Déjà Vu Blogfest - Ahhh, Memories

I'm participating the the Déjà Vu Blogfest hosted by DL Hammons, Creepy Query Girl, Lydia Kang and Nicole Ducleroir.

I went back through my posts so I could repost one, and it made me feel a lot better about my blog. I'm always worried that I don't have enough voice but I found myself shining through everything I read. It also made me reflect on the years past and how much I've grown, which is why I'm reposting about our first year in Germany.

Originally posted October 21, 2010

A year ago today my husband and I left the United States for Stuttgart, Germany. It has been quite the adventure. I really believe it has brought us closer, but I wouldn't say it's a good form of therapy for the light-hearted. Stress is our constant companion. We are just now starting to untangle its fingers from around our necks.

I'm surprised to see that I understood Germany pretty well when we first got here. I'm reading through the old blog posts. Here is a photo I took of the farms behind our first apartment. Lovely Bonlanden, the place that smells like farts when the cabbage rots.

The adventure of going through buying a car. And then having that car break in the IKEA parking lot and be broken for another few months. (It's now having the same problem, oh yay.)

Finding a beautiful apartment, renting and decorating it, and very soon after moving in locking ourselves out of said apartment.

We've gone to fests and made a ton of new friends. As well as had my family visit. A lot of friends and family are planning on coming out next year, it will be another crazy year!

We discovered the Nürburgring car-racing track and have traveled so many places. I think Albert has seriously been bitten by the traveling bug, he's constantly wanting to go somewhere new now! (And it's funny because he's only been to Europe once...even though it has lasted a year! He's never even dealt with the jet lag on the way back to the U.S. so he doesn't have an opinion when people argue over which way jet lag is worse.)

It has really been a good year. A stressful one, but a good one nonetheless. I'm looking forward to many more either here in Germany or elsewhere. Tomorrow night we are headed to the restaurant we ate in on our arrival. Only this time we can actually order in German!

Rainy Day Blogfest

Today is the Rainy Day Blogfest (click on those words to see the other participants) hosted by Christine at The Writer's Hole. She loves rain and wanted to see everybody's scenes where rain is involved. I wrote this scene specifically for this blogfest, but it goes in my novel Her Daughter. We're supposed to post under 500 words (I have 505, lol) sorry! Here ya go:

Liza sat at her desk watching the rain slide down the glass, obscuring her view of the front yard and the cars that drove by on the street. She couldn’t hear the TV downstairs because of the downpour; she knew her father was watching it, and her mother was in the kitchen making dinner. After sitting for another five minutes she made her decision. Putting her hands firmly on the desk, she stood and turned to her bedroom door. She swept through into the hallway and stopped just over the jamb. Listening for her parents, she tip-toed to the trapdoor into the attic, pulled it down, and slipped up the stairs like a ghost.
In the dusty attic she pulled the cord for the bare light bulb and closed the trapdoor behind her. The rain was even louder, rat-tatting on the roof with little insulation between her and the pouring wet. She pushed boxes aside looking for the one marked for her baby clothes. She found it under a smaller box. Settling onto the splintered-wood floor, she brushed the smaller box aside. It tipped over and dumped journals. She ignored those and pulled at the old cardboard box with her baby clothes inside. When she tugged the top open, dust flew into her face and made her sneeze. She stopped to listen for any sign that her parents were coming, but all she could hear was the relentless rain.
Out of the musty box she pulled a bonnet and long dress: her christening gown. Then she found a blanket with teddy bears on it and a yellow summer dress with frills along the edges. She wiped at the tears that made tracks through the dust on her face.
She set the dress in her lap, smoothing the wrinkles out of it and plucking a piece
of fluff from the collar; she turned to the journals. Randomly selecting a pink one with yellow stars, she smelled it first. It made her sneeze twice. But it smelled of plastic and paper with just a hint of a flowery perfume. She opened the pages and let them fall open to somewhere in the middle.

Mother walked in. She saw me. With Josh. Naked. In bed. My first time. We were right in the middle of it all and the door burst open. I’m mortified. She saw him, on top of me, under the blankets. She slammed the door shut again. When I went downstairs (he climbed out the window) she called me a whore. I’m so ashamed.

Liza slammed the journal shut in sync with the next beat of thunder. Was that why all the hostility? She tucked the other journals back in the box, hid the pink one under the yellow dress in her baby box and put everything back the way it had been.
Sneaking back to the trapdoor, she made her way to her bedroom and sat at her desk again to watch the rain slip and glide down the glass of her window.

Guess That Character Blogfest!

It is time for Guess That Character Blogfest! I will put a snippet from my novel about Liza here, you guess in the comments what she looks like, and tomorrow I'll post a photo. Go check out the other participants and the lovely Jen from Unedited by clicking on the photo for the blogfest.

Snippet from Her Daughter:

They arrived at the mall and went into some of the fancier dress shops. Liza didn’t like anything in there so they went into a privately owned shop down the road from the mall. There wasn’t a lot of selection, but after digging through the racks, Sarah came upon a very simple, white dress. It was spaghetti strap with bunched fabric over the chest and a slimming, straight drop to Liza’s calves. There was a tiny bit of sheer tulle sticking out of the top and another tiny layer of it running along the bottom hem. Liza put it on in the dressing room and didn’t want to take it off again.
“Girl! I want to see it. Get out here,” Sarah called.
Liza finally walked out with a big smile. “I love it,” she said.
“Oh wow, me too. It’s amazing. It even works on your shortness.” Sarah walked over and peered down at Liza.
“Not funny. But it is beautiful.” Liza looked up at her six foot friend. “This is the dress. God I wish I could wear this on my real wedding day.”
Before Liza could slap her hand over her mouth, Sarah grabbed her wrists and looked her straight in the eye. “What did you just say?” she said and laughed. “Are we having a secret wedding? That’s what I thought, but I wasn’t sure. Tell me, tell me now.”
“Yes. John finally saw how my mother is at the wedding planner’s office yesterday. She picked pink, yuck, for the aisle runners. John said it wasn’t a good idea because he knows I hate pink. She told the planner we would go with it because it was perfect.”
“What a witch.”
“No, Sarah. She’s still my mother. I don’t care how she treats me, she’s still my mother.”
“You are too sweet for your own good.”
Liza twirled around in the dress.

The Answer and a Blogfest

Ha! I stumped you all! Maybe that's a bad thing though? The answer is

sunset

or sunrise if you prefer. The colors yellow, orange, red, and then the three together in a sunset painting. So you tell me, did you enjoy it being harder or was it too hard? Don't you just love the yellow hair clip? If only I could pull that off and not look like I'm three years old.

I wanted to mention a blogfest that is coming up next month. A fellow blogger, Jen from unedited, blogged about her character and had her readers guess what said character looks like. Then she posted a picture the next day. It was so fun, and now she's turning it into a blogfest! It'll be on August 19/20. So check it out and join the fun. I'll be posting about my main character from my current novel (you've seen pieces of it already) Her Daughter.

Oooo, and tomorrow Hanna from I'll Name My Typewriter After the Moon is hosting a character party on her blog. Go check it out, it should be tons of fun. Kind of like a tea party on a blog.

Last Line Blogfest

I'm participating in The Last Line Blogfest with Lilah. Click on that link to visit her last lines and other writer's who are participating.

Quick rabbit trail: I'm an official writer now! I'm working for Suite101 writing articles. Yay! I'll have my latest articles in a widget on the side of the blog soon.

Back to the regular program: The Last Line Blogfest is where I post the last line of something I've written. Or the last twenty-five lines. So here are the last twenty-five (thirty-seven actually since some of it is a poem) (I suck at poetry by the way, it's just part of the story) lines of my novel.


   Jane sipped on her cappuccino and fondled the journal. She couldn’t help herself. She opened it and started reading.
   When she got a quarter of the way in, Liza had written this:

    My mother used to love me. I don’t know why, but when you came along, it changed her. She became the voice in my head. Not the good one, the one that tells you that you’re wrong all the time. And when I met John, I kept him a secret. The first time he met my parents it was to tell them we were getting married. It was a disastrous night; I don’t want to relive it here.
    And when we started planning our wedding, my mother took over. My brother hadn’t gotten married yet, and he was a boy. I was her daughter, even if she didn’t like me. But it was hell. I’ll put it this way, whenever we walked into a dress shop, my mother would ask for only the cream-colored dresses.
    So John decided to give me the best gift ever. My friend Sarah and I went shopping for a white dress. John said it had to be white. And three days later we were secretly married at the local courthouse. I wore this gorgeous dress (I’ll put a picture in here) and flip-flops. John looked beyond handsome in his best suit.
    It was the most beautiful day.

    Sunshine
    Daisies

    One White dress
    Two Flip-flops
    One judge
    Two friends

    Love
    Joy

   On the next page a Polaroid was taped in. It was a photo of John holding Liza in his arms, in her white dress. Her flip-flops were dangling from her feet, and they weren’t taking their eyes off each other. In the background were two people making faces, probably their closest friends.
   Jane closed the journal and held up the dress. It was a little faded, but that only added to the beauty. It was so simple and elegant; it took her breath away. She wondered where the flip-flops were.