The Oxymoron Diaries | Twelve Ounce Poundcake|Didi O'Neil

Abigail Nutter has walked a fine line between the apathetic urge to hang out a welcome sign for blood relatives, in-laws, out-laws, kissing cousins and stray animals or digging in with cold emotion and a quarantine sign, boarding up windows and padlocking doors against intrusion. The Oxymoron Diaries' Twelve Ounce Poundcake (Life is an Oxymoron), tells the story of Abigail Nutter,a local writer temporarily forced into multi-generation serfdom, disrupting her daily life in sadly amusing, mildly psychotic ways. As evidenced throughout the telling by random sprinklings of oxymora, she routinely takes her inspiration from everyday life, causing her family to frequently prefer she write her column in invisible ink. From 'plastic glasses' to 'nice and sleazy' and 'cold as hell' to 'safe sex', each chapter is subtitled by a relevant oxymoron, subtly teasing readers with the upcoming possibilities.

Abby's mother, Eve, a control freak, and her editor, Kemper, a sixty-something nymphomaniac and plastic surgery junkie, add to the endless instances of oxymoron humor, but no one more so than Belly, her nearly ninety-nine year old grandmother and self-proclaimed living fossil, who has been dropped on her doorstep for the winter.

Abby's husband, Bryan, who she fondly calls Moh, except when he's in trouble and she calls hiim Mohby Dick, is dismayed when two months later Abigail suggests their uninvited guest live with them permanently.

Hence ensues many emotional ups and downs, laughter, tears and heartbreak before the Nutter family realizes that with a touch of humor and a sprinkling of unconditional love, they can turn burdens into welcome loads. What surprises them the most is how Belly does not fit into the burden category as much as they anticipated. Broken marriages, broken families, and broken bonds turn out to weigh so much more than a ninety-nine year old sprite of a woman.

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Reviews:

Neil Nofziger

If sarcasm and an acid-tongue top your list of fiction prerequisites, then look no further. What I thought would be solely a work of fiction for the kinder and gentler sex turned into one laugh after another, with more than ample cringes thrown in for good measure for this macho man. Ms.O'Neil's use of oxymora as inspiration is brilliant and highly entertaining. In between the humor is pain and sadness, but never far behind is another humorous jab in the funny bone.

Meet the Author

DidiO'Neil walks a fine line similar to that of her characters, teetering between straight-laced and a straight jacket. She has written fiction for years for self-medication and is now delighted to entertain and medicate the general public. Nicknamed "The Human Sponge" she has the ability to pull out of a hat random bits of useless information that can be applied to the moment at hand and often, her writing. Her unofficial status as an accomplished wordsmith spurred her to use oxymorons as the theme of her first published series, The Oxymoron Diaries.

Her professional life also includes that of a National Real Estate Coach and Speaker.

Coming Fall of 2012:

The Oxymoron Diaries Vol. 2
A Little Pain Never Hurt Anyone

by Didi O'Neil

Excerpt from The Oxymoron Diaries Vol 1|Twelve Ounce Poundcake:


prologue     half dead

     The floor tile was the most unattractive and ordinary I’d ever seen, but I was tired of staring non-stop at her monitors and being mesmerized by their beep, beep, beeps. No, I was only mesmerized until those beeps turned into silent screams resounding off walls of the shabbiest flocked wallpaper I’d ever seen.
                 She would be mortified.

     Mentally tracing the lines of genuinely fake marble tiles was mildly tranquilizing; however, each drip of her IV had long before begun to feel as though a sledgehammer was pounding a five-inch nail into my belfry.

     I wondered briefly if her brain was feeling anything. Was the sledgehammer sharing time between the two of us? Or was it only pounding at her brain and I was simply having sympathy pains, as a queasy expectant father often did with a nauseous, pregnant wife.

     Genuinely Fake and Silent Screams. Ha! My mind wasn’t so clouded with worry that I couldn’t still identify an oxymoron or two drifting through the cerebral mishmash of emotions and fears I was experiencing. I knew those contradictory phrases were a gentle, subconscious reminder that I needed to keep focusing on my work. My lifeline. Not on the multitude of machines keeping her alive. Not on my family wearing scared, vacant stares - and definitely not on the beep, beep, beeps.

     I’d visited the maternity ward earlier that day in search of peace, but found no comfort, since it had dawned on me that newborn babies - who had no useful vision capabilities - were resting peacefully in a nicely decorated nursery, yet the Intensive Care Unit wasn’t decorated at all, looking like death, warmed over; drab and depressing. Wouldn’t it have made more sense to decorate the ICU? If she woke up and glanced down at the grungy floor, she’d think she’d died and gone to hell already! Or at least to the zip code in Purgatory reserved for sinfully tacky decorators.

     Enough! I remembered my deadline; affirmation that Life went on, even if Death perhaps lingered so nearby.

     I shook my head slowly, almost imperceptibly, thinking of how she would’ve rolled her eyes at my thoughts, since she’d always viewed my weekly column as trivial; simply a glorified fulltime hobby. Maybe if she’d known I was wasting time on The Oxymoron Diaries at that very moment, she would’ve been annoyed enough to will herself to consciousness and yell, “Get a real, job, Abigail!” At least we’d know she was well on her way back to normal.

     Normal for her, that is.

     Fulltime Hobby - yet another oxymoron. I was on a roll. Creative juices were flowing as freely as the saline drip in her intravenous tubing. Who would’ve thunk it?

     I had long before thankfully come to grips with her slightly askew and under-appreciated view of my attempt at mental masturbation - a way of preserving my sanity without going blind. I was resigned to her never understanding why My Other Half called me his Gorgeous Geek.

     I groaned when I realized the beep, beep, beeps were back, knowing I should’ve kept focusing on the oxymora - the unbelievably numerous oxymora. Not on her perspective of my state of mind.

     I re-focused again, as the floor tiles triggered the contradictory word pairs of Genuine Fakes, Clean Dirt, and Dull Shine; uncomfortable chairs were instantly synonymous with Plastic Wood. The beep, beep, beeps reminded me of Bad Health, Half Dead, and Cheerful Undertaker. I digressed toward Hilarious Funeral, but remembered Gorgeous Geek and was uplifted once again. I knew my odd form of mental therapy wasn’t logical when Artificial Intelligence focused my attention on the beep, beep, beeps, and once again propelled my mood into the abyss.

     I was visualizing plenty to write about, practically oozing oxymora from my pores, but would be doing it from The Psyche Ward if I didn’t stop. Me, in a psyche ward, would not make my editor happy, since Kemper preferred the level of lunacy that inspired my creative juices to be safely tucked away, out of public view. She preferred I exude Gorgeous Geek twenty-four/seven.

     So, back to the genuinely fake marble floor tiles. No, back to the beginning. The beginning of Life as I once knew it. The beginning of Life changing.

     Back to the beginning of Belle.

     Back to confirmation that Life is an Oxymoron.