What the *!@% Was THAT?

So FIRST, two announcements...

I am ALSO at Burrowers, Books and Balderdash today talking about the endless peaks and tiny ebbs that we need to navigate to make it in this publishing business.

Second, We have a WINNER of the “I am an Adept of the Magic Arts' t-shirt!!! From the names of people who entered, I put them in order then used a random number generator to pick ONE... Congratulations, Jan! Jan Morrison was the lucky person in that just right spot!  Jan, I will email you with Denise's contact info.


Okay, now onto the BLOG for today...

So on Saturday my daughter called me. She and her boyfriend had taken my son to the mall, as their fabulous nana had sent them a little money and so they had a couple school clothes things to look for. I had no money to contribute and an abiding loathing of the mall, so off they went... She CALLED when they ran out of gas. Oops.

I promised to come with gas, ran to the garage and stared for a good three minutes at our electric lawn mower plugged right where it always is. How had I forgotten we don't NEED gas? Not to fear though. We haven't reached the scary part of this story yet. I went next door and asked my FABULOUS neighbor if SHE had a gas can. She did and gave it to me... I got a little gas and rescued the childings, and then returned the gas can.

When I let her know I'd put the can back, I then went in for a cocktail. I might tell you we don't have cocktails often, but that would make me a big far liar... I really enjoy having a cocktail with my neighbor—she's good company.

Ours wasn't this big, but same colors: Transformer explosion

When I arrived it had been raining just a little, but mid-cocktail it began to pour... there was some thunder.. some wind... and then there was a HUGE CRACK (and we aren't talking plumber's butt)... it was really loud and followed almost immediately by a huge flash of light—bright orange neon... maybe a little pink and a little white to it. It was spooky. We ran to the window to see what it was, but there was no sign. Thankfully the house across the street looked fine. Whatever it was looked too low to have been the treetops and nothing was on fire or smoking. But it was also darkish (stormy skies doing what they do). I had to wait out the storm, so Fabulous Neighbor and I theorized for another twenty minutes what that might have been.

My theories most often had aliens or supernatural phenomena in them, of course... that making for the most interesting story. But we just couldn't come up with anything that made realistic sense.


I really like how a mystery hangs a little... it is fun to have so much possibility.

When HWMNBMOTI got home from work it was still fairly light (he worked an 8-8) so we wandered that way. He pointed out a dead tree, but it wasn't blackened and I thought it had been there before. No answers...

Ours was an oak, and long dead, but this much branch

The houses across the street though, were without power—we confirmed it as dark arrived. No streetlights on that side. No houselights. Our side of the street was fine. That's been the case before—we've known we were on a different part of the grid. Sometimes we're the ones with no power.

The confirmation I wasn't crazy about having seen something was nice. Not that fabulous neighbor and I very often have joint hallucinations, but I suppose it was possible.

Then, when I was in my tub, HWMNBMOTI came in and reported... we have an older neighbor across the street who got home when he was outside. He went and helped her get in—check on things, find flashlight and all that that can be hard in the dark.. and we got our answer... across her back yard was a very large branch—a third of the tree, really... the dead one... It had fallen, probably in the wind, and hit a power line on the way down.

It was more fun when I didn't know.


So are there writing lessons here? I think so... the best is that moment of unknowing is the most engaging... when several things are possible. Just watching it, if I'd known everything, would have been a WHOA moment, but that would have been that. We need to remember to keep a little mystery and engage our readers' imaginations.