the Harper Collins Dictionary Contest

I mentioned this in a previous post, and this project, along with a new analysis job (also, the Creative Arts guild website!) have eaten up a lot of my time, and I think that's sad, as its taken away from blog work.

It might make you feel better to know though, that the CAG has inspired me to spin off from the blog novel project and work on a side arc related to Talaesia in a period of time just after book one is designed to end.  Good times, and soon an artist to draw it!

In the meantime, I wanted to share with you my dismal harper collins entry.  I'm less than proud of it, to be honest, I think it's not amazing.  It has a few cherry passages mind you, a few lines I really like, and a few ideas I think were absolutely magical.  You be the judge, the HONEST AND FAIR judge lol.

Every which way but Normal

It is rare that anything can throw me as uncontrollably, erratically off course as love can. All at once those nasty little impulses, those neuro-chemical signals from that crocodilian part of the brain can set me off in a direction good sense would never lead me. Love leaves me rudderless and at the mercy of the winds.

Love can make me a nihilist and a devotee, a knight and a knave all at once, I can recite Wagner and debate quantum physics while I wear my idiot strings; it can make me march headlong into utter destruction, the whole time believing with every fibre of my being that I am, in fact, doing something just and good, even if it is vile and repulsive. Love is the great drug – the heroin in my veins and the fundamental addiction. In love’s equally magnificent and horrendous presence I’m no better than a begging, snivelling, salivating addict shaky and craving my next saccharine sweet hit.

So here I am, at a table waiting for dinner (or it could have been lunch, who knows?) with that auburn haired temptress sitting across from me. Appropriate isn’t it, that my little fantasy girl always has that lovely red hair, as if Aphrodite has decided it’s time again to tease this poor man with a visit from her Earthly avatar! It doesn’t matter where I was or what I was being served; it could have been Digby Chicken in Halifax or poutine at a Toronto Harvey’s for all I knew (although the latter is highly unlikely, unless Harvey’s started serving ice wine and Bloody Caesars): what mattered was that this woman, this Bondar babe, was sitting two feet away.

Like I said, the where wasn’t important, nor was the what. All that mattered was this asymmetrical sex machine sitting across from me. This pert little redhead with the crooked nose and plump cheeks, the brilliant emerald peepers under naturally long lashes and the contours of a real woman who had, for the preceding four hundred and twenty seven days treated me like a friend, a lover, an enemy (not necessarily in that order mind you), and eventually, a cautious but willing companion.

The entire meal was mostly a haze. I now understand why every single pretentious douche bag that tries to tell you how to seduce a woman says to let her talk about herself all she wants! Its not because women are preening, self-centred, infantile creatures, rather, it’s because a man who really loves a woman – and I mean a man willing to put himself between her and the war’s desolation, put his own tender skin suit on the line – just wants to hear her voice.

I remember she told me she loves fairies, any bit of iconography she can get depicting, duplicating, or even remotely hinting at those pearlescent winged sidhe that the Christian church stole to make their Cherubim. She laughed when she told me – a little self-deprecating laugh – that lilting yet throaty laugh I was falling in love with, because she thought that sort of adult obsession was somehow contrary to her age. I don’t think I said anything smart in response, I think I just smiled, and laughed a little and said it was cute. Foolish words from a fool in love! Hindsight being the only perfect vision, I wish I had told her that such an obsession as fairies, the sort of obsession relegated to pre-teen girls, added a dimension of innocence that, almost alchemically mixed with what I knew, made her an impossibly more precious creature.

I don’t remember what happened after dinner (or as I said, maybe it was lunch); if you told me I had driven her home and left without a kiss, I wouldn’t baulk. If you told me aliens had stolen the right half of my cerebellum just before dinner ended and served it to her like a sherbet, again, I wouldn’t baulk. If perhaps those same aliens had made Flipper Pie of my frontal lobe, I’d have sworn I tasted fish. She’s my drug, has been from day zero. Schmucks and fools can have cloud nine; those old Greek cats can have ambrosia. Let Valkyries drown in Heidrun’s mead and Newfoundlanders swim up to their toques in butter tarts, and fish and brewis, because I drink in every drop of her essence and couldn’t care less about anything else.

I know I drove her home, and from there, well, the story keeps going in the traditional way. More dates, some fights, a few cruel words but even more good ones; finally marriage, children, two-car garage and all that. Sure we did a lot differently from the norm, but who wants to know about that? No one I imagine.