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.

Maybe I'll just not specify a type of tree and trust my readers to just believe me when I say she's got twigs in her hair and bits of bark and/or sap all over the back of her habit. (It's all to make sure she's looking really, thoroughly disreputable and disheveled when they walk out of the woods and realize they're not quite as alone as they thought, being as Lucy's bitchy cousin saw their horses tethered at the edge of the copse and was curious enough to investigate.)