Side Bet

So I made a little promise/challenge to myself that I would try to write 1000 words a day. It's not nearly as difficult as say NaNoWriMo was (which paces out at about 2000 words daily). Anywho, I wrote this yesterday and was kind of tickled by it. I won't bore you with the whole deal but this is an excerpt. The office that she works in has very low lighting that is shifting around the office (think of those streetlight poles that turn on and off to conserve energy).

"If one person benefited from the eye-straining conditions of the office it was Mary-Alice Jewel. Not in a work capacity, of course, as everyone’s work seemed to be staggered by the office’s slow strobe and Mary-Alice was no exception. No, Mary-Alice benefited in a physical sense. You see, Mary-Alice wasn’t attractive in the least. She is what old southern women would call ‘homely’ and would say ‘bless her heart’ when matters of physical attractiveness arose. Her face was round and flushed, as though she had been running a great distance even though she had only been sitting at her cubicle looking over the receipts and breathing loudly. Her hair was greasy and waved, hugging the sides of her face like wet seaweed on the sides of a battleship. Her nose had dried bits of skin around it and the flakes would drift down like snowfall when she knuckled it while in deep thought. Lastly, her clothing was frumpy, not flattering in the least and had faded to moppish colors from overwashing with cheap detergent. Her jackets gave her the shape of a weather-beaten fire hydrant. Yes, under sunlight, night light, candle light, street light, club lights, bus lights, grocery store fluorescent lights and library study room lights, she was not pleasing to look at in the least. However, under the yawning glow of a computer monitor in a darkened room (and only there), she was a vision."

I've always been fascinated by what I call 'bar pretty', which is the idea that some people look completely ravishing under bar lights and cigarette smoke and with loud music blaring, and completely unattractive outside of that element. It's like being a solar-powered calculator except low lit bars are the solar power. Anyway, I shifted this idea a tad and made her 'office pretty', under very extenuating circumstances. As I said, it tickled me.

Best,
mm