Words for Wednesday December 7 & IWSG

This meme was started by Delores a long time ago.  Troubles led her to bow out, but the meme was too much fun to let go, and now Words for Wednesday is provided by a number of people and has become a movable feast with Elephant's Child as our coordinator.

  Essentially the aim of this meme is to encourage us to write.  Each week we are given some prompts. These prompts can be words, phrases, music or images.
  What we do with those prompts is up to us: a short story, prose, a song, a poem, or treating them with ignore ...
  We can use some or all of the prompts, and mixing and matching is encouraged.

  Some of us put our creation in comments on the post, and others post on their own blog. This fun meme includes cheering on the other participants.

  And the more the merrier goes here as well, so if you are posting on your own blog then please tell us in the comments, so that all other participants, can come along and applaud.

Elephant's Child who is supplying the prompts for the Wednesdays of December has given us these words for today

Candles
Everyone
Nine
Days
Heart
    And/or
 Aunt
Strike
Bullet
Ballet
Missed

This short chapter of Susan's story takes place some weeks after the happenings in Aunt Jemima's Garden - last bit HERE.

Candles were lit, everyone were ready. It was nine o'clock.
Susan and her co-apprentices had been waiting for this moment for days, she could feel her heart beating, fast, uneasily. She looked into the flame of the candle, to still her thoughts and fears. Then she stared into the contents of the bowl, exited what she was going to see. Funnily a picture of aunt Jemima rose to the surface of her mind. First she saw aunt Jemima as she had last seen her, and old, white-haired, grey-skinned, tiny lady, then as she had seen her in the photos in the house when they finally got in there, majestic, chestnut coloured hair reaching all the way her waist. It did strike her as strange that aunt Jemima had left almost everything behind, when leaving the house after Carl, her husband, had died.
Then she remembered that Jon had warned them about getting sucked into someone else's memories. Happy that she had dodged that bullet she stared on, and a pair of ballet shoes rose to the surface. It was her own ballet shoes, tied together by the pink satin band, hanging over her bed at home in Elsinore, and her thoughts slipped back to her dreams of being a dancer. The mini series Ballet Shoes had run on TV, and she had dreamed of becoming a famous ballet dancer just like Posy Fossil. She even persuaded Mum and Dad to buy her a pair of pink pointe shoes. Those that hung over her bed still. After buying a book on ballet and doing plies and limbering exercises for months, she realized that she was much more a kindred spirit of Petrova, who went off exploring with Gum in the end.
Her Mum's worrying for her feet, for broken bones and pulled tendons when she and Linda grappled with the basics of standing on their toes of course made Susan's stubborn streak become rampant and made her continue her exercises and reading for almost half a year more before finally giving in. Linda had stopped long before, taking up normal dancing, which Susan absolutely abhorred. So many people, and you had to be girlish and nice to stupid, clumsy girls, and ugly boys. She carried on with the limbering exercises every morning until she found the perfect excuse for quitting. She found out that female ballet dancers was limited to a height of 165 cm - even if the bar was up from 156, she was still going to be too tall within a year, and furthermore she was far too old.
She suddenly missed doing the limbering exercises every morning, and realized that she did not need to try and become a ballet dancer to do the exercises, her body clearly needed to stay limber and agile. With this realisation she looked up and met Jon's eyes.
"You saw and learned something, I see," he said. "Write it down in your note book and call it a day. Scrying is tiring work, and lunch break will be in ten minutes."
Susan just nodded, pulled out her green notebook, drew the ballet shoes hanging over her bed and wrote: If I don't practice for one day, only I will know. If I don't practice for two days, my teacher will know. If I don't practice for three days, the audience will know. Then she stroke out "the audience", and wrote 'everybody' over it. She did not remember if this citation came from The Ballet Shoes or from a book on children in a circus, or from somewhere else, but it fit in with her resolve to train her body as well as her mind.

If you think you have read some of this before - you have, and have a good memory. I cite myself from the long ago chapter Susan at home.

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December 7 question - It's holiday time! Are the holidays a time to catch up or fall behind on writer goals?

My answer:  Holiday time for me begins with the Christmas holidays somewhere in the 4th week of advent.

Of course the Christmas days themselves are not good for writing or any artistic endeavours at all. They are filled with family, masses, happiness, cakes, gifts and hopefully snow.

But until then, and indeed after, we are 'treated' to murky weather with low clouds, cold, windy and drizzling more days than not. And this is a good time for writing as long as I can keep my seasonal lack of energy at bay.