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Month: August 2012

Six Sentence Sunday 8/26/2012

Welcome back to my 6-sentence snippet series from my book, Portrait of Woman in Ink: A Tattoo Storybook. Over the next 7 weeks, I will be sharing with you snippet from each chapter. (Click here to see last week’s snippet)

Today we meet Alice, a social worker who finds herself getting tattooed with three of her best friends on a long girls’ weekend, but missing the presence of the fifth member of their little group.

Sarah and Karen had always had their own inside thing going on, an inner circle within the inner circle, one the rest of them had always felt but denied existed.  Alice could still remember when Karen was introduced as the new girl in their Kindergarten class, after the Christmas break.  She’d followed them around on the playground until Sarah informed the group (they didn’t have a name for themselves at that point) that it was too mean of them to keep ignoring her, and allowed her in.  Was it really possible to hold a grudge against someone for stealing your best friend more than twenty years ago?  Was that what bothered Alice about Karen so much?  Maybe the pain of the tattoo was just making her delirious.

That’s all for today! Be sure to check out some of the other talented people over at www.SixSunday.com, and come back to visit next week!

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Six Sentence Sunday 8/19/2012

Welcome back to my 6-sentence snippet series from my book, Portrait of Woman in Ink: A Tattoo Storybook. Over the next 8 weeks, I will be sharing with you snippet from each chapter. (Click here to see last week’s snippet)

Today we meet Hallie, a young single mom finishing up her tech school degree so she can move herself and her son out of their Section 8 apartment and she can retouch the tattoo she got in her juvenile delinquent days.

Years ago, Hallie had gotten the tattoo in the kitchen of a friend of a friend who ran with her old crowd, back when looking tough meant something to her. It was supposed to be an artistic rendition of her initials, a drawing she’d done as a kid, but the friend of a friend who’d done the tattoo had been so messed up at the time the tattoo had come out lopsided and jagged, and Hallie had been too messed up to notice. It looked like shit; it really did. She kept telling herself that when she got it all turned around, she’d get it redone and smoothed out. It wasn’t exactly an option when you weighed it against gas money to drive your child to his Grandma’s and yourself to school so you could finally get things turned around. She didn’t need a tattoo to tell her she was tough now; she had the toughest job on the planet already.

That’s all for today! Be sure to check out some of the other talented people over at www.SixSunday.com, and come back to visit next week!

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Audiobooking ninja!

I’ll be the first to admit that I am so far behind the curve with the audiobook craze it’s semi-sad. I always said I didn’t think I could get into audiobooks even though people like my mom were into it. I recently figured out that the iPod Touch my wonderful boyfriend got me is perfect for ear-reading.

The first book I ever tried to read via audiobook was Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses. It was for a summer class, and I had a really hard time getting into the book, so I thought I could help myself out by getting the audiobooks from the library to follow along with. Even then, cassettes were a dinosaur means of listening to anything, so I unfairly judged all audiobooks based on a book that was not for me on a medium that no one used anymore. (That was the only class I ever dropped.)

Ten or so years later, I realized that audiobooks were available in a digital format, available on Overdrive from my library (since I am not a bjillionaire who can afford the ridiculous price tag publishers put on audiobooks), and amazing for specific activities, and way better than simultaneously reading and ear-reading.

  • RUNNING: I wish I’d discovered audiobooks back when I was training for my marathon. Now that I live in Texas, running outdoors doesn’t happen all that often, and audiobooks are what keep me sane running on the boring old treadmill.
  • WEIGHTLIFTING: Yep, this is my favorite activity of all time ever. Yes, I am being sarcastic, but it’s an important part of the ole regimen, and listening to an audiobook is a great way to lose count of reps. Not really.
  • SEWING: It’s one of the primary ways I distract myself when I should really be writing, but adding audiobook listening to the mix does at least make me feel a little more productive.
  • PUTTING AWAY LAUNDRY: It might be my least favorite activity of all activities, but I don’t want to delegate it in the event that the clothes don’t get put away in the right place. Dammit, dog, why won’t you pay the same kind of attention to *clean* underwear? Sorry – TMI. My point, audiobooks make it more tolerable.
  • VACUUMING: Yes, you could listen to the buzz of the vacuum, but an audiobook is much nicer.

Not-so-great activities: riding the bus. You’d think it’d work, but it’s a surprisingly crappy experience.

I felt the same kind of ambivalence before I got into e-books, but when I took up e-books, I began reading 2-3 times the amount I did with paperbacks. Now that I’ve added audiobooks to my repertoire, it’s more like 3-4 times what I was reading before. I’ve read 49 books this year, and I feel like a multi-tasking ninja!

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Six Sentence Sunday 8/12/2012

Welcome back to my 6-sentence snippet series from my book, Portrait of Woman in Ink: A Tattoo Storybook. Over the next 9 weeks, I will be sharing with you snippet from each chapter. (Click here to see last week’s snippet)

Today we meet Jody, a woman with three kids who’s putting herself through nursing school so she can leave her husband. In this scene, she reflects on the foot tattoo she got for good luck.

Jody rubbed her temples, knowing this would be the most peaceful moment she’d likely experience that day.  They were right in the middle of clinical rotations, eight hours of nonstop chasing after the floor nurses, asking as many questions as you could and trying to keep up.  Her floor nurse was just over five feet tall and weighed over 200 pounds but was harder to keep up with than all three of her spastic children combined.

But, she figured, it came with the territory of being part of a degree program that had “accelerated” at the beginning of the name.  She needed accelerated; she’d already wasted seven years getting a mostly useless Bachelor’s degree in history, in which time she’d managed to punch out three kids and marry a husband who was about as useless as her degree.

It was why she’d gotten the golden koi tattooed on her right foot when she found out she’d been accepted to the program.

That’s all for today! Be sure to check out some of the other talented people over at www.SixSunday.com, and come back to visit next week!

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Six Sentence Sunday 8/5/2012

Welcome back to my 6-sentence snippet series from my book, Portrait of Woman in Ink: A Tattoo Storybook. Over the next 10 weeks, I will be sharing with you snippet from each chapter. (Click here to see last week’s snippet)

Today we meet Beth, a woman who got a tattoo on her honeymoon ten years ago after marrying her husband with cystic fibrosis. As she celebrates her tenth anniversary, she reflects on the permanence of the tattoo.

Charlie sat up to cough, bracing himself with his left arm. Beth’s throat tightened; she could barely even see one year into the future, let alone ten. The tattoo was already starting to fade, the once-black vine now a dark, drab olive green. Why did they always turn greenish instead of fading to gray? Still, if it faded to green, it would only make the rose vine look healthier, more alive, and the edges of the red petals would have the hint of pink they always got when they were at their fullest bloom.

Maybe she’d keep the tattoo after all.

That’s all for today! Be sure to check out some of the other talented people over at www.SixSunday.com, and come back to visit next week!

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