It's A Twister!

Hi all! Brookie was awesome enough to do a character interview with me over at her blog. You can check it out here if you'd like.

Now, on to my blog post.

Today is the anniversary of a gigantic storm that hit here a while back, and it's shaping up to be some really terrible weather (might keep my friends and sister in your prayers, as the camp does not have a storm shelter).

As a writer I have some weird quirks. I talk about people who don't exist as if they do. I spend a lot of time talking about MC's, WIP's, POV's and other strange abbreviations. And I often suffer from lack of sleep because "my muse won't go to sleep".

I've also got a severe weather escape plan that is a lot different from everyone else's.

I have a tornado bag.

Yep.

Do you know what that is?

You guessed it.

A bag that I bring with me to the basement when we think a tornado is going to hit.

 

In the past this bag had a lot of CD's, books, posters, and special t-shirts all packed into it so tight  that I probably would be too weighed down by it to make it to the basement (the doors are outside of the house), but the tornado couldn't lift me up anyway.

As I've gotten older and more insane in my writing it's evolved into holding thumb drives, tablets, folders, sketchbooks and journals. The thumb drives have all of my short stories on them, and my two novels that are actually finished. But I only have paper versions of all of my current stories, not to mention all of the stories I wrote when I was younger.

Since there is no way in heck I could ever re-create them if a tornado tore through my house and scattered them across the country side, that also means there is no way in heck I will ever leave the house without them.

Sometimes I still try to fit a t-shirt, book, or CD in there if I think there is room, but I restrict it to the autographed ones now. Sadly, I can't fit my guitar in a backpack. And I don't think my mom will let me keep it down there year round. If she gave in on that front I'd probably just move my whole bedroom down there and then there would be no room for us when the storm hit.

It's a daunting task trying to get just the papers in there.

I have to convert this-

(there are two shelves like this actually)

 

Into this-

It doesn't zip at all when I'm finished. I leave it at the bottom of the staircase so I don't fall on the way down and get crushed under the weight. So, if you hear about bad weather tonight, you know exactly what I'm doing.