff in it.

Erika, I agree with Beverly, this is very powerful. Great imagery.

Funny...it seems to me to be so "as it happened" the image comment caught me by surprise. But I guess I do that a lot. I did it when I lived there, too. Attendant: Do you need anything from the grocery store? Me: A million dollars, the meaning of life, and some laundry soap. A: Can't you ever give a straight answer? Me: No. And make sure you get everything. I don't wanna make two trips.(I just did that to the one guy cause I thought he was a lazy jerk-off. We got along better when I didn't have to depend on him anymore.)

What they said, Erika. Keep going.

Research question!

I suck at matters botanical. I lived in England for a year, more or less the same part of it my novel is set in, and all I could tell you about the trees was that they had all the expected tree parts. I did live in a city, if that's any excuse.

I'm writing a scene where the hero and heroine are so caught up in the passion of the moment that they have Spike-and-Buffy-in-Smashed style sex, only without the violent foreplay, in a convenient little copse of forest. I need a tree that would have a thick enough trunk to support the heroine and help her keep her balance, and one that's kind of sheddy, for lack of a better word. She should have bits of twig, bark, and leaves in her hair and stuck to the back of her riding habit at the end of the scene.

Susan, two trees that have peeling bark and might qualify as "sheddy" are birch and crape myrtle. I think birch is a New World tree, but you could search and see if it and/or the myrtle had been imported to England by the date of your story. Otherwise, you could search for indigenous evergreen shrubs and trees for your region of England, circa your story dates. Needles cling rather more than leaves would do, I think.

Hee. I justified the purchase of Brother Cadfael's Garden, a glorious coffee table book on medieval European herbs and their uses, as a research tool for my healer character.

So I try to learn them, from people who make out on the overnight shift, and eat tacos left in their cars overnight. But when they are with me, they are paid to recreate a place I think of as "America 1954". Where everybody likes meat with their breakfast, June Cleaver keeps surfaces clutter-free, and women like to be called "ladies".

DAMN, erika. You killer, you. Beyond evocative and fangs a foot long, too.

Susan, for some reason, the only trees coming to mind with the sheddy bark are decidedly not found in English gardens: eucalyptus and manzanita.

I suck at trees, unless it's figs.