Never Give Up, Never Surrender!

I feel like I'm starting to get back on track, become a bit more focused again. Maybe it's just those last few months of winter--they do seem to weigh heavy on me. I've also changed my plans a bit from my last post. I'm going to go ahead and do the April Camp NaNo, but I'm keeping my goal low because of vacation. I'm going to try and get some words down for Cut Shot, and then with any luck I'll have it done by July, plus the rewrite on the second Headphones installment. I'm not planning any further than that. After all, my plans constantly change. Let's just say I have some ideas on what I want to complete by the end of the year and leave it at that!

Excerpt from Headphones: Summer Heat, chapter 10:

Headphones sat curled in the center of the soft leather of the couch as she watched the rain through the big bay window. A gully washer, her dad would have called it. The evergreen was bending in the wind while thunder shook The House. The lightning shot fast and hot through the gloom.

She always loved storms. Their energy usually made her feel more alive but this one was leaving her unbalanced as if there was something more behind it; a tornado or a typhoon, although the first didn’t happen often in this part of the country and the second couldn’t. She was misplaced with her soul hovering over her, an out-of-body experience that she couldn’t quite define. The storm reflected her mood, forming inside her and spilling out into the world, leaving her empty and insubstantial. It was the same feeling she got when she had an itch in her boot, the strings too tight for her to wiggle her fingers inside to relieve the prickle under her skin and unable to remove the offending leather. All she could do was grind and stomp and hope the torturous irritation went away.

It has been this way all month. She was walking a tightrope, trying to stay balanced. Some little Sprite had taken up residence in her head and alternately reminded her that she’d been here for half a year and this was the sanest she’d been since her parents died. Then she laughed because there was a Sprite in her head and what did that even mean? How did a sane person know if she was sane? Maybe the bits of happiness was nothing more than a hallucination. Maybe, just maybe, she was living in a padded room, sitting upon a narrow bed with her arms wrapped around herself not because she felt the need to roll up and be as small as possible but because there were long sleeves and straps holding her in that position.

The world snapped back into focus as the clouds split apart and whorled away, letting the sun break into streaks that shone through the rain still falling gently. Rainbows formed between the leaves of the tree outside her window before they raced through the glass to bounce off of every shiny surface, leaving her with the illusion of being inside a bright crystal. Colored prisms reflected all around her on the floor and walls and she stood with her arms held out horizontally and spun as she decided that if this was her being crazy, being in the center of a diamond made it worth going mad.