Day #15 — Has Pie Jump the Shark?

OK, so I could not figure out to what Lisa Romeo's prompt of "Jump the Shark" referred. After thinking about just responding to it with a gut reaction, I opted instead to be distracted by the Internet and look up the definition. Seems it means when something stops getting better and starts getting worse, and it originally applied to television shows (specifically, Happy Days, when the Fonz jumped the shark on water skis; I must have missed that episode). So, now I know. I don't know if that makes it a better prompt, or a worse one.

In the meantime, the prompt that arrived in my inbox today is "pie". As Andie McDowell's character sang in the movie Michael: "Pie, pie, me oh my. I love pie." So again — which prompt do I choose? Being the control freak, methodical me that I am, I will take them in order and work on yesterday's prompt today.

Prompt: Jump the Shark

He knew his marriage had jumped the shark when he realized his fondest moments of the day were the 20 minutes or so he had alone in the apartment between the time she left for the train downtown and he left to sit in traffic on the highway during his commute.

From 7:00 a.m. until 7:20 a.m., six days a week, he felt truly at peace and comfortable in his own skin. He always waited until he heard the garage door close to jump out of the shower. Their master bedroom had been an addition over the garage, and the floor rumbled as the electric door rattled to a close under his feet. 

A sweet quiet would travel through his soles and up into his heart and he would slop out of the shower stall, leaving big wet footprints all through the bedroom and into the office/slash den down the hall. She hated when even a drop of water hit the floors and nagged him constantly that it would ruin the finish. He reveled in his wet footprints, squishing them from side to side to make them as big as possible, like a sneaky 10-year-old boy. Just before he banged out the light switch, he would wink at the shit-eating grin on his face staring back at him from the mirror over her pristine vanity table.

It wasn't that he was a slob, or that he didn't have respect for the quarter-sawn oak floors of their 140-year-old Victorian. He was the architect, for God's sake. But houses were meant for living in, not for housing museums. That's what she called the living room — the museum. She even had clear, plastic slipcovers made for the sofa, like his old Auntie May had when he was a little boy. It crackled and whooshed on the rare occasions he was allowed to sit on it, and last summer, in the heat of August when his best friends Paul and Evelyn visited, he was mortified when Evelyn's bare legs stuck to the sofa and pulled the cushion along with her when she stood.

But, this had been his house first, and he was damned if he would leave it, even if he left her. Every ounce of sweat equity that he had put into the restoration made it his. Let her take the damn plastic-covered furniture and go. All he wanted was the house. It had good bones. It could be redecorated.

Time:  11 minutes

I don't think I have ever tried to write in the first person from the POV of a male. The main character of my children's book manuscript is a nine-year-old boy, but it's written in third person. I've been toying with a rewrite in the first person, to see what that will bring out in my character and if I can get rid of some of the distance my readers (and a couple of agents) have mentioned.

I liked this prompt and the way it took me. So many gender stereotypes and role reversals to play around with (sorry for ending in a preposition; see, I couldn't do it; I had to add the parenthetical thought to avoid it).

Day #14 — What to do?

Since I took a little detour yesterday (responding to a prompt from Linda Cassidy Lewis), today I am facing two prompts from Lisa Romeo in my inbox. Such a dilemma! At first, I wasn't sure what to do. Should I respond to two prompts in one day to "catch up"? No, that does not follow the rules or intention of this blog. Should I do them in the order received? Should I peek and pick the most fun prompt? Should I just keep one in reserve?

Well, I peeked. Yesterday prompt was "black and white"; so many possibilities! Today's prompt: "Jumped the Shark." I don't even know what that means. Since my goal is to get more creative in my writing, I should probably do the second one, but my logical brain is responding, trying to figure it out, and my creative brain is off cowering in the corner at such a prompt. So:

Prompt: Black and White

My husband swears he dreams in black and white. I don't see how this is even possible. Why would anyone dream in black and white? Why those two colors? If you need contrast, why not blue and orange, which are across the color wheel from one another and therefore complimentary? And why just two colors – why not three — black, white and red, for example.

The answer probably lies in the fact that he was born in 1950 and is among the first generation of children raised with television. Of course, back then, TV was all black and white. Again, I don't really understand the science behind that, but I'm sure there is some logical, or at least technological reason.

But why would the subconscious be limited to black and white if the conscious brain is capability of perceiving the full color spectrum? What does that say about one's subconscious? I'm no shrink, but my guess would be it has more to do with his need for utter control, even in sleep, than the effect that black and white television had on his life. 

I'm not being critical here (OK, maybe a little — but I like control, too) or judgmental (OK, maybe a little because, frankly, I don't really believe him). He actually says that he hardly ever dreams, but that when he does they are always in black and white. Part of me thinks "No, they're not. You dream every night, just like everybody else, you just don't remember them; AND you dream in color every night, just like everybody else, you just don't remember.

But the other part of me, the generous, empathic part, thinks "how sad". What would I do with out my Technicolor dreams — sometimes dozens, even more in a night? It's true that my dreams are often exhausting — frequently involving my inability to get something done, some small task or enormous endeavor accomplished or resolved. But, I've found that as I've gotten older, I am somehow partly conscious of being in a dream state and can alter the course of my dreams. (How's that for being a control freak?) Sometimes, when I get really frustrated, my semi-conscious self will remind my sleeping self that it's just a dream and that I don't have to stick with it. I can move on to the next dream.

Maybe that's a good lesson for me as a writer: if the story in my head — my awake dreaming, if you will — gets too frustrating, maybe I can move on, at least temporarily to the next story, or an older story that needs revision.

And who knows. Maybe my husband is telling the truth. After all, nothing is ever black and white.

Time:  12 minutes

Damn. I ran long again. I really must get a better timer. Or just learn to be less wordy. Still, the control freak in me would feel really uncomfortable if I didn't bring the prompt to some logical stopping point. Of course, this blog is designed to take me out of my comfort zone, so maybe I should get that timer that will signal me to stop and let go at exactly the 10-minute mark. I read that one writer always purposefully stopped for the day right in the middle of some important part of his or her writing. The idea was to give the subconscious something to keep working on while s/he went about the rest of the day and into sleeping/dreaming. It's something to consider.