Ever

Ever

Five little girls, five steps they took 

To the clear and crystal babbling brook .

To the five berry bushes that grew down there, 

A-waving in the autumn air. 

On each little bush two berries grew, 

of white, green, red, and black and blue. 

Of the first little bush with berries green, 

One made you nice and the other mean. 

The second bush, with blackest berry, 

One made you sad, the other made merry. 

The third little bush, with berries blue, 

If you ate one you shrunk, the other... you grew. 

The fourth bush had berries, red as a rose, 

That changed the size and length of your nose. 

The fifth, berries white, as babies breath 

The one berry brought life, the other death. 

The very first girl... Anne, called she 

Was meaner than a bumble-bee. 

The second girl, by the name of Beth 

Had nearly cried herself to death. 

The third little girl, whose name was Cort, 

Happened to be extremely short. 

The fourth girl's name was Daffodil, 

A semi-truck her nose could fill. 

The fifth girl's name was simply... Ever. 

She was convinced that she would live forever. 

They traveled together to the quiet stream, 

Each with her own private dream. 

Anne from bush one, a green berry tore, 

Ate it and got nastier than before. 

Beth though, had no inner fears 

Ate a blackberry, and then drowned in her tears. 

A berry of blue, did Cort pick from bush three. 

She ate and then shrunk till too small to see. 

The giant-snozzed Daffodil ate a berry of red. 

Her nose swelled ten times and then squashed her down dead. 

The small simple Ever stared at the fifth bush. 

Then picked both berries and squashed them to mush. 

She took them both and ate them plain, 

And then walked back home, exactly the same. 

Despite all her confidence of immortality inside, 

At age 97... Ever up and died. 

By the way, the name of this post, or this poem, has nothing to do with Gail Carson Levine's book. Actually, the above is a poem I (Hannah) wrote in my notebook in two hours while my family ran errands and I sat waiting in the van, back in the November of 2011. The first few lines I came up with when I was about to fall asleep the night before.

It took a lot of thought to get all the colors and numbers and names to line up and rhyme at the same time. And did you notice the girls' names start with A, B, C, D and E? Maybe this is an indicator of genius... 

Trinity suggested that I put some of my poems up, like this one and the Clementine one, but as I've said, I can rarely write poems where someone doesn't die or something. I mean, really, Ever, for example, it's around 320 words, and I killed off five people. Well, I killed off three, technically Anne and Cort didn't die. I made horrible things happen to five people. That's just the writer in me. So continued poetry posts might or might not be a thing.

Tell me what you thought! Comments always make the day. My day, Trinity's day, just the day. And I'm sorry if I scared you with my... creepiness... *cough cough*. Not to say it won't happen again.

To God be the Glory,

Hannah 

Good News And Bad News

Trinity here!

Well, I have good news and I have bad news. The good news about the good/bad news is that the good news applies to just about everyone and the bad news applies mostly to me. So, no need to be concerned.

The good news is I finally managed to design an acceptable and spiffy cover for my NaNo novel! Ta-da!

This was a frustrating project because I wanted to have both an element of the modern (as in, a ravaged city), and an element of medieval. I tried looking for swords, girls on horses, girls with swords, etc. etc. and I just couldn't find what I wanted. But I eventually got this, and I think I like it.

And the bad news. Yesterday I spent a couple of hours researching nuclear power plants and radiation. 

Now, I realize that all this information coming up might not mean much to you, and if you want to you can go ahead and skim right over the next little bit, but I'm putting it in anyway because it helps me think things through and solidify them in my head. 

First though, note that I've done a lot of research and I've stated things as simply as I can, so you might learn something cool. Like, the fact that the code name for the first nuclear detonation test ever was called the Trinity Project. :D 

Anyway, it looks like nuclear-osity might not be able to play into the plot quite as much as I'd hoped for several reasons.

First of these is that the fallout just wouldn't stick around long enough. 

Radiation has this thing called a half-life, which is basically how long it takes to lose half of it's power. The two main types of radiation that would be released in the case of a nuclear reactor failing are Iodine-131 and Cesium-137. 

    Iodine-131 has a half-life of eight days, which means that 100 years later, it would give off such tiny amounts of radiation, it wouldn't make a difference to anything. 

    However, Cesium-137 has a half-life of 30 years. Which would mean that in one hundred years it would have halved it's power three times which would put the total decrease at something like... 87.5% 

In any case, the radiation wouldn't be as powerful as I had previously thought it would be. 

The second thing I learned is that the Chernobyl disaster was so devastating because the nuclear core was exposed, on fire, and sending up plumes of radiation for many days before it was contained.  Also, it was a very poorly designed plant with few of the now required safety features.

        So these days an accident as huge and horrible as the Chernobyl disaster is virtually impossible, not only because of new safety requirements and backup safety requirements, but also because the reaction time of containment would be much, much faster and handled more safely. 

I still might be able to make it work, because with a world-wide earthquake and tsunamis, etc, etc, the damage could be much worse than anyone has ever considered could happen, and containment reaction time would be almost none. If I chose that route, though, I'd probably want to bump the time of the earthquake ahead a couple decades because currently nuclear power plants just aren't widespread enough.

Another option would be to have them raid an abandoned hospital or nuclear facility and steal something radioactive that weakens and contaminates them, such as happened with the Goiânia accident in Brazil (Warning: The story is pretty tragic). 

Okay, boring part's over!

As far as characters go, I'm vaguely, faintly outlining them in my head. They've been inspired by pictures from (surprise..) Pinterest. Mostly this one: 

I've kinda worked out who she and the babies are and then as I browse through the rest of my board my brain is gradually beginning to pin together which characters go where and how they may enter the story. 

Eight days until NaNoWriMo, and I have a feeling I'll be scrambling until the last second preparing!

Sé onr sverdar sitja hvass! 

~ Trinity