Friday Eve Epiphany

Memorial Day weekend I saw an ambulance two doors down with a stretcher readied out front. It's the house of my elderly neighbor with the overweight dog who always stops to chat (and let her dog roll in my grass) when I'm doing yard work.

I've noticed new people, strangers, in her driveway lately. So yesterday I asked my immediate neighbor (a woman who tends to make me nuts) if she knew her and what had happened. We spoke for a while, she said she didn't know.

When I returned home this evening she'd left me a note saying the woman down the street had fallen down the stairs. She died on Memorial Day. It made me so, so sad. And suddenly -- immediately -- I was overcome with a sense of release.

There is so much going on in my life right now, but I just let go. I freed my mind of all the bs and took a deep breath and a step back. Life is too short to anguish over much that we do. In that moment, and now, I am thankful for the people who do love me and the life that I live. My God is an awesome God and He is good all the time.

Sunday Morning Blooms

I'd like to say I woke up early today and did something productive; went to church, started writing, planted all those flowers I bought from Home Depot yesterday. Something. But no. I simply woke up early and starting...thinking.

There's an itch at the back of my brain -- one of those personal preoccupations one doesn't share in a public blog -- that's demanding more attention than I want to give it today. But man, it's loud. Peskier than that character conflict I need to heighten as I plow through this manuscript re-write, and certainly more compelling than the fact that I always leave my plants-to-plant in the garage or on the porch until they're on the brink of death before I turn gardener and save them.

So I've managed to ignore the "itch" by covering it with the guilt of not making it to church. Again. (Shaking my head here.) I even told the kids that today would be the day we return. The first for them since the divorce. (Except for a family funeral and birthday celebration they've attended with the other side of their family.) Maybe I was mad at God for a while. You know how we humans can be. But somewhere in the past few weeks, I've decided it's time for us to return.

Until I remembered -- this morning -- that I let my daughter ride her bike and make mud pies in the rain for a looooong time Friday evening. Wonderful for her. Trauma for her hair. An afro puff is fine for soccer, but not for church (to me anyway). I can just hear the old folks whispering behind the itch in my brain, saying, "Look at that baby's head," with an accompanying tsk, tsk, tsk. I let mommy guilt push me into the paralysis of analysis and here we are at home. The kids are not in pews. They are in bed until I finish this post.

It's been so long since I've strung a whole thought, I figured my poor Plotting Me blog was way past due for a new installment. And this is so much easier than that dagblasted re-write I'm submerged in. (Notice I did not say immersed. Very careful word choice there.) I love my story and its new direction, the growth and evolution of characters I am as attached to as my Mac lipstick, the anticipation of an amazing happy ending.

Yet, every other day I'm thinking it would have been easier to start an entirely new story. So, why didn't I? Because there were components of this one that I wanted to keep. At least that's what I thought a year ago when the book found a new home with Amazon. Now, the more I work on it, the more I realize how much I outgrew the manuscript I originally submitted. Little remains the same in this story aside from the title and the characters.

Now that I've admitted this factoid aloud to myself and the universe, I'll move ahead accordingly, deleting the old words and replacing them with new direction. After I plant. My daughter is awake and anxious to bring the color of God's annuals to the front porch and the back deck.

That's what Sunday morning thinking will get you: Prayers without church, new life for uprooted plants, heart-opening plot bursts, and a shower of words to help all of this bloom. Everything, it seems, becomes salve for the itch.

Finite Creativity

I saw an interesting tweet the other day that said (in paraphrase) that Hollywood has run out of original movie ideas. I suppose if you look at titles and themes you might think that. But, then, I subscribe to that school of thought that says there is only a finite pool of story themes to draw from. To me, the differences between the re-makes is in execution, in the re-imagining of the story.


For example, I can think of four different takes on the Snow White fairytale: there’s Disney’s “original” animated feature, many years later, “Snow White: A Tale of Terror” starring Sigourney Weaver in the late 90s and, most recently, “Snow White and the Huntsmen” with Kristen Stewart and Chris Hemsworth, and “Mirror Mirror: The Untold Adventures of Snow White” with Julia Roberts. Check IMDb and you’ll find several other versions. I have to say that the Huntsmen and Mirror Mirror movies – released a few months apart – were vastly different and refreshing for that reason. I wouldn’t even consider them the same story. And to me, they underscore the power of reinvention.

Singers who want to stay relevant in the industry find new faces to show to the public every few years. Think Madonna. So why shouldn’t Hollywood pander to audiences’ love for the tried-and-true by twisting underlying themes? It’s like they give us just enough familiarity to bring a certain level of mental comfort while mixing in a generous serving of whatever’s in style – be that darkness, edge, thrills or modern comedy.

I’m not disenchanted or disillusioned.

But what’s your spin? Any favorite re-makes? Overdone storylines that you don’t want to see on screen ever again?

Personally, I would’ve said no more Batman…until I saw the Dark Knight. Or even the Spiderman franchise until Andrew Garfield showed up as The Amazing Spiderman. I think there’s always room for a better idea.

How about you?