Monsters Under the Bed

For a child, I imagine the worst thing about a monster in the house is the deep silence under stuffy confines of a big blanket, powerless, waiting for something sharp or something slimy to grab a toe until sleep overcomes fear. For an adult though, for me in particular, the worst thing is that I can’t tell anyone without coming off as a complete nut bag, a future roommate of Miss Maclaine herself.

It has occurred to me that at some point I did unwittingly purchase a ticket on the Looney Tunes express. No one would blame me, I’m sure. Dennis has been gone now for almost a year, the anniversary of his disappearance less than a week away. Considering his mystery, my new little visitor fits right in to a mentally fabricated reality.

Besides, whom would I tell?

I could call one of the kids, but what would they do about it?

Craig would listen or at least let me speak. But then I could almost hear the platitudes, could almost write his script as he threw out his momisms about getting out of the house, taking more walks, finding myself a friend or joining the church’s bingo crowd.

I might ring up Jeannie. She would listen, and might even drive up for a visit, come stay the night and bring the kids and fill the house. For those few precious hours the sounds of love and life would push that little bastard back into the shadows until they were good and gone.

I got a picture! He either didn't know that my cell took photos or he didn't realize he was visible. I'm thinking the latter because these types of monsters are no doubt masters of technology. I immediately sent it to the kids, right from my phone, which Craig probably thought was amazing.

Unfortunately Craig couldn't see it. Even after I directed his attention to the sofa, his only reply was that it looked nice and that I might think about upgrading my light fixtures. Jeannie threw me a small bone and said it looked like an eye and wasn't that weird and that I should send the picture in to a contest or something.

Maybe if I could get a recording of its voice someone would pay attention. Probably not. I think trick photography, computer graphics and digital sound has probably sucked the belief right out of just about everyone.

I miss Dennis more and more every day. It has occurred to me that my little monster friend represents a way to return to my husband. I don't think Dennis is dead, or that he has just finally gotten so sick of my nits and picks and decided to start a new life under an assumed name. This last bit was a suggestion from a neighbor who has always hated our happiness. I think his interest in what he called "unknowns" finally got someone's attention. Someone? Something? That may be six in one hand and half dozen in the other.

I've caught the little guy over my bed ad night. I'll just open my eyes and there he is, standing naked right on the bed near my feet, weightless, looking down at me and making that little cooing noise like an angry pigeon. I watch him for a bit, holding my breath, clinching my fists under the spread, my old heart beating much too fast. And then he seems to realize my awareness and slips away.

If I want to see Dennis again, I think I have to speak to my monster, call out my need. Maybe it's romantic, but I am starting to believe that free will is in play here, that I must request an E-ticket before this grey-skinned, oddball will act. This thought nearly makes me laugh because it's possible my weird visitor is nothing more than a cosmic cabbie waiting for me to tell him where I want to go.

Tomorrow is the anniversary. Dennis will have been gone a year. Jeannie has offered to come up with the kids, take me on a picnic, then to a movie. She said Joe will even come and they can all stay the whole weekend.

I told her no.

See, I'm no astronomer. But even an old woman understands that our planet is in basically the same spot every year relative to the sun. So if there is a chance that a cab or bus or ship or whatever is scheduled to head off towards galaxies unknown to all but the little grey, black-eyed men and possibly Dennis, I think it would leave tonight, the same night Dennis disappeared from our bed in a flash of light and noise.

We shall see.

handwritten notes discovered with doctored photo

I Should Really Start Writing Again

As often happens when I have a strong run of words (30,000 in November) I bail almost completely in the subsequent weeks. That has been the case for Mighty Quinn. The book is about 2/3 done and I have come to a complete halt.

It makes me wonder if binge writing such as NANOWRIMO is good for my productivity. Maybe slow and steady really does win the race.

Isn't he cute?

But I'm not a turtle kind of guy. I type fast, I think fast, I work fast, I golf fast, I... do other things fast. I want to write my novels fast as well. But the faster I go the uglier my prose become. My mind has to sort of devolve to get into my writing brain. Maybe I need to start some sort of meditation routine before I start slapping those little keys.

Isn't he cute?

Regardless, these words do not write themselves. I'm very excited that Scrivener is developing an iPad app for their phenomenal writing software. But this is no excuse. Holidays? No excuse. New job? Well, maybe a little excuse. But really, if Anne Frank could write under her circumstances, what chance do the rest of us have of explaining away our procrastination? What about Woody Allen? He writes a screenplay every year without fail... on a manual typewriter!

Isn't he cute? Ha! Didn't think I was going there, did you?

Well, here's to a new year of writing, of appreciating the time we're all given to write, of taking advantage of those moments, of learning and growing in the craft and of putting our work out there for others to read.

Thanks for reading. Off to write... eventually.

Casey

Blogsy Review

I thought it'd be fun to do a review of this new app, using this new app. It's called Blogsy and it cost $4.99. I didn't really need another blogging app. I'm an impulsive guy.

Here's my Dad. He was also an impulsive guy.

Blogpress seemed to be working just fine. But Blogsy claimed much easier use of links, formatting and media usage and Blogpress can, at times, be chunky, especially in the links category. So I thought I'd give it a try.

Starting with the photos. As you can see above I was able to get a pic of my dad on this post. I had to upload it to a photo account so it could link to the pic, but this is fairly easy thanks to the symbols on the right.

This is a little buggy, but within a couple of minutes I took this screenshot and had it uploaded to Flickr and then inserted in the post. I imagine it'll get better as I use it more. Let's consider the YouTube...

This is a video of my boy playing the piano for his Auntie. I'm very proud!

If you can, indeed see the video above, then I'll say that was extremely painless. Couple of tips... When you are dragging media into your blog, scroll to the bottom of the post. Once your finger has hold of that pic/video it's hard to make the post scroll. Also, if the pics are looking funky, triple finger swipe left, then back right. This resets the post to WYSIWYG happiness.

1. You can also do bullet points and numbers.
2. Good if you dig making top ten lists.
3. Or have several points to make.
4. Or just like to hit the enter key and see a new number waiting for you.
5. Okay, I'll stop...

One more thing. Links! It's extremely easy. One of those buttons on the right is a browser. Looks sort of like a Safari icon. Click on that and find your site. Then select the word you'd like to link to and drag the link from the browser to the post. In this case I chose the how-to video site for blogsy. You can view it here.

That's about it. Worth the $5? Sure, I think so, especially if they do updates and clear up some of the buggy jumps when getting photos into the post.

Thanks for reading. Off to write.

Cheers,

Casey

P.S. - After posting this I checked and the only real problem I see is the size of the blog and the size of the post don't match up. My blog is narrower. But I can't blame that on Blogsy because it's the same way on blogger. I'm off to look at resizing!

P.P.S. - As with apps, we learn as we go. Just got how to place pictures. Use your OTHER finger to place. As the late-great jobs might say, IT JUST WORKS!

Seven Things I Learned at Camp this Year...

I am returning to the faceblogoforumtweetbook world this weekend. It's been just shy of two months and it's time to reconnect.

Here's what I learned while on hiatus:




1) My job is not who I am. I decided to resign from my position and leave the organization where I have worked for ten years. I start my new job on Monday and couldn't be happier.




2) Best steak in town is not the best steak in town. It is an empirical fact and I can only surmise that the emotional attachment to said best-steak-in-town causes one's taste buds to lie to one's brain. Still, the company was fantastic.





3) The leaf will fall, and fall, and fall. No matter how diligent I think I am, no matter how many times I fill the green bins with leaves off the front yard, there are always more. Yes, I'm going out there again after this post.





4) Words can be written. No, I didn't finish my first draft of Mighty Quinn. Yes, I did write. In fact, I doubled my words. I'm at about 62,000 right now and on the home stretch. Still hoping to finish before Christmas, but we shall see.





5) Siri interface rocks. Siri functions? Not so much. My new iPhone has Siri, the new voice recognition personal assistant software from Apple. Its ability to recognize what I say is nothing short of fantastic. And it can do some amazing things. When I say "Remind me to write 750 words on Sunday", it will actually remind me Sunday morning to write 750 words. If I say, "Call my wife's mobile," it will immediately call her. But say I'm driving and listening to a podcast and would like to pause it and restart it while I talk to the nice cop who pulled me over. While Siri knows what words I'm using, she apparently doesn't know how to carry out such a simple command.





6) I missed everyone. I'm so looking forward to reading the blog posts of the last two months, the poems, the stories, the humorous observations, the biting satire, the familial anecdotes... all of it.





7) In the end, it's really only about the people I love. It goes by so fast and every minute really does count. (This picture, by the way, shows my 22 year old kids when they were maybe 7? What the heck happened to those 15 years?)

Cheers to everyone!

Thanks for reading. Off to write.

Casey