It's Launch Day!

Angus and Sam at the beach two summers ago,
Inverhuron Provincial Park, Lake Huron.

We were on holiday a couple of summers ago and everything was as it should have been: laughter carried on the lake wind and secrets shared around the crackling fire. Sunburns and sleeping bags. Long days at the beach.

It was all there, a glorious week of it but, when I think of that time, it is only one moment that I recall. One small but shining moment, when time stood so irrevocably still that memory etched a potent tenderness in my heart.

It was late in the day, after supper, and we were down at the beach for one last swim. Our good friends Tammy and Richard were there with their daughters, playing in the waves that were pounding against shore. Lake Huron is a fickle playground – one minute her water is serene; the next it can be dangerously rough. It didn't seem too bad that evening, enough big waves to give everyone a thrill, but not enough to scare anyone.

Not until the plastic rafts Tammy and daughter Megan were on began pulling away from shore in the grip of a needy undertow. Tammy screamed for help and it only took a few minutes for Richard, a former lifeguard, to bring them to safety.

I have to say, Richard is one of my favourite people on earth. He's kind and gentle, and he'd give you the shirt off his back, he would, but he's got a few rough edges and is particularly good at scowling and cussing and teasing his wife.

Tammy, mind you, gives it right back. When I first met them I thought for sure they were headed to divorce court but that's just the way they carry on. Besides, I know they love each other. I saw it that evening on the beach. I saw it as clear as I've ever seen anything.

The way they stood, her hip snugged against him, her smile full of gratitude, and of love. They stood there while the sun set and the beauty of this long-married couple suffused me with pure and unbridled joy.

I'm smiling as I write this, just remembering.

For some reason I associated what had happened with Gordon Lightfoot's classic song If You Could Read My Mind. I played the song over and over, thinking about Tammy and Richard, about heroes, and feeling such overwhelming emotion that I would cry every single time the song played.



A few days later I sat down at my computer and wrote But Heroes Often Fail, a short story for Friday Flash. When I finished, I looked up from the computer and tears filled my eyes. I felt pretty good about what I had written, and I still feel good about it. I've written more than 50 Friday Flash stories but it's one of my favourites and I am thrilled it was included in The Best of Friday Flash Volume 2.

I often refer to Friday Flash and how it changed my life but just because I say it all the time doesn't make it less true.

It's simple, really. You write a "flash," which is a story 1,000 words or less. You post it on your blog on a Friday (or a Thursday night if you're a keener, like me) and then add your blog url to the Collector at FridayFlash.org. You then "advertise" your story on Twitter and on the Friday Flash Facebook page.

The first time I ever did this I was AMAZED at the instantaneous results. Within minutes there were people visiting my blog from all around the world. I remember shrieking, "THERE'S SOMEBODY FROM FLORIDA!" Within a couple of days I had visitors from England and even Australia, all writing heartfelt, insightful and helpful comments about my story. In the meantime, I used the Collector and Twitter to read other people's stories.

What I had discovered – what all people who write Friday Flash had discovered – was an incredible community of writers. They might have been based in Rhode Island or Newfoundland or England, but they became as important to me as my "real" family and friends.

Even better, Friday Flash was a teacher for me. It taught me to be a better writer, both by writing and by reading. It was also a confidence builder. If it wasn't for Friday Flash I never would have written a novel. I wouldn't have joined a writers group. In fact, I'd probably still be mired in a soul-sucking miasma of depression. Not now, though. Now I wake up with purpose, with a smile on my face and a bounce in my step.

And this is all due to Jon Strother, the writer who dreamed up Friday Flash and made it a reality. Thank you Jon, from the bottom of my heart.

Now, enough maudlin! Today is a day for celebration! Today is LAUNCH DAY for The Best of Friday Flash Volume 2, a collection of 58 of the finest short stories I've ever had the pleasure of reading.

And if I can brag a little bit, I have not one but two stories in this collection. As well as the story I submitted, But Heroes Sometimes Fail, a story called Running Away was nominated for – and won – the Reader's Choice Award. I actually have to laugh about this. It's a horror story and I almost never write horror. Basically it's totally different than my usual drivel, so it's funny to me to see it included. Regardless, I owe my nominator, Virginia Moffatt of Oxford, a great deal of thanks. Virginia also has a story in BOFF2; called Breakfast News, it is laugh out loud funny.

There are some tremendous stories in this book – I swear you'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll be scared and you'll think. There are stories for all tastes, for all moods, and they're all in these sweet little bite-sized lengths that are perfect for when you don't have time for anything else.

As writer Dan Powell so eloquently said in the Foreword, "Flash fiction is all about the moment. A snapshot of an event, an emotion, a conflict. A glimpse of something important that flickers in front of the reader. It hints at a whole world beyond the borders of its modest word count and when gone the characters, ideas and images sit in the head of the reader for far longer than the story took to read."

Only five of the stories in BOFF2 are written by Canadians, which makes me even prouder, I have to admit. Canada may be a big country but it hasn't got anywhere near the population of some other countries so we Canadians always think of ourselves as underdogs to some degree. When we succeed at something, we're like Sally Field at the Academy Awards: YOU LIKE ME, YOU REALLY LIKE ME. Silly, I know – that's just part of our identity.

To celebrate Launch Day, I've joined up with my four fellow Canucks on a wee blog hop. I do hope you drop by their blogs and say hello. They are all really wonderful writers and wonderful people, as I have come to know. They are:

Alan W. Davidson

Lauren Cude

T.S. Bazelli

Jen Brubacher (who lives in England but is definitely Canadian - in fact, Jen is a little jet-lagged and may not be able to post today but she's hoping)














One more thing: I hope you consider buying The Best of Friday Flash Volume 2. It's available in paperback for $9.99 plus shipping and as an e-book. You can buy it from the publisher, eMergent Publishing (thanks to Jodi Cleghorn for all her efforts) and from Amazon. When you buy a paperback from the eMergent, an e-book is bundled in at no extra cost.

To all my family members I have this to say – guess what you guys are getting for Christmas!

Tomorrow's the big day!

Tomorrow's a huge deal for me.

Huge.

Wait, that's not big enough.

HUGE!

Ok, that's better.

Tomorrow is Launch Day for Best of Friday Flash 2, or BOFF2 as it is somewhat lewdly referred to. *wink, nudge*

It's big because it's the first time any of my fiction work has been published in a real honest-to-god book. 

This shouldn't be such an enormous deal for me, having had about three bazillion newspaper articles published in my long-in-the-tooth lifetime, but they were WORK and this is FUN and it's DIFFERENT. Man, it is so different.

Please forgive me as I prattle on about the wonderfulness of this auspicious occasion and try to sell a few books. I know, it's annoying. But damn it, this is just as big as losing my virginity. 

And much more politically correct to brag about.

P.S. Best wishes to everyone currently facing Hurricane Sandy's wrath. Stay dry. Safe safe. OK?

The Auto Suck 500

Scientists were understandably mesmerized when they realized the flux capacitor they were working on had a surprising bonus feature: it sucked fat! (Don't you love my photo illustration? I took several photos and glommed them together, then painted radiation around the vintage vacuum cleaner. My favourite part is the floating doughnuts. Of course....)

Eat that other doughnut. I know you waaaannnt to.

Have two or three doughnuts! Scarf down the whole box! Order another box! Eat 'till you puke!

There are not enough doughnuts on god's green earth to make you fat.

Finally, you can eat everything you've ever wanted and not gain one ounce.

How is this possible, you ask?

Ladies, gather around. I have a little secret. A miracle of modern technology.

It's called The Auto Suck 500 and it can give you the body of your dreams.

All you do is eat your fill and then plug yourself into The Auto Suck 500 and, voila! All your fat gets sucked out!

No exercise! No dieting! No surgery!

Sound too good to be true?

Wait, it gets better!

The Auto Suck 500 comes with an exciting new option - the Auto Suck 500 Inner Suck is a tiny microchip that is injected into your butt. It's just like the chips veterinarians inject into dogs we actually want to keep!

Bonus! If you get lost and your husband wants to find you, he just follows the beeping from your behind!

With the Auto Suck 500 Inner Suck, you don't even have to plug yourself in to get your fat sucked out.

The state-of-the-fart technology in the Inner Suck senses calories from a distance of 500 yards, so, as you're pulling up to the doughnut drive-thru, the Inner Suck automatically starts working, getting its internal guts rolling in preparation for incoming fat and carbs. By the time you're wiping Boston Cream off your blouse, the Inner Suck has already sucked out all your fat!

I know! Incredible!

Even if you can't afford the Inner Suck you can still be skinny the old-fashioned Auto Suck 500 way. But instead of the micro-chip, you have to plug yourself in. Where, you may ask, is it plugged into?

Well, one end can go into any electrical outlet anywhere. It comes with a handy adapter so you can even suck fat in the car. The other end is shoved up ... um ... well, you get the picture.

Admittedly there is a little pain involved plugging into the Auto Suck 500. I guess it's like every other weight loss program in the world.

A big pain in the butt.

My apologies for being ugly

I feel sorry for all the people who know me, who have to look at me day in and day out. I especially feel sorry for my husband, who's actually married to me. I can't imagine looking at someone as freakishly ugly as me all the time.

I'm actually feeling sorry for myself at this moment. A friend posted photos of me on Facebook and, like all photos I see of my true physical self (as opposed to the one I hand-select for the world to see - photos without triple chins and freakishly ballooned arms and legs, bloated with blue veins, pulsed hanging handfuls of lard barely contained by overstretched and shiny skin), I feel sick when I see them. Utterly sick and utterly depressed.

I am what I am. I made myself this way. I'm not blaming anyone and I'm certainly not looking for either sympathy or inspiration to change myself. I'm merely using this blog the way I intended and that's as a journal of what's going on in my head. Back when nobody knew my blog existed I wrote from the heart. It was rather cathartic. Now it's always in the back of my head that maybe somebody might read it and thus I don't want to offend anyone or make them think ill of me.

Anyway, back to the self-flagellation for a moment. I'm the fat ugly friend. Everyone has one. They're great morale boosters, these ugly people. You look like movie star when you're next to a ginormous freak like myself.

I'm the Melissa McCarthy of Bridesmaids. The chubby one.  That's OK for you, you fit person, you of the attractive face and slender body. You don't mind hanging around the chubby one. But having come to the realization (a long time ago) that I'm the chub in the crowd, well, that's just not cool.

People are nice to me. I have friends. They don't seem to mind that I'm the freak of the crowd. At least they never say that. But they must be thinking it. I'm part of their view, after all. Or I'm blocking their view.

Anyway, my apologies to everyone, especially my handsome husband. Poor guy. He could have any woman, and he's stuck with me.

Big buttons, little buttonholes

I bought a new pair of jeans, with three chunky fake diamond buttons on the fly.

The buttons were big. The buttonholes were not. When I undid them for the first time, in the dressing room, I had to sweat with the effort of it all. They were relatively easy to do up but ridiculously hard to undo. 

A wise person would have said, "this might not work out so well if you're in a hurry to pee," and put the jeans back on the shelf. I thought, "well, they're just stiff. The buttonholes will stretch. They'll be fine."

The other day I wore them to work. After a couple cups of coffee I needed to use the bathroom, but procrastinated for a while because I was in the middle of a project. When I finally took the opportunity to use the loo, I had to go so bad that I was walking bow-legged.

I stumbled down the hall to the bathroom, found an empty stall, closed the door and, with some relief, started undoing my new jeans.

Oh crap, I thought, as my fingers began wrestling with the stupidly oversized buttons. I could not get that first button to move. It was stuck. Like Winnie the Pooh in the rabbit hole stuck. I pulled and I wrenched and I sweated and I swore but could not undo the top button.

Fine, I thought, I won't go to the stupid bathroom, but my fulsome bladder was saying, "uh-uh, you can't give up. This isn't a game, sister, or some diet you abandon. This is a bonafide emergency and I gotta GO."

Feck, feck, feck, I thought, as I fought with the stupid buttons on my stupid fly. Sweat was pouring off me by now, making my fingers slippery. I wiped them off on the dark denim of my jeans, the ones I was supposed to wash before I wore because of the heavy overload of black dye, but didn't, because why bother, and my fingers came away with a ghastly dark blue hue, like a corpse. A sweaty corpse. A sweaty corpse who had to pee like a racehorse. 

I couldn't believe the ridiculousness of my situation. In a frenzy of ineptitude I poured renewed frenzy into the undoing of the buttons, corpse fingers grappling, tongue gripped between my cursing-like-a-sailor lips, bladder screaming "OPEN THESE GD PANTS NOW OR THEY'RE GONNA BE YELLOW," and I thought, for one horrific moment, that I was going to have to call the fire department. Have them burst into the bathroom stall and say, "Just relax ma'am, it's going to be fine," and then cut them off me with the jaws of life.

In that instant the button, finally, undid. I plopped down on the toilet and peed, oh blessed relief. When I was done I pulled up my jeans and hesitated before doing them up. Should I? Shouldn't I? If I didn't do them up, they'd fall down. If I did, I risked going through the same rigamarole in an hour or so because, once the seal is broken you pee all day.

I debated for a few moments longer, finally deciding to do them up because what they needed was stretching, and if I didn't stretch those buttonholes, the jeans would never be wearable.

I did them up. And went back to my desk.

An hour later, my bladder started making itself known. 

"Shut up and go back to sleep," I said.

An hour and a half later, I was starting to feel uncomfortable. All I could think about was the bathroom stall, the sweaty blue fingers, those ginormous buttons.

The clock ticked. 

My fear grew.

The buttons waited.