Yippe Kay Yay!

It's Blog Rodeo time, fellow bloggers and friends!

This edition focuses on different posts about blogging. We starts our ride through the blogosphere at Great Circle. Pete Aldin offers a link to his last blog carnival about the way each of us overcome personal obstacles and battles. Read many interesting and varied posts on How the War was Won.

For a more personal insight into Pete Aldin read the first blog post that ever went up at his blog, Freaked Out Fathers. Slip back to December 2006 and see how he reacted In the beginning.

This next stop will be a real treat if you adore the beauty that is a found in the creation called a woman's body. This blog run by Aloha_50 is adult in some of its content and called In Praise of the Female Form. The post offered for the rodeo is of an array of gorgeous famous faces, artistically photographed and fully clothed. There is a particulary striking one of Kim Bassinger.

We've seen bueaty in the physical form at the last site, now lets cast our eyes upon beauty of the written variety. Jonas Lamb shares his poetic vision with this short sample of his work:

a baby's heart
a hummingbird's wings
my ear drum on her belly
listening
__

Now read all about this talented and thoughful poet who blogs.



Our wagon train is heading to to the heartland of my country as we stop by a site titled Alabama Kitchen Sink.Shelia Norbit lives in Springfield, Missouri now and opens up her world to us when she answers Why I Blog.


Time for a little fun. Play Tag at The Lives and Times of....Anthony McCune.

Draw your eyes to the center ring of this Rodeo and see me take the bull by the horns with the first blog post I ever put online. Its February 2005, its cold here in Chicago, and I am entering a brave new world See what started it all for me.

Some of us, like me with that very first post of mine, are not born brillant. But some of us are. This poet and friend from Doktor Lapse Eternus never fails to entertain and enlight me with his work. Shakir takes a moment to tell us why he blogs.

Our wagon train through the blogosphere zooms over to England to visit Naomi now. She's someone I can relate well to- an aspiring writer working hard to finish her novel. She's been blogging since January of 2006 and recently hit her 500th blog post. Read about that milestone and the blog carnival she is running by stopping by herDiary from England

We end the this time at our Rodeo by hopping on over to the see the man who inspired this whole event, the hardworking Kilroy of The Gonzo Papers. His post is dedicated to a cause that touches the heart of every American I know. If you pray, say a prayer for lost souls and then read about the life of Joseph Vincent Vigiano, who lived and died as a hero on September 11, 2001.


Thanks for taking the time to read this post and stop by all the sites that participated. Leave a comment at each one and let them know you had a ball at our Blog Rodeo! Till next time, cowboys, cowgirls and all you crazy blogging buddies of mine. Yee Haw.

Sing us out, Tim McGraw.


I got a life that most would love to have
But sometimes I still wake up fightin' mad
At where this road I'm heading down might lead
I guess that's just the cowboy in me

The urge to run, the restlessness
The heart of stone I sometimes get
The things I've done for foolish pride
The me that's never satisfied
The face that's in the mirror when I don't like what I see
I guess that's just the cowboy in me....

We ride and never worry about the fall
I guess that's just the cowboy in us all.


Cowboy in Me Lyrics

An Accidental Life

Its time for Three Word Wednesday again. The three words offered are

Caught
Eager
Perfume

To me the first thing that comes to mind is a tale of two lovers having an illicit tryst. But I didn’t want to go with the obvious route so here is what I came up with instead. I am trying to change up my tone each week. I have done violent, obsessive, and romantic already.

An Accidental Life


Jared sat at the kitchen table, smoking a cigarette. It was about time to go out and water the flowers.

No one expected a guy like him- with spiky black hair, cold eyes, and a rap sheet that stretched over two tables back before they had all the records on computers- to enjoy gardening. He was supposed to like riding motorcycles and bar fights. And he did. But raising hell would never ease the heavy weight of loss that had settled into his bones.

Though he could not call himself a good man, he had a desire to leave something good on this earth once his time ran out.

The way Jared figured it, he had done one right thing in his life. Though his Ma would say one thing don’t make up for all the shit he pulled, all the lives he drug down, all the times the cops banged down the door or the phone rang at three a.m. Jared thought- for a time- that this one thing had made the fact he was born worth it.

He had been a good father.

His daughter was christened Camille Amelia Tennyson . Her skin was pale as translucent paper. Her hair a deep ruby red, her smile heaven. She woke up eager each day- for life, for hugs, for seeing the sunrise and watching cartoons. She was alive for three years, thirty-nine days and ten hours.

They made quite a sight around town, after her mom split with that roadie from a rock band no one had ever heard of. Strained. Spliced. The name was something like that. Jared had known it once but now it was more than irrelevant. Kim didn’t make it to her daughter’s funeral. Her cell was cut off and by the time she got the message Camille was laying beneath a stone that read Daddy’s Little Angel Girl.

People who would have never spoken to him before- who were turned off by the tattoo’s that decorated his neck, knuckles, and both arms- left flowers and teddy bears on his front lawn, right over the dark patch of grass where the truck had barreled over his child.

The driver lost control. That was the answer he got. Four words.

To keep from going crazy- from diving into pills and booze, from killing someone or himself- Jared started to plant flowers. It started when he had to cover the spot on the lawn. Then he added a bed of flowers near the back door. Gardenias.Camille had loved when he brought home bouquets of those for her. They smelled like the perfume Kim used to wear. A visceral reminder of a mother lost. She would suck in the scent and light up, as if her mother might walk in the door at any second. He thought of not bringing them home but she would beg, “Flowies!” and he didn’t know how to tell her she couldn’t have her mother or her flowers.

Now all he had was flowers, too.

Jared needed to keep moving, planting, watering, pulling the weeds, because then he wouldn’t be able to think as much. He planted flowers all along the perimeter of home, and then his mother’s and then his best buddy’s yard got a makeover.

It was a small thing to do. But it kept him planning and tending and honoring his baby girl.

The driver was caught. He didn’t flee the scene. A kid. Seventeen and stupid, not stoned or drunk.
He was never charged. The prosecutor broke it to Jared by saying “I understand your grief. But it was tragic accident...”

Jared didn’t think he understood anything. Camille would be seven now. Did he understand what four years, fifty days and three hours without being able to kiss the head of his child felt like?

No one should understand that.

Ring. Ring.

He stubbed out the cigarette and crossed the kitchen to grab the phone.

“Yeah.....Kim. I’ll be over to plant those roses you wanted put in this weekend.”

THE END


Note-

Did you know that DBA Lahane has added a new story to his blog? I mention this because I'm impressed by his work each and every time I read it. He's a published writer that weaves unique, engaging fiction everytime he puts fingers to keys. I'm a hug fan and hope to write like him when I "grow up". :)

Check out his latest story


Panacea by DBA Lahane.

OMG,is it THAT time again?

I got an email from Chris Baty ( okay, I personally didn't just get an email from him. Thousands of other crazy people- I mean NaNoWriMo participants- did too.)

The site will go live on October first in preparation of the November first start of the challenge. For anyone who hasn't heard of National Novel Writing Month, the goal is to write a 50,000 word novel in 30 days.

I took part in 2005 by writing 42,800 words or so. That unfinished work was called Tripping Over Myself. It was about the misadventures of a slacker twenty year old guy named Jasper Patterson.

Last year I jumped in again. That time I made it to 51,000 words. The novel I worked on was Nikolas and Simone. Anyone who reads this blog has probably already heard me bitch and moan about this story ad naseuam. I do love that novel though( except for the days I hate it). It is, to date, my favorite piece of fiction written by me.

Will I do NaNoWriMo this year?

That is the plan. Except I have zero plot ideas. I'm dry. Even though it is only September and by all rights I should not enter full fledged panic mode till, oh say, around November 5th or 6th I would still prefer to have at least a germ of an idea right now.

Hmmm. Will have to muse on it.

I'm crazy about NaNoWriMo. It's insanity but its a bueatiful sort of madness that only a frustrated writer could enjoy.

Are you doing NaNoWriMo?

Dancing Backwards in High Heels

After two weeks of spinning dark tales of men gone mad I offer a woman’s perspective.

The three words offered this week are:

Ambiguous
Nine
Slept

Dancing Backwards in High Heels by Sara

Vanessa Hartgrove had been rushing for the last eighteen years. This was one of the parts about being a feminist no one mentioned to her in college. You had to run- always, everywhere.

If you wanted it all you had to be at the gym early ( looks matter), the office late ( face time counts), and not forget to squeeze in meeting a life partner so you could raise two point nine happy, well adjusted children that you would lie to everyday when you swore “You can do it all.”

Doing it all took its toll. But all things in life did, she knew now.

She was forty three years old, and tired. Exhausted down to her bones, would be a more apt description. In her loss column was a failed marriage (Jerry liked them young) and a kid who smoked weed (rehab had taken care of the Oxycotin problem). It was far from the picture she had painted in her imagination for herself when she left Yale two decades before.

Still she didn’t look like a failure. No one would guess, upon first glance, that the world had beaten her down, that all her days as the competent employee, mother, wife had made her a bitter, restless woman.

As she hurried from her office building toward a cab, with rain splicing down over the city street making it so she could barely see more that the flash of familiar yellow and headlights, Vanessa knew she looked damn good. The fact that she slept only four hours a night did not show on her face, how she gave up on ever being happy didn’t reflect out of her eyes. Her disillusionment was her best kept secret.

“Share a cab?” the man asked as he slid into the backseat next to her.

A quick, offended retort sprang to her lips before he turned and met her eyes. A smile curved his lips as recognition darted into his eyes. “Nessa?”

Harold Ratson. She hadn’t seen him since they kissed goodbye before he headed off to Chicago, the summer after graduation. They had both been so eager to start their “Real Lives”-she laughed now thinking about that. They hadn’t even cried as they stood in the airport. No big teary good bye for them. They had been too full of themselves to imagine they wouldn’t be moving on to bigger, better things.

Her life had gotten bigger, that was for sure. But better? Vanessa seemed to remember thinking the way his lips felt when they kissed the pulse point on her neck was the best single sensation she ever experienced back then. Nothing had been ambiguous when they were young. Everything was now.

She smiled at him, her life started to slow down. “Harry.”

Spinning an original racket? No, no, that is not right. A racket spinning orginally? No, that is not it either. Oh, hell.

After spending a few hours trying to create a story using the three words

Spinning
Orginal
racket

I started to realize I was defeating the purpose of Three Word Wednesday. It is to spark creativity and to get the words flowing. But all I was doing was slowly driving myself mad. A good, compelling story could surely be born from this week's prompt but I won't be the one to write it. Blame it on The Muse. What a bitch. :)

Anyway, I went back and did an old prompt from August 22, 2007. Since I didn't write anything that week here is my first attempt to incorporate

Subtle
Linger
Corridor

into a short story. The title of this story comes from Pat Monahan's latest song, Her Eyes.

Blue Skies Meet the Sunrise by Sara

Manny felt like telling the judge “Don’t blame me, it was her eyes. Those eyes, man. How could I resist?”

To say they were blue is like saying Jordan was merely good at basketball. Her eyes were such a shocking bright, sky at dawn, shade of blue that the first time she looked directly at him Manny forgot everything he ever knew.

His name- gone. Telephone number- disappeared. Address? At that moment he couldn’t have told you if he lived in a hut or mansion. All he saw was those eyes.

Then- and this was another part of his defense he would have liked the judge to know-she smiled at him.

See? If she didn’t like him back, then why did she smile? It wasn’t the type of smile other women gave him, Manny could tell the difference. Her smile had lingered flirtatiously. Lana knew what she was doing when she smiled at him- what she was starting.

So he chased her. Men had been chasing woman since the beginning of time. Since when had that become a crime with a sinister name like stalking? Wooing, that is what it was. He sent her love notes, promised her things, offered her chance after chance to admit her feelings for him. But Lannie- his nickname for her- she was young still, just a few months into college, and she didn’t know how to be in an adult relationship. Manny didn’t blame her for her misjudgements about him. He should have been more subtle. Sitting outside her apartment all night might have been a tad bit overprotective, he could admit that much in retrospective.

But Lana had to take her blame in all this mess too. Fair was fair. That was another lesson she needed to learn. So many he still had to teach that girl.

“You are sentenced to 36 months to be served in an minimum security facility under the direction of the California Correctional System,” that damn misguided judge pronounced as Manny shook his head vigorously in protest.

Could no one see the injustice? Sent to prison for loving Lana too much? Being too good to her? His eyes jerked over to where she sat behind the prosecutor. And that is when Manny lost it. He really did flip then- not like the times before when Lana was merely confused. Because at that moment, when he was just about to have to leave her side for three long years, Lana did it again, what got them in this whole mess.

She smiled at him. Sweet blue eyes from Heaven met his nearly black ones before she stood and, with a flip of her honey blonde hair, left the courtroom, slipping into the corridor without even saying good-bye to him.

“You cold hearted bitch!” Manny shouted. “I’ll slit you like a fish. Teach you some respect, nasty whore. You better wait for me. Don’ t go cheating on me, Lannie. Don’t you dare.”

Guards rushed him. They were all crazed with power and eager to take any excuse to use it. They insinuated he was causing a disturbance which Manny found to be utterly ridiculous.

He couldn’t even tell the woman he loved good-bye now? What was this world coming to? It was getting to the point where you couldn’t breath without getting arrested. Manny blamed that on The Patriot Act. He would have to write Lana a letter and tell her to be very careful while he was away. She would surely appreciate the advice.

Hi everyone

In an effort to post more often on this blog between now and November ( when if I do NaNoWriMo again I should be posting all the time about how crazed I am) I have decided to start doing the prompts found at Three Word Wednesday.

The latest one asks for each person to write something using these words:

Pound
Sunglasses
Wild.

Pay it Forward

He stood on the balcony of the overpriced, but still somehow trashy, hotel and gazed down on all the smiling, happy people. Hurly hated smiling, happy people. And beaches. And sunshine. And life. Hurly particularly hated life these days, ever since he became a walking cliche on the night he walked in on his wife and his best friend.

They had never even liked each other, Shiela and Tom, or so they had lied to him. Hurly hated liars.

It wasn’t like Hurly has ever been a upbeat guy to begin with but that day something changed, something broke. Something that could not be soothed over no matter how much alcohol he poured down his throat, no matter how many blondes spread open their thighs for him, no matter how good it felt to go to Shiela’s funeral and hear that there were still no suspects in her murder. Maybe it was just an accident, after all, was what people whispered.

There was a young woman, not over twenty and still full of promise, on the beach beneath him. She reminded Hurly of Sheila. She looked like she would take a man and break him but good.

Wave after wave pounded the shore, as the perky bright eyed beauty laughed at something the man at her side said. Then she stole his sunglasses right off his face, taking what wasn’t hers, taking without permission, not caring how the man felt about it at all. Hurly longed to scream at her clueless boyfriend “Don’t you see what she is?”

But only Hurly could see. Ever since Sheila slept with Tom, Hurly had a certain kind of second sight. He used it viciously. Some women weren’t human, Hurly now believed. He wondered why it had taken him so long to see that. 39 years and only now did he know the truth. So many men never figured it out. Some women were just wild things- animals, greedy and never satisfied.

Hurly titled his head to the side as a smile curved up the corners of his lips. The young woman on the beach was walking back to the hotel- his hotel- right now. He could catch her in the lobby if he hurried.

Self absorbed little twits like her didn’t ever notice when someone was watching them.

By Sara Pufahl

Okay that was extremely dark. Whoa.
Let me know what you think.

Three Word Wednesday

Blog Rodeo

Hello everyone.

I will be hosting a Blog Rodeo this month, in conjection with Fear and Loathing- The Gonzo Papers.


Submit your entry to: IlovetowriteSMP@yahoo.com with Blog Rodeo the Subject of the email by September 26th.

The entry should be the URL to a post on your blog that is about

We want to round up the best posts on bloggers, blogs and blogging. The types of posts were looking for are these:


LOOK FOR THE POST ON THE 27th.