flower meanings!

I'm keeping a running list of plants I call attention to, and will probably pull their meanings in at some point. I snagged a .txt copy of the oldest book (1885) referenced on my trusty language of flowers website, and am referring to that as I go along.

The scene I did yesterday... those are locust trees, specifically black locust trees. There were toooons of them by one of the houses I grew up in, and I was picturing a specific grove from the side of our yard as I wrote that bit. The flowers are an amazing thing, they'll come in later. But the meaning of the locust tree is "affection beyond the grave". This is the main reason the tree turns up in my Phisto stories as much as it does, but the more I think of it, the more I like the tree for its own sake. Oddly, I'd always thought of it as something of a scrub tree, but it's actually one of the hardest woods that grows in North America (though bugs eating it somewhat deters from that).

The little white flowers by the creek... I'm not entirely sure what they are, I've been nagging my poor floral genius of a mom with emailed questions about plants all week. I remember so many from my childhood, but, I don't always know the names. But one of the things those little flowers might be is Candytuft. Blooms at the right time of year I think, and the plant structure works...

The meaning? "Indifference".


I got happy chills when I read that, and instantly knew that, if it is candytuft growing there, it was planted after the locust trees, in snide rebuttal to their haunting message.

<333

first write-in

...my sixth year, and today was the first write-in I ever managed to get to. Three other people turned up at one of the coffee places on campus, and someone was good enough to bring a power strip, and holy crap if I didn't write a good 2000 words in, what, three hours? With loooots of talking in between. One woman, I actually had a class with a few years ago. The other girl loves Batman and was raving about the audiobook version of the novelization of the newest Star Trek movie. The guy is going to go poke around an abandoned sanitarium like next week, he's using several abandoned places in his story.

This, is pretty freaking awesome.

I have people to share my NaNo experience with - people who understand the excitement of wordcounts, the frustrations of plot, the ridiculousness of characters. And I have things in common with these people! I always forget how nice that feels, the only people I've hung out with in ages are my coworkers. And while some of them are pretty awesome people too, and I even have a few things in common with some of them... it's a really great feeling to just sit down with some people you've never met before and just fall into conversations.

NaNo makes it so much less awkward, too. When there's a lull in the conversation, you just go back to the writing you're supposed to be doing. When you get stuck, you start talking again. You have people to remind you how to properly use quotes inside of quotes. It's a very cool thing.

Tomorrow night after work, I'm going to Tim Horton's until Tom gets out of work. It's one of my favorite places to write, and while most of the local NaNo'ers are meeting in the afternoon, it's sounding like a few will drop by at night, so that'll be good.

It's so strange having my wordcount already DONE for today, and it's nowhere near midnight! (Not being able to access the campus wifi - since I don't have an active student network account - was probably a VERY, very good thing.)


Also, regarding today's chunk: 1) I've never actually seen documentation of street names and things changing like that, it just totally makes sense to me that they would. I know growing up, we always had our own names for places - one particular intersection up the street was "four corners", the dirt road leading to a farmer's cabin was "Swyers Road". 2) I was not expecting my random zoning guy to be so entertaining! I was cracking up as I pictured this guy in this little office throwing maps all over the place. He's adorable! He made me so happy today, I had no idea how I was going to make today's section interesting, and then he showed up!