Butter Knives

According to your little criminal you can put a round peg in a square hole if the hole is big enough.

She's correct. But to enlarge the hole might require a lot of you. If the other shoe is always about to drop and all sorts of hell are about to break loose and your ship never comes in you probably feel as though you are whittling with a butter knife. And you are. It's more like holding the butter knife in a shaky paw and distressed by it's odd heft. There is no faith in the isolation ward where you've locked yourself.

Sandy's for the Insecure

So everyone could choose a sandwich that was under a dollar which meant a hamburger or a cheeseburger, and we'd get one order of fries to share. The Mom would count the fries out and divide them five ways, which amounted to four or five each. Woo hoo. yrmama liked just ketchup and pickles, the others were all more daring, onion bits and mustard too. The works. Later, if we were lucky, there'd be a stop at the day old bread store to pick a Hostess fruit pie (cherry, apple or blueberry) from the big bin.  Along with bread the mom would get a box of Ding Dongs or Ho Hos or Twinkies for the rest of the week.

We always ate sitting in the car in the parking lot, but someone had to go in and place the order at the counter. The mom didn't like to go. The dad had no say.

"yrmama, it's your turn."

"No thanks." yrmama was maybe eight, or ten.

"But why not? It's easy. And it's good practice, you just say..."

"No." There was no way. yrmama's head would pop off. She'd rather go without lunch.

"But that's so silly. Don't be so shy."

"I don't want to." Fine, yrmama was shy, but she had better social skills than anyone else in the family. That didn't mean she would fall for being forced to walk into Sandy's alone, and speak for the whole family in front of all those strangers. Town people. Regular people.

"You do it," said the dad to the mom.

"You do it," the mom said to the older brother.

"No! Why should I have to do it?" the older brother would protest as he got out of the car clutching a few crumpled, sweaty dollar bills. He secretly loved it. Before he closed the door he'd add, "yrmama can't do it because she's too shy."

While the dad nursed customary annoyance the mom would sigh in admiration at her nearly perfect son.

Feeding the Cows of Fictionalization and The Interpreter of Maladies.

So the plan might be to outline this percolating new novel idea, then copy all the parts of the current novel that fit into a new document, then use the memoirish things yrmama's been writing as silage to be consumed by the cows of fictionalization over the winter.

Imagine, a novel in which none of the parts make her neither skim nor cringe -
It would constitute her third full novel, which is starting to be a healthy amount of practice. She felt she had nothing much to say fictionally until she was over forty, which is fair, ten years is not an unreasonable tenure as these things appear to go. A good number of rather successful writers have waited until they are of a decent age...(which does little to assuage the irksomeness of worrying that one's time may be passing one by). yrmama has been busy with other worthwhile life pursuits.

Before we descend into defensive wallowing let's point out the The Interpreter of Maladies, by Jhumpa Lahiri is quite worthwhile. It is a collection of short stories about people living on the margins between cultures, a delightful place in which to find fictional individuals. In this case it was probably better as a set of short stories than an entire novel - the intersecting observations was like circling around the topic and looking at it from different angles. And in Ms. Lahiri's case, delightfully detailed angles, a crumb here, a tidbit there, like tapas ought to be.

Hobunk Junction...

If Brenda Trax, Heiress, were a coming of age story set near Hobunk Junction, Iowa in the early 1980's would anyone mistake the hyper-truth of fiction for the mundane truth of historical fact? Would it be able to include a reimagining of the trope in which the long lost dad reappears? Rather than him causing minor trouble and being accepted because after all, he's her father, in this version she discovers that a relationship with the long longed-for father is unworkable, and there's a good reason why she didn't know him before now. Besides, in the current version it's easy to mistake the protagonist saving herself, which was yrmama's intention, for being saved by the boy.

"Hobunk Junction" is actually kind of brilliant because Urban Dictionary says Hobunk refers to a certain group of "hill-folk" of the Minnesotan frontier. And a website devoted to something called Belegarth (www.geddon.org/Belegarth) says Hobunk is the god of falling down and dropping things. And "Brenda," that's the name of another of yrmama's alter-egos, a name that trips off her tongue as if it were her own. (Not that she likes it, it just has a solid, mid-century muscular-thighed feel.)

There's nothing to lose by reworking or hybridizing parts of the novel because there hasn't exactly been a bidding war over it's publication. Maybe it's truly unfinished, a kind way of saying parts of it still suck a little. Nothing to lose. Nothing at all. Perhaps threatening to "finish it" in this manner will light a psychic fire under the few small presses who have not yet rejected me it.

Do. Or do not. There is no try. 

Tipping

This hand infographic is from Jezebel.com

yrmama dutifully admired her new haircut with a hand mirror with a slow spin in the twirly chair then followed her haircut lady up to the register. She declined to pre-schedule the next appointment and pulled her Mastercard out of her handy phone case while the haircut lady rang her up.

"Do you want a receipt?"

"No thanks."

OMG she's going to hand me the slip and I forgot to pre-figure the tip. 20%? Move the decimal one place = 10%, then double it...okay it's $47.50. Shit it's an odd number and a fraction as well. Now what? There's a seven. Seven times two is fourteen, round it up to be generous, fifteen. Add $15. Now for the adding. Meanwhile the haircut lady is politely waiting. Shit, carry the one, scribble out the five that looks like a two and make it a five. Okay, it's added but she's waiting for me! No time to double check! It's a fucking timed test and everyone else is done! Pencils down!

So once again I've overtipped. A while back I had a similar incident and ended up giving her about 40%. Out of mortification I then simply didn't tip at all for a few haircuts. So now she thinks I'm really weird and give huge tips but only occasionally. Perhaps the graceful way out is to find a new haircut lady, but then she'll think I don't like her work, which isn't true.

WWYD?

Mastering the Kale Smoothie

Blackberry seeds render it pebbly.
Curly kale is too chewy.
Orange juice balances the bitterness.
Blueberries make it dinosaur-colored.
A banana disappears into the maelstrom.
Parsley and kiwis are in short supply.
The dishwasher cannot dislodge kale specks from plastic or glass.
Cucumbers are a bad idea.
Melon is insipid.
Pineapple is positive.
Chia lends slime.

Prologue

yrmama considers a prologue. Not the car, but a prologue to her brilliant novel - a fresh beginning followed by a freshened ending. The protagonist really, really doesn't need a man to save her, but she does have to trust, at least momentarily, that there are people who are interested in helping her. Pathological independence will only take you so far, and one of the places it will try to take you is into a deep hole.

To prologue or not to prologue? If the prologue is set in the present and the rest of the story is set in the past, the present is prologue. Or, actually, the past is prologue but you read them out of order.

Who will publish the sucker? Will she stoop to self-publishing? Will she wear out her welcome with every prospect by submitting the work as finished when it is in fact not? How will she know when it is finished? Should that storyline about finding a photograph of her father and seeing he is not what she thought and therefore nor is she, be removed? Mostly, is the boyfriend a red herring? Boyfriends are real, and can be worthwhile, but they aren't the answer.