Kristin, I love the way the paragraphs flow now. I can't pick out exactly what you did, but it's both clearer and more concise.

Deb, those two are breath-stopping, especially the second.

And to the wall-slamming thing? I had posters hung in some odd places where my hormonally-overcharged teenaged sons punched holes in the wallboard.

Kristin, yesyesyes. More light shining on those kids, but without a drop of sentiment.

After whining and procrastinating all day, I finally sat down to write around 8:00. And wrote eight pages in three hours. It felt especially good because I looked at the last three pages I'd written in Alabama, laboriously, at one page per hour, and realized they were utter crap. And then I realized how to fix them and move on from there.

Yay Susan!

Thank you for the earlier affirmation, everyone. It was needed to allow me to push on through tonight...

I too achieved something this evening. Final revisions are in. Essay is done. I would like to post, but I think it's too long. How many words can each of these little boxy thingys hold? Is it worth posting the whole thing, or would it be better to simple send out to anyone who's interested? I just need a final "attagirl" to make me feel accomplished, especially since I tried (and failed) to go to sleep three times in the last couple of hours and now only have three hours until the alarm goes off. Anyone? Bueller?

t /high maintenance girl

How many words can each of these little boxy thingys hold?

Kristin, I threadsucked BBaBB and found:

==========
Gus "Buffistas Building a Better Board" Sep 2, 2004 6:00:56 am PDT
t snip
eta: The members of an autosplit post have an additional expansion allowance of 2000 characters for edits, at which point they will be truncated (max 6000).
t /snip
==========

That's characters, not words.

Kristin, this is the first time I've read it, since the past 3-4 days were so harried for me that I skipped and skimmed most of my usual threads. That's extremely powerful and wrenching writing you've got there.

Very good.

Now go get some sleep.

I haven't read Kristin's yet, because I wanted to respond to erika's issue, before I forgot.

erika,

This is a great piece. I want the whole store. The thing with the mashed potatoes? It caught my eye, too. I thought about it, before I read on and saw Lyra bring up the same issue.

I think Lyra is right. If you want to keep it in (and I think perhaps you should want to), you need to establish that they were deadly serious. I don't know how you do that without hurting the flow, though. Your flow is great. Before I saw Lyra's comments, I also thought to suggest that the use of "flicking" is at least a little bit of the problem. If they were being deadly serious asshole adults--so nasty, that they were letting their bad marriage turn them into bad children, they might do something idiotic like food fighting. If too much of the love was gone, it might not end in laughter, either. But they'd be "flinging" the spuds, not flicking them. It might end with an even more humiliating act, like throwing the bowl or one of them dumping the remains of it over the other one's head. Yes, I gave this too much thought.

You need to work on your line breaks a little. It's a little hard to read as is. The formatting should be something a little more like this (I'm going to italicize it so it's clear it's all yours):

Saturday Morning Cut
By Erika Jahneke

Cheryl’s life only makes sense when she cuts hair. Something doesn’t fit or is uneven, she can train it back or trim it, squirt it with water or product, something. You can’t exactly pull life back with a banana clip. Even the smell, which every associate stylist she’s ever had complains about, is one of her favorite things. Burned hair, perm solution, color with its sinus-opening ammonia...if she could snort it she would, because when she’s here, she makes things happen. She knows exactly how long a dye job lasts. Not like, say, a marriage. She picked up Pete’s wandering eye before he could admit to it himself...they’ve always been in a weird kind of synch. She thought it would save them, back when she was still scarred from watching her own parents flick mashed potatoes at each other in a fit of rage-beyond-words, but it’s hard to read your own husband’s mind and not find yourself. She has trouble adjusting to change. It takes her half a television season to identify the models-cum-district-attorneys on Law and Order, after all, and by the time she does, Jack McCoy has moved on. Maybe they’re all the same.

It’s not hard to get stuck in the past in this salon...salon being a gross overstatement. This is an old-school beauty shop, not one of those sybaritic temples to Paul Mitchell promising coconut-scented hairgasms. This place is still half Cheryl’s mom’s fifties modish pink Formica. Cheryl swore she’d never work in here, but she forgot to tell herself what she would do instead, so here she is, gamely attempting to resurrect the beehive for what one of her few college classes would’ve called her aging “client base.” Sigh. She can see it over her head in a balloon like in her kids’ comic books. She could do a lot of things; she goes to conventions, tries to keep up, admires short spiky styles, new colors. It’s all wasted. Her clients want the hair from when their mental clocks stopped, the last time they felt they understood, which around here taps out at about 1964 or something....the Goldwater years. "Like, wow, what a bummer, man. A total bad scene.” she says and laughs at herself.

When she first started here, she used to do her own hair, sometimes a platinum that made her feel famous, but lately anything new she brings home makes Pete say, “Why do you have to act like some fucking *kid,* Cheryl?”

Because I’m not fucking dead, Pete. “I thought you’d like it,” given that that girl you stare at is only about nineteen. She’s not that pretty, though. Her pores are huge and her makeup is too dark for her complexion. But she is a lot younger, probably doesn’t squint when she reads, if she reads.

(continued...)