But that's the fun of this whole week right? I'm secondhanding it up baby, and trying new things.

From Top to Bottom:
Handmade choker that Charlie has broken a million times (including but not limited to today)
Homemade black pearl necklace made by me under the tutelage of my Auntie Sheri
Cozy ribbed t-shirt- The Buckle
Pinstriped vest- Wet Seal
Skinny jeans- brand unknown
Vintage red wedges- BC footwear


So here it is without the vest. I'm thinking the skinny jeans do no favors for my thighs. Bad thighs, go away.


...Ahhh. Much better.



I adore these shoes. 2 bucks, barely used at the AmVet thrift store downtown. You can see though, I am certainly doing my best to wear them out.



And here's my jewelry, plus a bonus angsty look from me. I wasn't having much success taking self portraits with the tripod and timer, so Jamie took this picture. Not bad little grasshopper. But if you don't mind, I'd like my camera back. I belong on the other side.

Lace Layering Tank - Casual Corner

It has probably become rather obvious here that I am all for tradition refreshed... or an eclectic mix of styles. I loved Two Gentlemen from Verona set in the twenties, and now I'm fully convinced that the silent film era works wonderfully for morality tales as well. At least when attempted by Tony DiTerlizzi.

We've got two drastically different morsels of fiction for you this week.

The short and sweet. (literally...yum)

Bethany~
"I don't believe it," Shannon said, not even glancing up from her homework.

-----

The cynical. (inspired by Vox Popoli's Game theory)

Esther~
Jason had never felt so foolish in his life and he hoped he'd never feel so foolish again.

Photography's a slippery slope. When I was shooting with a film point&shoot, I was convinced all I needed was a digital camera. I was (am) such a cheapwad about developing film that it took me months and months to fill up an entire roll. I would always think "is there a better picture I could be taking with this money?". Not a bad mantra, all things considered, but I should have told my 12 year old self that someday I'd spend thousands and thousands of dollars on photography anyway. I should have taken a chill pill back then. Or now. (I still need one)
So I got a digital camera, but all the masterpieces in my head turned out looking more like toddler fingerpainting...metaphorically (I only wish my pictures looked like fingerpainting). The answer of course was not my lack of skill or talent, it was the camera. If I had a decent camera, I could be the next Man Ray. Obviously.

So I graduated to a DSLR: Minolta, Olympus, then Nikon. Bad, Better, Best. Loved them all. But the camera itself doesn't make your pictures look much better. This is where I'm supposed to say it's the persons talent and skill that makes the picture better... or the ever popular "it's not the camera, it's the person behind the camera."... blah blah blah.
Brilliant words. I've said them myself. *blush*

But there is a little secret. It's all about lenses.
More specifically. There is one lens that is both super useful and inexpensive. The 50 mm 1.8 (or 1.4). Here it is for Canon too.


Unfortunately most camera lenses cost more money than the camera itself. Fortunately this 50 mm lens checks out for about $100, and I kid you not, it is almost impossible to take a bad picture with it.

You know all those pictures professionals take where the background is blurry, but the subject is sharp and in focus? Yup. This lens will do that.
Frustrated by the lack of poor indoor lighting that makes everyone look like fuzzy ghosts or requires you to use a flash? Yup. this lens solves that too.
Have problems focusing fast enough before you find your subject has wiggled away? Yup. Ding, ding, ding, we have a winner folks.

Personally, I couldn't live without mine.

As promised, here's the second installment of Flash Fiction Friday. If you'd like to come out of your own shell and submit a flash fiction piece to us to publish here on the blog. Email us at fairiesandfrenchfries at gmail.

You're going to get sick of these Gail Carson Levine writing prompts before we're done, because she has a lot of them. That woman has no bottom to her creativity.

Bethany's: Issy was a small dog, a fluffy dog, the sort of dog that barks like small sharp knives and pees every hour, preferably on expensive furniture and favorite toys.

Esther's: I have one green eye and one brown eye. The green eye sees truth, but the brown eye sees so much more.

I don't know about you, but the word "Literary" used to be something I revered-- something smart. That was back when I actually worried about looking smart. Now I don't really care, my standard being "anything I like", but watch-- in another 26 years I will probably have completely gone the other way and read nothing but high literature.

In this case however, "anything I like" turns out to be something literary. Although it's online, so maybe that takes it's cool points down a notch or two. Who knows.

Whatever the case, you have to go read it. Anything that can make you smile, and make your eyes water in less than 250 words is inspiring.

Boston Literary Magazine. Read "Test Day" by Teresa Houle

Twenty plus hours of one audiobook finally opened my eyes... er.... ears? I was midway through listening to a monstrously sized box of cassettes when the library summoned its child back home from our playdate. Quite naively I picked up another copy of the same audiobook by a different reader. The difference was astonishing. In the defense of the second reader, I had already spent a good solid dozen hours reveling in the artistry of an amazing interpretation. Even had the second reader been brilliant, he still would have been the second.

We have secrets here at Fairytales and Frenchfries.
We write.

Maybe that seems obvious, but it gets worse.
We write fiction. Novels even (or are in the process of working on them).

Admitting this seems a little bit like pasting a big, fat "delusional" sticker on our foreheads. But everyone has to start somewhere and you can't get better if you don't write, and you can't get better if you don't actually let people read what you write.

So we're throwing our hats over the fence (or in this case our laptops, notepads and plot charts), by posting a piece of Flash Fiction every Friday. (flash fiction is a 1000 words or less)

Click through for more than the opening sentence. Bethany's is first, then mine. We are both working off of writing prompts out of Gail Carson Levine's book Writing Magic. (which we will review at some point in time).



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Stars.

They met on the stairsteps in the middle of the afternoon.



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The ghost was eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.



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C.S. Lewis is very possibly the most widely distributed author in our family library. His books grace the children's bookshelf as well as various shelves devoted to theology, poetry, sci-fi, fantasy, non-fic, literature, you name it. There are even a couple of books about him on our biography shelf. If you've read or heard of The Four Loves, then you probably are aware that C.S. Lewis had much to say on the subject of love. He speaks of it eloquently in the book devoted specifically to the topic, but he doesn't limit his message to those willing to plow through pontifications on the topic. He takes the seeds of the same thoughts and scatters them through his novels and his poetry, each seed springing into life through story.

All this flashy rhetoric about loving you.

I never had a selfless thought since I was born.

I am mercenary and self-seeking though and through:

I want God, you, all friends, merely to serve my turn.

Peace, reassurance, pleasure, are the goals I seek,

I cannot crawl an inch outside my proper skin:

I talk of love--a scholar's parrot may talk Greek--

But, self imprisoned, only end where I begin.

~"As the Ruin Falls"

If you ate something and found that it made you look and feel like you were five months pregnant, and you most definitely were not five months nor even at all pregnant, would you avoid that food?

I was reading Orson Scott Card's blog today (or rather, one of his blogs), and he mentioned his son-in-law crying while listening to an audio book (as he was running a marathon incidentally).
This, for some reason, was astounding to me.

Jim pulled the car off the freeway the first time he saw actual rivulets of saline running down my face while reading a book. We were on a road trip and he was convinced there was some dire and truly serious reason for my crying. Yes and no, depending on how serious you think Walter dying in Rilla Of Ingleside is. It wasn't the first time I'd cried through that book, nor was it the last (confession there). Jim was honestly flabbergasted.

That incident made me think maybe crying through books wasn't exactly normal among men... or even people in general.
Now I'm not so sure.

Do you ever cry when you read a book? Does your significant other?

Do you laugh out loud? Or are you just laughing and/or crying on the inside?

This is me at 10.



And it was not a bad hair day. This was a normal hair day.
Unfortunately.

The quest of any curly haired person is to tame the frizz. The older I've gotten the more extreme the good hair days and bad hair days are. Some days I don't know whether to be grateful, or just give up and shave my head.


I call my bad hair days Helena Bonham Carter days.




My cousin-in-law (the one who's a hair stylist in Hollywood), sent me this product: Mixed Chicks



And it is the gel/lotion/conditioner/mouse/serum/spray/bug juice I have been looking for my whole life.

Finally, happy curls. In hair talk that means soft, glossy and defined without being dangerously crunchy feeling...or frizzy. At the risk of scaring you all away from ever trying it, here is the result.

I hasten to add, that while my photographer (my sister) was fantastic, my eyes really aren't that blue (Nor am I that pale. But I do sleep in a coffin.)


So anyway, awesome stuff. I plan on sending Bethany a bottle... as soon as I send her their Christmas presents.