BRAINPAN LEAKAGE

There are certain things, that when said aloud, will bring most any conversation to a screeching halt. You know the things I mean. Stuff such as, “Whoops, my hair is on fire…” or “Whoa! Is that Dana Delany over there?”

Personally, I have an intense fondness for the Dana Delany comment, but then we already knew that, right? Well, if you didn’t, you do now… Oops… Guess that was sorta awkward, eh?

The thing is, there are several such phrases that can bring a conversation to a sudden halt. Case in point…

I was prattling on endlessly with my PA the other day. As it happens, the o-spring is out of school for the summer, so she was sitting there fiddling about with her Nook or some such since it is loaded up with a ton of summer reading for her. Since she’s all kinds of brilliant and has a high school level command of the English language, I often forget that she’s still just a tween, so my filters aren’t always in place. In this instance, they weren’t, and I was talking to my PA about Merrie Axemas, and In The Bleak Midwinter, giving him a synopsis of the stories, how they related, differed, and other such nonsense.

Well… Anyone who has read Merrie Axemas knows that there is a dismemberment involved. Merrie. Axe. Mas… You get the idea. So moving right along, as we are talking the o-spring pipes up and says:

“Did you know that when your head is chopped off you still live for eleven more seconds?”

This really shouldn’t – and didn’t – surprise me. After all, she’s my kid… But that’s not the thing that stopped the conversation. I mean, think about it. I research all manner of nastiness for my thriller novels… After all, I write about serial and/or spree killers for the most part. That’s why I’m a member of the HWA, and not the “Grandma’s Cozy Knitting Happily Ever After Ending Whodunit Club”…

But on with the story… you see, since both my PA and I know my kid, we just continued the convo, involving her at this point. Mainly discussing the fact that 11 seconds might be a bit of a stretch, but that there was some evidence to indicate that the brain continued to function very briefly following decapitation.

This then turned to different ways of dying, and before I knew it my PA and my daughter were into a discussion of which way to go would be the least traumatic. They got onto beheading, suffocation, drowning, etc, and I added my two cents, that being the fact that I was under the impression that suffocation wasn’t a particularly pleasant way to go, no matter HOW the suffocation happened. That’s when my PA regaled us with a tale of how he had almost drowned – or come somewhat close – when he was a child, and how it had gone from a fearful struggle to a simple calm… Well, obviously he didn’t drown, or he wouldn’t have been there having weird death conversations with my tween daughter.

But this was when the conversation stopper came.

Darling daughter pipes up, “Yeah, I almost drowned a few years ago.”

You could hear a pin drop. I stared at her. She stared at me. My PA stared at her. She stared at him. We all stared at each other.

Finally I broke down and said, “When was this?”

“A few years ago at blankity-blank pool,” she replied.

“How?”

She shrugged. “It was before I knew how to swim and my friend took me to the deep end and left me there because she didn’t know that I couldn’t swim.”

I stared some more. “Why am I just now hearing about this?”

“I dunno.”

“So, did the lifeguard jump in and save you or something? I mean, it seems to me they would have told us about it when we picked you up from summer day camp.”

“No,” she said. “My friend just took me back to the shallow end.”

“Well, did you start sinking or what? How did you almost drown?”

She thought about it a second and then said, “Well… I might’ve kinda exaggerated…”

Guess I can’t complain. She’s my kid. She got it honest…

More to come…

Murv

Okay, I’ll be honest, this is going to be one of those short and sweet postings. I’m up against a deadline – not right up against it, but it definitely now falls under Visual Flight Rules – so I’m not free to “blawg” like usual… Still, the title does have a bit of a dual meaning.

1. I’m off in the land inside my head where I am not necessarily me. I’m just some random cluster of glial cells that happens to be taking notes.
2. There’s another place out on the web where people might think I am me being someone who is not me, but in a real sense of the word is actually me. But it’s not.

Make sense? Nope… Doesn’t to me either…

Let me see if I can explain –

As far as number one goes, I’m writing. I have a manuscript deadline to meet. Of the two, I think that was probably pretty self-explanatory.

As to the oddball number two…

There’s a blog out there called Ripped From The Pages…

RFTP is a blog (duh, Murv, you just said that), and it is written by characters – primarily Felicity O’Brien – from the Rowan Gant series of novels. It details things going on in their lives outside the boundaries of the books. Some folks, quite understandably, have assumed that it is me penning these entries.

Well… It’s not. Now, I know I often speak of merely being a stenographer in the world of my characters, and yes, I still maintain that position. However, in this particular case I am not even the stenographer behind the prose. As it happens, a dear friend, fan, and co-creator of the “Official Unofficial M. R. Sellars Fan Club – Murv’s Stalkers” is the voice behind Felicity and her blog entries.

So that we are clear, YES, these blogs are officially sanctioned by me, and I do see them prior to public release. I also provide some of the pictures that are used (though not all, by any means)…

Why am I telling you all this? Well, you see, here’s the thing. Sometimes folks will leave comments on the blog addressed to me. I don’t always see them unless “Felicity” tells me about it, or I just happen to surf by there. “Felicity” has pointed out that she is writing the blog, and not me – however, I am willing to bet that many are just assuming those notes are from me being silly – or  personality dissociative…

Well… It’s not. There’s a “Felicity” behind “Felicity” on Ripped From The Pages… And you know, sometimes she even fools me…

More to come…

Murv