So Spring and family came for a visit on Sunday, Feb 21, for my birthday. Spring intended to bake a sheet cake for me – chocolate, of course, and let the girls each decorate half of the cake. Hope was having none of that, huh-uh no way nosireebob! Apparently, Hope told her mommy, “I’m gonna dec’rate the whole cake!” Naturally, Spring tried to reason, cajole, beg and bribe Hope to share decorating duties, to no avail… so she came up with the idea of splitting the batter and baking two round cakes. Now the girls could decorate a whole cake, each! Chocolate cake with white icing, blue and purple decorative icing and black sprinkles… yummy! The girls giggled and argued as they decorated their cakes, until both were ready to present them to me.
Teen D gave me her cake first; she had written Happy B-day on it in blue, sprinkled black sprinkles all over, and used the thicker blue mixed with purple icing to decorate the edges… they looked like spiky points. Teen D kind of blushed and started to say something when I interrupted and said, “Oh wow, look at what you did! You know how much I love dragons and you’ve created dragon scales and claws! Thank you, babe.” Teen D beamed with pride as she squired a bit; I could tell she was embarrassed and trying to figure out how to tell me the “scales and claws” were an accidental creation, but I just winked at her and she realized I understood. Well, not to be out done by her big sister, Hope presented me with her decorated cake… it also had purple mixed with blue icing ‘scales’ and a big blob in the center where Teen D had written a message on her cake. Before I could say a word to her, she pointed to the blob of icing and said, “That’s dragon poop.” All of the adults burst out laughing. Who knew dragon poop was so tasty?
On Monday, my actual birthday, I went to Starbucks for my free birthday drink, and decided to head to Springy’s house from there. I wanted to visit longer – we hadn’t had much time together the night before – plus I wanted to see Elsa’s litter of twelve. After evaluating the pups and tentatively selecting the one I’ll be getting [me, a pitbull, wowsers!] I finally was able to talk with Spring for about fifteen highly interrupted minutes. [Hope is very competitive concerning Mommy’s attention and Grammy’s attention. It was like a double whammy!] I told her about the problem I was having with Chapter 13, that I was stuck and had no clue where or how to go about getting unstuck. I had also given her details of the various changes I’d been making, due to peer critiques, and how the very thing that caused my current dilemma was because of the only Instructor critique I had used. *sighs* It was a good critique, but with other interruptions, I had forgotten how I planned to implement the new direction and I became totally and completely stuck. It was like I was locked out of my story, and it was driving me batty. Add to that the way a character completely changed as I wrote in her voice, from how I had originally envisioned her – she surprised me the way she was in the story, but I wanted her to somehow move closer to what I had envisioned… well, Spring gave me an idea I had not thought of and I came home and wrote for hours! It’s safe to say I’ve moved past the block and am now heading towards the finish line. Yay, me!
So, with that said, I am so outtie….