Author: PaigeRandall

What’s Yours Is Mine

/ PaigeRandall / 2 Comments

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I’m driving back from a wonderful long weekend away. Passenger-ing actally. We attended an incredible wedding. I have been to a lot of weddings and this one was truly extraordinary. The ceremony was blissfully quick. The reception was held 47 paces from my hotel room.  The party, complete with a singer and steel drum, overlooked the ocean. Insert great food, fun people, loud music, and bourbon. It was unbeatable!

(Oh no.  I hope no one is awaiting sappy “you could see the love between them” drivel. Wrong blog.)

Now that I am writing,  I feel a little like a vampire trying to feed off of everyone and everything around me. There was a photographer last night at the wedding.  One of four photographers. She was utterly fascinating.  My main character has a complicated relationship with her camera.  (Does that sound dirty?  It isn’t meant to.) I stalked this woman all night. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. I took four times as many pictures of her as I did the bride and groom. Literally four times as many.
I took and took from her all night. The musculature of her forearm, the tilt of her waist as she leaned back to frame a shot, how she set her chin when she checked her images — I took it all and I’m going to use it.

When I’m done with Circling I should probably look that photographer up and send her a copy.  What is the etiquette for borrowing somebody’s essence?

It’s Not All Good

/ PaigeRandall / 4 Comments

In the interest of maintaining a somewhat honest blog, I need to just vent about this crap day. I intend to rant for about 250 words and then wrap it up with a tidy little bow of optimism at the end. Or maybe I’ll add a link to a song instead. Let’s see how it goes…

I’m sick. Nothing bad, just a nasty cold that includes strange symptoms of whininess and overeating. My preference is always wine to whine, but this is over taking me! Yesterday’s sick day cost me a box of Kleenex, but allowed me 14 hours of revisions on my current draft. I pulled a few “big reveals” out of dialog and wrote the scenes as flashback. This was very challenging. I think the pain was cloaked in dialog because writing snappy conversation around the action isn’t so gut wrenching. I did terrible things to my poor characters!  I bled all over the damn page. It felt horrible, but effective.

Needless to say I spent a sleepless night with violent nightmares, those really bad ones where I have to get up and walk the house to shake it off. If only I had walked to the basement.

I awoke feeling crappy, but the good girl in me got ready for at least a half day at work. Until – the discovery of a flooded basement. Insert curse words, dripping towels, wet vacs, probably ruined carpets, and all that mundane garbage that will never find its way onto my pages.

And then my cell phone died.
And I’m heading out of town for a wedding tomorrow.

Sooo – 90 minutes at the Verizon store (not too bad actually), where dueling sound systems playing different music from two sides of the store blared into my brain. It was good music too. As punishment for all of my life’s crimes, I sat in the middle, until I thought the sensory overload would be the death of me.

There is probably more, but I’m getting sick of me and my word count is high. I’m going to turn my whine into a glass of wine and set up my new cell phone. I’ll wallow just long enough to share this song with you. It reaches my most miserable core. Truly I am grateful for every minute of every day, but this day has been fucktastic.