Ball-ball, Buffy! in Dancing on a Blade (September 2019)

More cooperative writing angst.

We’re fighting again (this time “we” is me and Old RP Partner.) She’s definitely mad I dumped her on the site and “ran off.” She expressed this by being angry I’d spoken to someone else she still writes with there when that someone else (let’s call her Kay?) expressed that she was feeling run down and thought she might quit because she’s feeling the grind.

I know the grind of writing with ORPP is real. Seriously, you can only manage to create so many dicks in a box and post as them so often before you hit the wall. (Dick in a box: slang term for a random male someone is pining for after seeing them on TV and has decided that they need to write a story about fucking. Except it’s never the personality itself, and the male isn’t actually allowed to develop, he’s just supposed to be A Guy. It’s boring to write. It’s insanely boring times 70.) (If they develop a plot, she’ll walk off and your development is done. Useless. This is, by the way, Never Her Fault.) (And she was always “right about to get back to” whatever character.)

Anyway. She roared at me that I ought to take up writing with Kay, since I was so “angry with her.” And I pointed out that sometimes only playing the guy can get really old really fast, and she threw out lots of “reasons” that “none of us play the guy all the time.” And I sat there, and I thought, and the first thing to come to mind was an image.

You know that game you play with a dog? They bring you a ball and wait. And you play with the ball a few seconds to hype them up, then you pull back for the big throw…and the dog takes off. But you’re still holding the ball.

That’s what she does to me. And silly me, I have brought her five or six balls.

I don’t know how many Kay has brought her. I haven’t been back on that site in over a year. (they changed a rule, then argued that “all the important people knew about it” when I lost my shit. If I am not an “important person,” then I’m not staying.)

All I know is, that bitch has my ball, and I want it. Throwing it myself is massively unsatisfying. Those balls were specially developed for her to throw, and she psyched me and suckered me and I never got to chase them properly, while at the same time being tasked with keeping dozens (Literal dozens, one old character tracker lists 74 characters, 69 male, 5 female.) of her balls in the air.

I don’t like to be teased.

And last night: Spouse made a cake for my birthday, and a really questionable batch of butter chicken (he didn’t bother with a vegetable or anything: we literally had chicken chunks, sauce, and rice, and the rice was mildly underdone.) He started the cake at 4:30. He put a whole pound of carrots into it. He did not include nuts or raisins, and he didn’t have one of the spices.

So when he served it, the frosting was melted off (it was still warm!) and he forgot ice cream, and we only had three birthday candles left over from the twins’ birthdays (two weeks ago.) Everyone’s pooping orange because he thought 2 cups of grated carrot meant you needed a whole pound of carrots.

I’m not sure I like carrot cake any more, after that.

But I guess I officially have to be forty now.