judgment_of_the_aunts epitome of incomprehensibility This a story in progress, the one I was stuck at last week. And then, as my first progress_report entry chronicles, I wrote an outline and got unstuck. Or a little less stuck. Outlining doesn't always work for me, but it did then, and it revealed that my character is trying to taper off a tobacco habit but welcomes a cigarette at the butt end of 1999. I didn't expect her to smoke because I don't smoke, but then when I wrote the outline, I pictured a place and situation where Birdie (narrator) and Violet (her youngest aunt's partner) could talk, and I pictured this: the two shivering, fingers holding moving points of light and smoke, a view of a grey-dark snowy field also with faraway lights. Birdie (Roberta Wren) is 49 years old, works as a receptionist, and lives near some of her relatives in a small town in Manitoba (imaginary, but placed near real_life Winnipeg). Her mother is trying to plan a family reunion that's also a New Year's Party for the new millennium, but she runs into resistance early on: Aunt Patty doesn't like that her younger sister, Birdie's Aunt Chloe, is a lesbian, so she tries to exclude Chloe's girlfriend from things. E.g. she doesn't like that Birdie calls her *Aunt* Violet. (Will these imaginary people get married in a few years, when they can? Now I'm thinking about that and it's not even in the story.) The thing is, Birdie has a secret, or not so much a secret as something that has been nebulous in her mind and ill-defined outside it: she's asexual, or on that sort of spectrum, so she thinks bringing it up with Violet would bring some sort of solidarity. (Chloe is dreamy and artsy but not talky; Violet is confident and practical.) And then there is the whole chaos of visitors. Some are from Winnipeg (e.g., The Gays), some from Montreal (one of Birdie's four aunts is Aunt Tammy, the Tamra from The_Palm_Reader), and maybe a few from celestial realms (snowflakes). (Did it snow on the eve of Y2K in Winnipeg? What's if it was raining?? The things I find myself needing to look up.) 250710 ... e_o_i And yay for writing about imaginary aunts while visiting my real one in Arden. She isn't that much like any of the characters, though. 250710 ... e_o_i From the Winnipeg airport, "Light Snow, Drifting Snow, [and] Light Drifting Snow" was observed on Dec. 31, 1999. God bless the internet. The description of snow itself is poetic - like the TV_Tropes trope "Bread, Eggs, Breaded Eggs" but more elegant. 250710 what's it to you? who go blather from