Part 1

        "Are you sure you don't need anything from the store, honey? You have an extra towel, right? Enough blankets?"
        "Mom, it's summer, I don't need any more blankets."
        "But towels? Oh and what about---"
        "Mom!" I broke in, laughing. "I just survived a year in a dorm, and there's a real kitchen and a real bathroom and real furniture here. I have more than enough to get myself through a summer."
        She smiled ruefully and spread out her hands in surrender. "I'm your mother, honey, fussing is what I do."
        "And Mrs. Mayhew is a grandmother, so if there's anything you forgot - which there isn't - she'll cover it ten times over."
        "Oh, I suppose..." She sighed. "You're really sure you don't want to come hone this summer, Kris?"
        I softened, and crossed the room to give her a hug. "Mom. Of course I want to... but I really should do this class this summer, my professor thinks it would really help me, to just devote a few weeks to nothing but my photography. And I have that job all lined up already."
        "You sure you'll be all right getting there and everything?"
        I giggled. "It's like not even a mile to campus, Mom, I'll be fine."
        "Oh, I know you will, dear. I'm just stalling so I can cling to my baby girl a little longer."
        "I promise to call - but I can't promise to make it interesting or anything. This town gets pretty quiet in the summer, I've been told."
        "That's all right, I still want to hear from you. Even if it's just that you ripped a new hole in your jeans. ---Jeans! Do you have enough jeans for the summer? Do you need any shorts?"
        "Trish, darling, you just filled an entire dresser with her clothes, and that's not even any of her shirts." Dad slid in through the door, and put his hands on Mom's shoulders. She leaned her head back to give him a forlorn look. He chuckled and kissed her forehead. "I'll miss our girl too, but she'll get along. And we're only an hour away if she needs us."
        Mom looked back at me. "You will call."
        Laughing, I promised, and eventually managed to usher them out of the house. Mom waved from the passenger sear of the old Chevy station wagon until the car was out of sight over a hill. She probably kept on waving even after that...until Dad made some teasing quip, which would have made her smack at him and then laugh.
        ...so I was actually kind of sad to see them go, I really was, but I knew they'd visit plenty. And I'd survived my first year away at college just fine, once the initial shock wore off. Suzy would keep my parents plenty occupied at home, especially with her being able to (legally) drive unsupervised this summer... I had to grin at the thought, she was going to be an absolute terror, and I was so glad I wasn't going to be there for it!
        As I turned back toward the house, Mr. Mayhew waved and halloed me from where he was fixing a fence railing by one of the many extravagant flower gardens that filled the large yard. (That is, they seemed extravagant to me, but then again my own parents' horticultural aspirations got about as far as keeping evergreen hedges sort of trimmed. I have a little pot of ivy that my roommate didn't want to take home with her, but I only took it because she swore you really couldn't kill it, as long as it was watered like once a week, every two weeks at a stretch. We'll see.)
        "All moved in, then?" Mr. Mayhew asked, leaning on a new fence rail he was putting in. The wood was an incredibly bright gold when contrasted to the muted gray of the weathered old rails.
        "Yep! Mom wouldn't leave 'til she could literally see I had eeeeverything I needed, so I'm actually pretty much unpacked, too."
        He chuckled at that, and he waved expansively toward the house and yard. "All yours, kid! Don't be shy about exploring or nothin', we're used to the grandkids crawling all over every inch of this place, you won't bother us none. Just keep an eye out for that little scamp Caleb, he knows all the best hiding places 'round here, and gets the biggest kick out of scaring the bejeebers outta folks."
        As soon as he said this, a battered and grass-stained soccer ball came flying out of absolutely nowhere, and almost took out a good chunk of a huge rosebush.
        "Hey! You watch Claire's roses, now!"
        "Sooooo-rryyyyyyy!" came a clear young voice from somewhere out of sight.
        "Not that the bush wouldn't grow right back," Mr. Mayhew continued in an aside to me, a grin in his eyes. "But believe me, we'd be hearing about it every blasted hour 'til they did."
        I giggled and nodded understanding. Mr. Mayhew turned back to his work, and I gave the ball a vague kick in the direction it had come from.
        "Thanks!" I caught a quick glimpse of a kid, maybe eight years old? with messy blond hair and a big grin. He gave the ball another huge full-strength kick, and was out of sight again in a second.

        Entering the house, I skipped quickly up the stairs, grabbed my trusty SLR camera and a few rolls of film off the dresser, and bounced back downstairs, shoving the film canisters into the pocket of my jeans. The sunlight was far too nice to stay inside fiddling around with things in my room - might as well begin the Summer of Photos. No way was I going to explore the place without my camera in hand...I really never walk anywhere without one camera or another. I have a small digital one that I throw in my purse whenever I'm going out, for more casual shots, and just as something to have on-hand all the time, without worrying about film or scratching a lens or anything. I love the space (Mom got me a two gig memory card for my last birthday, which is fantastic), but while it does have a feature where it will blur the background and keep sharp whatever you're focusing on... it kind of decides on its own what it wants to focus on, and how big of a difference there is and everything. Most of the time it's fine, but I'm really much, much happier having full control of that aspect. I'm still in awe of it sometimes, like that's the most obvious difference between a random person's snapshots and an attempt at Photography with a capital letter, the fact that there's depth of field. I mean, now that I know what I'm doing (a little), I know that there's so much more to it, but to the outside world, it's like, ooooo, how cool, things are blurred!
        One of the things I'd picked up in my classes was that different times of day mean different kinds of light. Alright so that's obvious, but, it's one of those things that you don't really realize you know, it's not something you don't think to be conscious of. It was nearing late afternoon, one of the better times of day for light. I took a few preliminary shots around the gardens, a few roses in bloom, some other flowers I didn't know the names of, just to get into the mood of things, and see how the light levels were running. Pretty bright still, but turning a little golden, which brought a nice amount of color into things. I took a few pictures of the outside of the house with the barn peeking around behind, a few of the yard in general with its gardens, the view across the fields of grape across the street, bordered by woods. I took a nice shot of the sun peeking around the leaves of a huge maple tree in the front yard, sunbeams peeking through things always looks so cool.
        I started to wander out back, behind the house and toward the barn, growing pensive. Steve, my professor, told me in a critique one day that while I had a good eye for composition and things, that I should take more risks with my photos. I wasn't really sure what he meant, but, he told me to think about the difference between post cards and paintings, the difference between a brochure for a place and your actual memories of it. He said I should look for the little things - and that I wasn't allowed to turn in any pictures of sunrises or sunsets for my portfolio at the end of the independent study that summer. I really didn't get it, I hadn't turned in more than one or two all year, but, I figured he probably does see a lot of them... So I tried to think of other things to take pictures of. I tried taking some shots of the bricks at a corner of the house, the dusky red of them against the bright blue of the sky, which I thought would look pretty nice. I kneeled down next to a pile of firewood, stacked up by the barn, and tilted the camera up to take a picture of a calico barn cat climbing on top of the pile. The light was a little low inside the barn - and to be honest, it smelled awful in there, I had no idea chickens smelled so bad! I didn't spend long in there, just poked around a little. There was a big patch of vegetable garden, and decent sized plots of corn and pumpkins growing out behind the barn, in the space between the house and the woods behind. I could see a few small trails heading into the woods, but decided to leave those for another day. The light had turned a little warmer by this point, so I darted back to my room to grab a zoom lens from my supplies, then went back out to the flower gardens, to try for some close-ups with the rich light, and I kept myself occupied there until Mrs. Mayhew called out the front door that dinner was ready.

note

So I'd gotten a good two-page start on the novel on my lunch break at work today, when I realized... MY MAIN CHARACTER DID NOT HAVE A NAME. For all this fretting I've been doing over her, I DIDN'T KNOW HER FREAKING NAME. siiiiigh. My coworkers suggested I name her Casey, or Cass, or something along those lines, given that there's so many random commonalities between her and my coworker Casey. (And it really IS ridiculous. Like, last night, before falling asleep, I was randomly thinking about my character's hairstyle, I wanted something a little different. So I was thinking maybe dark hair, with a colored streak to one side near her face, but I was trying to think of a fresh variation of that, something you haven't seen a gazillion times before, maybe like a reddish-blonde streak in dark hair? I come in to work today, and what has Casey done but put dark streaks in her bleached-blond hair, near her face, all mixed in almost like Phisto-hair, PRETTY FREAKING CLOSE to the same lines I'd been thinking for my character. It's ridiculous.)

The little scene I wrote up in creative writing like two years ago, that gave me the (very, very vaguest) starting point for this, the photographer's name was Kris, which I still kind of like. I decided her parents wouldn't have been the ridiculously artsy creative type I am, so I scrounged up a list of the most common names for the year she was probably born, and picked from there.

Dude like half the names? were names that Kris would be a nickname for. :p

But I should still warn you that I may yet change her name to Alexis (Alex), which I think fits her overall look, but, currently, it is Kristin (Kris). NOT related to my middle name, that part is actually purely coincidence, she is definitely not a Kristine. I'm still not sure she's a Kristin, she might well be a Krystal or something. But Kris suits her.

So does Alex.

Thank God the lovely crew at NaNoWriMo offer a free kennel service for your Inner Editor for the month of November. I am totally free to change my main character's name whenever I so feel the need. XD