I woke up with a thought in my head about an industrial revolution. I have no idea what that pertains to, but I have a feeling it was a holdover from a thought from yesterday. This is why you write things down, folks.
In other, more writing related news, I'm… writing a romantic comedy. It goes against everything I stand for, but there it is. I wrote six pages of it the other day, just trying to get the setup out of the way. See, there's a particular situation the characters have to be in, where most of the action happens, and I needed to get them there. So the beginning is a little awkward and kind of "why would you make that foolish decision" but I can fix it later.
I know I said a few weeks ago that if I wrote this rom-com, I wasn't going to blog about it. But now I am, because frankly, I don't have anything else to talk about. I don't want to talk too much about the overall plot, because I'm afraid it's going to sound stupid, and then I won't want to write it anymore. Which would suck, because it's shaping up to be a fun little story.
Roughly, it involves a young woman going home for Thanksgiving. And she's bringing a… friend. That's not the point right now. The point is, families are weird. Not just in the crazy, neurotic sense, but in the fact that, well, your family probably does something weird and you don't even realize it.
People have weird traditions. Some families play a sport when they get together. Football seems common in movies. The maternal side of my family played croquet. I had a friend whose family played bocce. And for whatever reason, these become totally normal things to do at family gatherings. And then you bring in an outsider, who thinks it's all so bizarre.
So then I've started thinking about what this girl's family might do for the holidays. I'm not totally sure where it's set, but I know it's cold out. Write what you know and all that. But do they have a sport or a game they play? Some strange food they always have at Thanksgiving? Like… fucking… pretzel salad. That's my in-laws' thing. Maybe they all sit around and say what they're thankful for. That seems pretty common, though I don't think my family has ever done it. Maybe we’re the weird ones.
Let me ask you, my readers, what kind of family traditions do you have? Or have you seen?
After pretty much every paragraph I've written here, I had to go back to my story notes to add more ideas. The dam keeping back the floodwaters of chick flick worthy ideas has broken, and the tiny town of Being a Badass is doomed. I'd better get back to writing this thing before it crawls out of my computer and tries to kill me.
I'll see you Saturday.
romcom's are supposed to be cheesy. That's the draw. It's like all the goofy bad decisions work together to make that one moment. I love it.
ReplyDeleteMy family has Oysters Rockefeller for a Thanksgiving side. I think that's unusual. We usually have a card table up and keep a game of Eucher going a lot of the time. Newcomers are required to sit in a hand or two, at least, and try to learn the game.
Also, now that the kids are teenagers they want to do Black Friday shopping so we are usually pouring through the giant stack of newspaper ads that get delivered on Thanksgiving morning. Then someone goes shopping, but gives up when the line is stupid long or they realized they needed to bring a tent just to be in line for the opening in the morning.
There are usually enough people in the house with the cooking and goings on to keep the door open no matter the temperature.
That reminds me of a Halloween party I went to when I was about 10, where they played this complex dice game called Bunco. I'd never heard of it before, and never known anyone to play it since. I literally just looked up the rules to try to remember how it went. I had forgotten it was dice and not cards.
DeleteI think a relatively obscure game could be a fun addition to the tale.
Bunco is very popular here. I don't know how you know no one who plays it. In my office all of the ladies are in Bunco groups, some more than one. I've even subbed in two different friends groups. Haha! One group is a church group who plays with no alcohol and takes the game very seriously (it's a game of chance for goodness sake, but they all believe that one person is a very skilled player), the other group sometimes doesn't finish the game because there is too much drinking. I think there is a happy medium.
DeleteEuchre is a card game that is popular in the Midwest. I only know a few people here who play, other than my family, and they all lived in the Midwest at some point. You keep score with the 5 cards. Each point you get you uncover a symbol on the 5 card with the other card. Obviously playing to 10. My aunts have a "dancing 5's" ritual, where they dance the 5's around and rub it in that they won. They win a lot. When a team loses, they give up their seats to the next team. It gets loud and it gets competitive. Lots to add to a story. :)