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.
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...)
( continues...)
(new P)
Cheryl wonders if she should refit the place, make it more modern, or if she did the wrong thing in fighting the city when they wanted to run the freeway through here. Mid afternoon is slow on weekends...the older ladies get started early and frantic moms looking to get kids haircuts prefer not to go downtown for them, in favor of a chain salon with a million chairs and toys in the waiting area. So she is surprised to find a woman she’s never seen before, leaning on crutches and looking in her window.” Hi,” Cheryl says, trying to look and not look both.
“ I thought you were closed.”
“Well, you know, it’s...practically.” She couldn’t defend this place to this woman.
(Deena, and Beverly are better at making these sort of technical suggestions than I am, because I'm just going from gut, or possibly my ass. They remember the actual rules.)
This piece is a great example of what I love about your work, erika. When the dialogue stops, you're still giving me the character's inner monologue. The way you use that technique pulls me right into a story. The only bit of it that seemed like it might not be right is when you just have the word
sigh
as a sentence. I think maybe that might be too posting board/Buffy-ish.
Erika, I'm sorry I've been so preoccupied with my own project. Cindy is quite right to address yours first, and I've been meaning to do so as well.
I absolutely love the way you create that character, especially in the first paragraph. Your description and integration of the hair salon is extremely evocative: I can smell it.
I am particularly in love with these two lines:
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.
It's such a unique way to convey her feeling of helplessness and avoid what could so easily have been a cliche. I adore the idea of attempting to pull back life with a banana clip. (You did, however, force me to flash on myself with eighties hair, which is unfortunate.)
I agree with Deb that the L&O reference seems unecessary, unless you plan to integrate her love for the show throughout the piece. It draws attention to itself, and if it isn't going to be a theme, I would leave it out rather than let the reader be distracted by it. Again, though, that's obviously your call. I don't know the entire context of the piece.
I also agree that here:
Sigh.She can see it over her head in a balloon like in her kids’ comic books.
you might want to rework the "sigh"--maybe something more along the lines of "She sighed, picturing it in her head like a balloon in one of her kids' comic books"?
I'm so intrigued. I totally buy this character and want to know her better. This is an awesome beginning!
Also, Deb, your second drabble in particular is making me smile, even though I know it isn't supposed to. I think it's just that if I were going to give someone one snippet of your writing that captured who you are to me, this would be it: that grim determination combined with a fierce loyalty that burns hotter than most people want to ever feel.
She looks recently cleaned up, and determined to rectify the situation. Her gaze doesn't lie on the lens, but rather on the photographer, and with an impatient curiosity. She's a girl with plans, and she's being delayed.
"Hannah, you say?"
"Yes." The woman treats the sofa like a desk, a place of work.
I look at the picture again.
"Hannah." I test the name.
"If you read the rest of the file, you will see that Hannah needs a patient hand."
I have time. I have patience. I look at the folder again.
And I think I have a daughter.
