Contradictory Abstract Nouns (Photography Challenge)

Today I’m looking at finding the jealousy in faith and the faith in jealousy. I chose faith as the contradiction of jealousy because jealousy is a form of mistrust, not believing a relationship can withstand a challenge imagined or real, or believing that others can accomplish things but you can’t, where faith means believing in the relationship or one’s ability to do anything. The more I thought about it, one has to have faith in their own imagination to be jealous, because more often than not, that little green-eyed monster, is all in one’s imagination. But what does that look like?

For today’s images I put different transparency filters in a thought bubble and had some fun and surprising results.

November PAD Chapbook Challenge

Today’s prompt is a fill in the blank title prompt: “(blank) of the (blank).”

I’ve been enjoying the exercises in The Art of Voice by Tony Hoagland, so I continued with Exercise 3 from chapter three “Connecting through the Admission of Failure and Error.”

Faith of the Jealous

My attempts to do what you wanted—
to feel jealousy when you played in her band
to feel envy when you stayed late at practice
to worry and wonder when you didn’t call
—were a complete failure.

I tried to obsess over her fingers on your shoulders
the way she praised your skillful fingers playing
the  shared glances that were not quick or secret at all
but I had my own music to write and fingers to callous
Turns out jealous possession took too much attention

My efforts to feel the pain of your loss
before you were gone was an error
because it did eventually erode
my faith, so finally I just gave up
and turned green, all of me a pretty emerald
I gave you a going away party, invited everyone
but you, and I gave my heart permission to break
which also failed; the bloody dagger stayed there in the cleavage
the blood pumped out in gushes like old Faithful
with each heartbeat, but I wasn’t jealous
I didn’t feel anything at all.

NaNoWriMo

As a plantser (someone who likes to let the words flow, but also likes to know where she’s going in the story and have an outline), I’m starting to worry about how to get from today’s scene to the big first crime solve. I’ve brought up some hints, but need some real clues. So today, after my planned writing session, I am going to do my very best to fill out “A Blueprint for Planning a Mystery Novel” from Writing & Selling Your Mystery Novel by Hallie Ephron.

At this point I think I have all the information I need to fill in the blanks; I just need to connect the dots. Hopefully physically writing the details onto the worksheets will how me visualize how to get from where I am now to where I want to be for the midpoint.