Word Craft

While primarily a place to display my crafty tangible pursuits, I have not shared any of my fiction here.

I would like to say that I am a disciplined writer and spend an allocated period every single day practicing and honing my skills; however, I am a fits and starts novelist. I write when the muse strikes and do very little of anything else until it fades again.

In that vein, this is a glimpse of how it typically works for me:

Mr. Sandman and I have never fully committed.

We flirt incessantly.

I get all dolled up, shower, shave my legs, and generally make myself available for a glorious night with him. He either drops by for a few short moments of bliss, if he shows at all, before abandoning me for others.

I am convinced I need him, otherwise, I would not continue to accept his wandering ways.

He is definitely not boyfriend material.

I deserve better.

However, he is basically the only game in town.

Thus, my nights are spent is a semi-conscious state, cocooned in the bed linens with one, all important, leg cast out to even out the temperature extremes. I convince myself, on average, the sacrificed appendage, cold and blue in the meat locker-like conditions, compensates for the near inferno suffered by the remaining body parts.

Occasionally, the body flips and the other leg manages to escape its confines to allow the first one to sneak back under the bed clothes.

More often than not, in a fit of pique, all the covers are tossed, but for a corner wrapped tightly across the chest, to better maximize the incubus, soul draining experience, perhaps. These are usually the nights Mr. Sandman surreptitiously returns and sprinkles a macabre version of his fairy dust, and I am left with a series of horrific, slow motion visions that each ultimately result in my impending demise, albeit in a vast myriad of excruciatingly painful, if not cleverly inventive, ways. I have long suspected Stephen King and Mr. Sandman fell out half a century ago…

Most of the events from these nocturnal images need not be shared; however, last night introduced something a bit different. In a playful mood, I suspect, he introduced me to a new character: Beatrice “Dixie” Cabot, a former FFA (Future Farmers of America) beauty queen with degrees in English, History, and Anthropology, although she has yet to use any of them professionally. For the prior fourteen years, since she graduated from college, she has been the attractive, socially-connected half (read Trophy Wife) to their small town’s District Attorney, Cedric Winthrop, III, otherwise known as “Tripp.”

Unfortunately for Dixie, her husband’s political career was derailed, along with their marriage, when it was discovered Tripp organized a high-end escort operation, which targeted political opponents in well-publicized stings.

While wallowing in the throes of her unraveled life, Dixie received a certified letter detailing the Last Will and Testament of her eccentric, spinster great-Aunt Bessie, who had estranged herself from the family thirty years before Dixie was even a glimmer, and exiled herself from the family’s holdings in the rural South for what was tantamount to a foreign land: coastal Maine.

After packing what belongings were not confiscated or sold to satisfy her ex-husband’s criminal defense fees, Dixie loaded up her mammoth shelter specials, affectionately named Anarchy and Chaos, and set out to discover what treasures Bessie had bequeathed her in the northeast.

Once she arrived, Dixie was startled to find other than a fund tied directly to the care and maintenance of a certain property, her inheritance was basically a tiny rectory and a small, long abandoned stone church, as well as the acre on which they stood.

The body in the cedar chest in the basement was a bonus.

Calling on skills in reason and deduction she did not know she had, Dixie embarked on a bizarre search into history.