Payment Rendered

 This entry is a sequel, of sorts, to a #FridayFlash of many years ago: Payment Due. The original was a...different...take on the Cinderella story: 

"Take Cindy for example. You know the one," as the Fairy Godmother was heard to say.

The below is what happened some time later in the lives of the protagonists. I hope you enjoy.

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"I know it's my birthday," the young woman thought, "but they're acting weirder than usual. Even for them."

"They" were the Princess Cinderella and her husband, the Prince.

"And what are all these guards doing here?" the young woman continued. "Are we expecting an invasion in the throne room?"

"Aurora!"

"Oops," the young woman, Princess Aurora, said. "Spotted."

She stepped out of the shadow of one of the throne room columns.

"You called?"

"I specifically told you to stay in your room, did I not?" her mother, Princess Cinderella, said. "You don't know what's at stake here."

"Of course I don't," Aurora replied. "How could I? No one ever tells me anything around here."

"Now see here, young lady..." the Prince began, his voice suddenly stopping.

Aurora looked at her father to see what had happened. He was no longer looking at her. She turned to see what he was looking at. The great doors of the throne room had just opened. That was surprising. It normally took two burly guards per door to swing them open.

This time they seemed to just open by themselves.

"Huh," Aurora said quietly. "Curiouser and curiouser, I suppose."

"Guards!" the Prince called.

The guards ran forward and established a line across the room in front of the throne.

"Protect the Princess," Cinderella shouted.

Aurora looked at her mother.

"What?" she asked. "Protect me from what?"

The guards looked from the Prince, to Cinderella, to Aurora.

"Behind the guards," the Prince said. "Aurora, get behind the guards."

Aurora stood her ground.

"Aurora," Cinderella said, despair to be heard in her voice. "Why must you never do what you're told."

"Because you've never, ever, told her why she should do something," came a new voice.

Aurora looked towards the door.

A small silvered-haired woman stood there, looking for all the world like someone's grandmother--

"Godmother." The word sounded in her head.

--like someone's Godmother. She was dressed in flowing gossamer layers of pink and gold. Her face was unwrinkled but set with determination as she looked towards the pair on the thrones.

"You!"

Aurora started. She'd never heard her mother speak with such fury, no matter how hard she'd tried to provoke her over the years.

She looked back at the apparition by the doors. "Whatever did you do to her?" she wondered.

The old woman turned to her and smiled.

"Guards," the Prince shouted.

Aurora stepped back as the guards rushed by her and formed a line between her and the woman standing at the door. The woman did nothing other than smile broadly.

"You can't have her," Cinderella said. "You just can't."

"That's not for you to say," came the reply.

Aurora looked back and forth between the two women.

"What's going on here?" she asked.

Before anyone could answer, her father, the Prince, shouted "Guards!" again.

Aurora briefly heard a "Tsk, tsk" sound from the old woman before it was drowned out by the stamp of the guards' feet as they took a single step forward in perfect unison.

"That should please Dad," Aurora thought. "All those feet in perfect time. He's weird about feet."

She looked at the guards and stepped back, shocked. It seemed to her they'd been replaced by mice, all running this way and that. Aurora rubbed her eyes. If she squinted, she could almost see the guards, but they looked as confused as she. Did they see mice too?

She looked back at the woman by the door. She hadn't moved, but her smile had broadened considerably.

"Who are you?" Aurora asked.

Before the woman could reply, the Prince shouted again.

"You will not speak--croak!"

Aurora looked around at her father, wondering what had happened to his voice. She stepped back suddenly, a burst of laughter rising to her lips.

The Prince seemed transformed into an unusually large frog seated on a small royal purple velvet cushion. A crown balanced precariously on his head.

"Cro-o-o-oak?" said the frog.

Aurora looked to her mother and then back to the woman at the door. She was smiling beatifically.

"Now that all the noise has died down," she said, "shall we to business?"

"You can't have her," Cinderella said, her voice rising.

"What does that mean?" Aurora asked. She was trying to focus on what was being said, but the frog had jumped from the cushion to the small fountain fixed to the right wall of the throne room.

"Croak?" it said.

"Your mother promised you to me before you were even conceived," the woman said.

"Ew," Aurora said. "TMI."

The woman smiled and moved to the center of the room. The mice scattered.

"Croak!" the frog said angrily.

"As if a frog can croak angrily," Aurora thought.

"Not another step," Cinderella said.

"Or?" the woman replied.

"Stop! Everyone just stop," Aurora said. "What is going on here?"

"Your mother promised you to me before you..."

"Right. Right. I get it," Aurora said. "No need to repeat it."

Aurora turned to her mother,

"Why?" she asked. "Why would you do that?"

Princess Cinderella said nothing for a moment. Aurora stared at her.

Cinderella looked away. "She," she said, her voice quiet. "She helped me."

Aurora spun around to look at the older woman.

"Helped," she said. "Helped how?"

The older woman smiled. She gestured towards the frog prince.

"Ew," Aurora said again. "And the price was me?"

The older woman shrugged.

"If their first born was...available...by their 18th birthday," she said, "then they would hand him...or her...to me."

"No one's handing me to anyone," Aurora said.

"You've never done what you were told," Cinderella said. "You've always gone your own way!"

"The Godmothers like independent thinkers," the older woman said.

"Godmothers?" Aurora asked, turning to the older woman.

The woman smiled. "I was the Princess Cinderella's Fairy Godmother. Back before she was a princess, that is."

"That just sounds ridiculous," Aurora said.

She paused a moment, then spun around to face her mother again.

"Available? Available?" Aurora took a breath. "Is that why you've been trying to marry me off for the past two years?"

"Calm yourself, Aurora," her mother said, rising. "It was for your own good. We were trying to do what was best for you."

"You should have tried asking her what she thought was best," the older woman said, her voice dry.

"I don't need you to speak for..." Aurora said, turning to the woman.

She stopped. The clothing the woman had on seemed to have changed. The billowing pink and gold dress replaced by black leather adorned with silver chains. The previous 2-inch heels by black leather boots. Pink and gold were still evident, but only at the tips of her spiked black hair. The woman was smiling.

Aurora returned the smile.

"You think that will convince me to go with you?" she asked.

The woman's smile broadened.

"Worth a shot," she said, glancing down at her garments. "And it's a good look. For me, and you."

"Just because it matches mine doesn't mean I'll go off with you. What happens if I say 'No'?"

"No?" both the older woman and Cinderella asked at the same time.

"No," Aurora said.

"Then you say 'No'," the woman said.

"Anything happen to my sister and brother, or my parents?"

"Nothing," the woman said.

Aurora glanced over at the fountain.

"Can my dad not be a frog?"

The woman grinned. "In time," she said softly.

"So," Cinderella said. "Get out of my palace, and never come back."

Aurora turned to her mother.

"I think she means me," the woman said.

Aurora nodded.

"But I'm going too." And, turning to the older woman, she said, "By myself."

The woman nodded.

"Aurora," Cinderella called but Aurora strode through the throne room doorway to freedom.

Two years later Aurora was walking through the streets of a town far from the kingdom's capital. She'd been thinking a lot recently of frogs, and mice, and of the stories told of her parents' meeting at a fancy ball.

And of Fairy Godmothers dressed in black leather, chains, and boots.

"Do you think you're becoming available?" came a voice from behind her.

Aurora turned. The Godmother stood in the crowded street behind her, the flow of people parting as they reached her, joining again after passing Aurora. The woman had traded her leather in for the pink and gold dress again.

But pink and gold still adorned the tips of her spiked black hair.

Aurora smiled at the combination.

She nodded.

"Yes."

The Night, The Dark...and The Light

Mid-Winter here, here in the Northern hemisphere. We are surrounded by the dark nights, broken but a little by short, short days.

Sometimes, when in the dark, it can be difficult to see other than...the dark. Whether that is the darkness of night, or a darkness that makes days, as well as nights, difficult to navigate.

The days when the Nature we struggle through mirrors the struggle to just get through.

Not easy to appreciate that the light doesn't leave permanently. It can, it will, it does, take time to reach us again. But reach us it will.

It was the reality of the dark and the belief in the reality of the light returning that caused those who went before us to create reminders. Reminders made of stone. Reminders made of festival. Reminders made of belief.

The reminders didn't, and don't, change the darkness. Without or within. But they align our perception with reality.

The light can, will, and does, return.

We need to give it, to give ourselves, the time it will take.

But these beliefs are foundational to us, this wildly hopeful and flawed species that we are.

And so we reach out, reach across, reach through, to others, to ourselves, to who we are. Irresponsibly hopeful, even when it we can see nothing but the dark.

As was said so very long ago, "On those living in the shadow of death, a light has shone."

To those looking to the light, to those needing the light, to those providing light for others, I wish you well in this holy night.

Freewrite—A Review

"The Freewrite is not a typewriter." So states Adam Paul Leeb, one of the founders of Astrohaus, the makers of the Freewrite.

OK, that still doesn't stop me from referring to mine as my "21st Century typewriter." Opinions, you know how they are, though Adam's may carry a little more weight than mine.

This review is also an opinion. One based on my experience, my usage. Different usages may lead to different opinions, and different conclusions.

I backed this project in Kickstarter, because the concept looked really interesting. I learned to type, a long time ago, on a manual typewriter, and it's left me with the ability to type reasonably well. The keyboard on the Freewrite is a major help. It caused me to order a gaming keyboard for my laptop (I am *not* a computer gamer because few, if any, games hold my interest) because it had a similar kind of mechanical keyboard.

The product was late, by something like nine months, if memory serves. No Kickstarter, or similar crowd-funded project I've backed, has delivered on time. It's the nature of the beast. At least they delivered. Two projects I backed did not.

But, what joy when it arrived! Setup was straightforward. It connected to my home Wi-Fi without issue, and the keyboard was all I'd hoped it would be. Other than the fact that the keys were white, which caused them to stand out dramatically against the black of the rest of the device. The effect, for me, was slightly jarring.

I am using the US format keyboard, so I freely admit life has been easier for me that for others using French, French-Canadian, etc. keyboard layouts. There have been problems with those layouts, some addressed swiftly, some perhaps yet outstanding.

I configured the cloud connection to drop all my files into DropBox. I have Evernote and Google Drive locales also, but keeping my Freewrite documents in one place seemed saner for me.

I was surprised when the files delivered to DropBox turned out to be Microsoft Word .docx files. Nothing against MS Word (apart form the usual) but .txt had been promised given its ease of loading into *everything* and because its longevity as a document format. .txt isn't going out of style any time soon.

An update to the firmware, 1.2, delivered over the air, and to the backend Postbox cloud service, allowed for the delivery of .txt files to DropBox (and the other endpoints.) The Astrohaus people (Patrick) were very responsive and provided an interim fix and, subsequently, a fix to the Postbox configuration.

I've written poetry (and not just free verse) with my Freewrite. And short stories, and longer format documents, and technical documentation. For this last I experimented with Markdown formatting, and was pleasantly surprised with the result. Using pandoc to generate Word .docx files from the .txt gave me a good start on a formatted Word document.

Editing...this has caused much debate on the Freewrite community forum. You can't. Not on the Freewrite. Well, you can delete the previous character, or the previous word. Possibly the previous paragraph, but I haven't gone there.

And it can be annoying to see, four or six lines up from where you're typing, "teh" rather than "the" or worse. Sometimes it's bothered me enough that I delete whole sets of words, but that's generally because what I wanted to say (write) isn't exactly what made it to the screen, and I fix it.

Typos, I don't care enough to worry. That can be taken care of in Scrivener, Word, or whatever else I dump the text into.

Once or twice my text remained in the Freewrite and did not sync to Postbox (and thence to DropBox.) I can only attribute this to work being done on the Postbox site itself. I've worked enough with web development tools to know that hiccups can arise from time to time. The interruptions were never long-lived and synching began again without issue. But an indication that this was going to happen, or was happening, might ease troubled minds.

Battery life is not what was promised, but Astrohaus is working on it. I've learned to keep Wi-Fi off on my Freewrite until I'm ready to use it, unless I'm at home and in easy range of power outlets. I have experienced the "Critically Low Battery" situation, and the Freewrite takes some time to recover from that. But I've learned to adjust how I use it (not the perfect solution, our tools should adjust to us, but reality is what it is.)

The other disappointment I've had is screen refresh. Much of the time this is not an issue. Words appear soon enough after key presses that I don't notice. But I'm using my Freewrite for NaNoWriMo right now, and I wanted to keep it all in one document—because the Freewrite keeps track of my word count.

This was ok-ish to about 20,000 words. Then word appearance began to lag badly. By 25,000 words I had to start a new document. Now refreshes are great, but for my word count I have to do math. This is not ideal.

As I understand it, there is hope that the third firmware update (V 1.4) might do something to address this. I am hopeful. In the meantime I have to adjust what I do to overcome the lack in the tool. Not tragic, but it would be good to have this addressed by Astrohaus.


(By the way, don't those black keys, purchased from Astrohaus and very easy to install, look gorgeous!)

My final thoughts on the Freewrite is that it is very close to a distraction-free writing device, optimized for getting text out of my head and into a format that can be edited...later.

NaNoWriMo 2017 here I come...

So, I'm doing this thing. There's a story to be told, a character to follow as she journeys. And I have the month of November to do this in.

I've done NaNo before, five times if memory serves. And "won" twice. The competition is against myself, my laziness—not to put too fine a point on it.

The first was a real win, because "Not by Dark Alone" came from it. A story I've reread a few times. I still think it survives the rereading.

To all who are venturing down this crazy paving path this November, best of luck. Have fun with it.

I'm kjmackey on the NaNoWriMo site, should you wish to connect.

For the night is...

...dark and full of terrors. So they say on Game of Thrones.

I'll not patronize and say these terrors are just our own fear of the dark, a fear that seems to spring from our very DNA.

For there are real terrors, and there is real darkness, and to fear such is an adaptive trait.

And yet the same DNA seems to drive us to hope, to seek the light, to remind one another of its return. This capacity to hope, to believe that which cannot in that moment be seen, has fueled the festivals, the celebrations that mark this Mid-Winter time here in the Northern Hemisphere for as long as we can remember.

Our species has left its mark on the stone, the land, the oral and written record of our peoples, talking of the darkness, the terrors, and the light driving out the darkness. Twenty-six and more centuries ago a voice was raised saying:

"The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light..."

Yet the odd thing, the salient thing for me, is the speaker/writer is not talking of the past. He spoke of the future. I have written before that we are a hopeful species. That seems to be as much part of our makeup as our fear of the dark.

So, look up. Look past the terrors. Look past the dark. On they who dwell in shadow...a light will shine.

Our truths tell us this.

*Image from: http://switched.deviantart.com/art/light-through-trees-20221042

Time: a creeping, leaping thing

*She walks in beauty...or it may be that she runs so, or jogs.

Walking out in the world some time ago I smiled at the sun, warm on my face. As I paused she ran by, lean, lithe, her blonde ponytail swaying with her strides. Perfume, perspiration, and the slap-slap of jogging shoes against the unforgiving pavement.

She rounded a corner and was gone.

Not very long later I rounded the same corner and moved further through the city. A little distance away from me she stood. An older her, a young man by her side, between them a golden retriever. The light changed and the three crossed the street, the retriever straining against the leash wrapped around her outstretched arm. I heard her young man laugh as he walked by her side, his hand in her free one.

They were quickly lost to my view.

Later in my walk, after turns both right and left, I saw in the distance the blonde young woman, a mother now, pulling a golden-haired boy in a little red wagon, a litheness still present in her gait, a curve to her belly hinting future joys.

The golden retriever was now leashed to her young man. They kept pace behind her, the years lying heavy on the dog.

I stood and watched. Her ponytail was gone, her hair a more sensible style. Her young man...his hair already fading...still smiled easily in response to something she said.

I lowered myself to a nearby park bench, not eager to hurry them through further stages. There would be time enough for college-age children, for grandchildren, for a time alone after her young man was gone.

I closed my eyes, letting the early summer sun warm my face, smiling at life.

* My thanks to Lord Byron for the phrase.

Freewrite is here

Freewrite is here.

I never doubted it. Honest. Yes, it's a year later than they said—well, maybe just eight months. Some might have doubted. Not I.

Another project I contributed to, a tablet with the world's greatest operating system and interface, didn't make it. But I never doubted that till one day they said they couldn't do it.

Still, the Freewrite is here. A typewriter for the 21st century. Web enabled, internet connected.
Distractionless.

Will this make me a writer? No. I am one. Will it make me a better writer? A harder question to answer. It may, because with it I may write more.

That was the idea behind the product in the first place, and why I thought to support it.

For I am kid, distracted by shiny new toys. And the Internet is full of shiny new toys, and email, and music, and interactions with friends, and...

It doesn't hurt that this Smart Typewriter qualifies as a shiny new toy. I know me: my strengths...and I'm conscious of many of my weaknesses.

So this blog entry, the resurrection of my blog if you will, is a start with this new toy. This new toy designed to help me do what I love to do. 

Tell stories.