Looking For Answers In All The Wrong Cookies

I took my mother to Dr. Hearing Aid this morning (she has successfully adapted to her new hearing aid and no more appointments are called for), and afterwards we had lunch at our favorite Chinese restaurant.

Since my life is a neverending succession of questions (What book should I read next? Should I hold it against the Texas Rangers that George Bush goes to their games? Will I ever get around to cleaning the downstairs hallway? How much more can I shove into the freezer?), I naturally turned to the fortune cookies for answers.

Here's what my mother's cookie said:

Slaying the dragon of delay is no sport for the short-winded.

My mother, being 100 years old, is kind of past the dragon of delay situation.

Here's mine:

We treat this world of ours as though we had a spare in the trunk.

Now that's probably very profound, and no doubt I could learn something from it, if I understood exactly what it meant. Do we drive the world over nails and shards of glass? I never drive my tires intentionally over nails and the suchlike, and even worse, I never learned how to change a tire, and nowadays they don't put really good spares in the trunk anyway, just those scrawny scary things that you know aren't going to last until you can get your car to someplace that knows how to change a tire.

But I am very good about recycling, and I think the fortune cookie should give me some credit for that.

Speaking of recycling (this transition is so brilliant I'm darn near dumbstruck by it), I've been thinking about recycling some of the characters from Life As We Knew It and The Dead And The Gone and This World We Live In in The Shade Of The Moon Take Two, if I ever write it.

One of the characters under consideration is Miranda's friend Sammi, who leaves midway through LAWKI, never to be heard from again. I've always been interested in what becomes of Sammi, and a couple of people have left comments on this very blog suggesting a Sammi story, should I write TSOTM Take Two volume of short stories.

This morning as I snuggled with Scooter, I thought about a Sammi story, and I realized two things. The first, and most dazzling, was that Sammi specifically tells Miranda she's going to Nashville, which is in Tennessee, the same state that Sexton, Tennessee is in, even though I made up Sexton, Tennessee and didn't make up Nashville. I've been very reluctant in my ponderings to have characters bump into each other, since that feels far too coincidental, but if Miranda is in Tennessee anyway, she could legitimately decide to look for Sammi in Nashville.

With that in mind, I tried to work out a Sammi/Miranda story and here's the second realization. If I tell the story from Miranda's point of view, it's a chapter. If I tell it from Sammi's, it's a story.

Last night, mostly to see how things stand, I made up a listing (I can't call it a chapter outline, since I'm hoping to have stories, not chapters) of the stories I sort of know about. This morning I added Sammi to the list.



I have minimal concern about people reading this list and figuring out the plots of the stories because most of the things on the list don't have plots yet, and even if they do, my handwriting is so bad there are a couple of words even I can't read, and I wrote the list less than 24 hours ago, so you'd think I'd remember what I wrote.

Oh well. The dragon of delay doesn't stand a chance against me. Whatever else you might think about me, I am definitely long-winded!