Not everyone who reads this blog also follows my other blog, Smile! (but really, why not?), so I wanted to post a short note here asking you to visit my other blog for an important message about how to help share a little happiness and cheer this holiday season. You can find the post in the Smile! blog under “A happy PSA.”
The scenes below are from a story I’ve been working on for a long, long while. It’s on my computer in a folder labeled “TO FINISH THIS FALL.” Sadly, winter is just around the corner and the end of the year just a few weeks away, and I doubt I’ll find a satisfactory ending to the story these scenes belong in. But they get me closer.
That night in bed he woke to the yowl of a cat in the street. He stared for a long time at the window gauzed in thin curtains, listening and thinking of nothing at all. Then he rolled onto his side and watched his wife in the blue light from the street lamp through the curtains. He mouthed her name, Gwen, but didn’t want to wake her — he mouthed it only to name her, like Adam in the Garden: Here is my wife.
He lay on his back and tried to recall more details of Cecily, that other woman from all those years ago, to fill in the gaps in the story, but no distinct features occurred to him. Even the color of her hair had left him — he thought it might be blonde but it could just as easily have been bronze or even auburn. He never had known the color of her eyes. He arranged his memories of that night and searched the visions until he recalled at last the pendulous weight of each breast as he uncupped them from her bra, and for a few moments he enjoyed the hazy reminiscence of her warm and soft in that trailer all those years ago, but as he recollected what had happened afterward he shuddered and could think no more. He let the memories wane and he studied his wife instead.
Gwen breathed in the indigo dark. He extended an arm with his finger outheld to stroke her cheek, but thought better of it. She seemed a hologram made from the blue night’s light reflected off the dreamy lenses of his eyes, and he worried that if he touched her she would shimmer and dissolve. Instead he touched his own shoulder to remember the weight of her head when she rested it there. He thought of what it was like when he kissed her, the press of her lips against his and the sweet scent of her breath. He closed his eyes and pictured the curve of her hip where it met her thigh, the place he liked to hold when they made love. When he opened his eyes she lay there still. She seemed a miracle to him — he lay awake an hour amazed she was there at all. He watched her as one watches a plane receding in the sky, waiting for the moment it becomes too small and disappears. But his wife remained the while, breathing steadily on. What luck he’d had. He held his breath and stilled his body and then slipped his fingers into her curled hand at her side, and she stirred and lolled her head away from him but did not wake, and he exhaled and closed his eyes again and slept.
* * *
[Val in conversation with his wife, who begins this dialogue:]
“Do you ever wonder if that girl was onto something? You ever worry you did something wrong, running out on her, might have got onto God’s bad side for it?”
“God ain’t got no bad side that I know of. No good side either. He just is.”
“I don’t know. Just seems you been more religious lately, thinking about that girl. Is that what’s going on? You feel you need more religion in your life?”
“Let me tell you about religion. You can have all the trappings and the ceremonies and the mumbo jumbo you want. You can sing you some songs or read prayers out a book or dance in the aisles or just do like them Amish, sit and stare at each other for a hour or so. You can put up pictures or tear pictures down, you can have priests and popes or no preachers at all. I believe myself a Christian but I’ll tell you, when it comes down to it, I think every religion there is boils down to this: It’s about security, about having a purpose in life, a reason to wake up in the morning. It’s about knowing the world’s the way it’s supposed to be and that if something goes wrong with that, someone’ll be there to help you through it. And darling, you are my religion.”
* * *
[Later, over beers with his friends, they discuss the state of marriage, and Val mentions how he feels lucky to have escaped the dangerous relationship this story is about. His friend Randal responds:]
“You talk like you didn’t wind up in chains anyway. You got married, you’re working a hard job, when’s the last time you had a beer with me or Jesús after a long day in the sun? You don’t ever cut loose, Val, just head straight on home ever damn night. They call it a ball and chain for a reason, and you’re the reason.”
“I’m sorry you feel that way. Far as I’m concerned you have yourself as good a wife as you deserve, and I got better. Ball and chain is just an excuse to go out drinking, to pretend we got something to run from. My Gwen ain’t the chain, Randal, she’s the damned key. What I thank God for is the chance to of found her.”
This exercise comes from the website Writing Forward. Specifically, it’s a post on “People-Inspired Writing Prompts.” The prompt is supposed to “help you think about the people who have impacted your life,” and it lists seven different exercises, many of them touching on romantic relationships. I chose #2:
Too often, writers are more motivated by heartache than by joy (all those broken-hearted poems and love songs!). Write about a love that is not stained by pain, betrayal, or heartbreak — one that is happy and healthy.
The story these scenes belong in actually describes a bizarre, disturbing, possibly dangerous relationship that Val was in as a younger man; now, middle-aged and looking back over his life, he begins comparing his current wife to that other girl. A lot of my male characters do this, for some reason. The narrator in “Bathe in the Doggone Sin” spends the whole story lamenting “the one that got away,” and the male characters in at least two other, unpublished stories* do something similar with former loves. And the narrator of “How Long My Bruises Will Last” romanticizes his early marriage, while the female main character in “Consuela Throws Her TV Away” complains about her useless, borracho husband. So when I caught myself writing about this weird, frightening former relationship that Val had narrowly escaped from, I realized I didn’t want his current relationship to be so rocky. I wanted his wife to be wonderful, for him to love her unconditionally, for them both to be great friends and for her to be his source of comfort on dark, scary nights, his refuge from his past. I wanted Val’s wife to be for him what my own wife is for me.
This exercise reminded me of that. So, these passages.
* Both those stories are in print or soon will be: “Barefoot in the Guadalupe” appeared in Red Dirt Review, and “No Milk Would Come” is forthcoming in Scintilla Magazine.
“How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.”
~Henry David Thoreau, Walden
Yesterday, I was reading a blog post from Annalemma that came through my RSS feed, and the author, Chris, was discussing his year in books. Chris had set a goal earlier in the year to read 120 books, or 10 books every month. That ambitious (and maybe insane?) goal went fantastically unmet, but with very good reason: unless we live on a bottomless trust fund and have no day job or even paying hobbies to speak of, and have no real interests outside of books whatsoever, and have purchased ourselves a pair of cybernetic eyeballs, it just isn’t possible to read 10 books a month. Okay, that’s only 2.5 books in a week, which sounds doable; and yes, I have friends who manage this sort of reading load on top of their day jobs. (Seriously.) But Chris’s day job IS reading, and reading books for a large part of the time, and he still managed only 55 books this year. Granted, that’s on top of all the short fiction submissions he reads for Annalemma, and on top of all the magazines and newspapers he no doubt reads, and all the e-mails and business correspondence and…. Well, I’ve gone on like this before. So frankly, I think 55 books is a heroic number.
Of course, I’m saying that because I’ve just counted my own book list for this past year, and so far I’m at 65, not counting the book I’ve just started and plan to finish before the month is up. So maybe I just want to feel heroic, too.
A small gang of my friends from back in Wisconsin got me started on this, actually. They had the idea to have a book club without having a book club: They would read all the books they could manage, whatever books they wanted, and then once a month they’d post their lists on Facebook and if anyone felt like commenting, a discussion would ensue. No meetings, no arguments over what to read or when, no pressure at all. Okay, some pressure: to keep things interesting, they called the game a “contest” and assigned points to the books based on page count (because let’s face it, saying you read 100 slim chapbooks in a year isn’t really as impressive as saying you read, well, anything by Tolstoy). Also, magazines and single-issue comic books don’t count, though of course graphic novels do.
At the beginning of the year, we all set a year-end goal, like bidding on tricks in Hearts. I low-balled my point goal at a mere 100 pts, because the most common point score for any book, according to our rules, is 2 pts, and because I’m a slow reader (I prefer to say that I savor the words…), I figured 50 books would be a stretch for me. Plus, I don’t like losing.
But here we are at the end of the year and I’ve racked up 149 points so far.* And that’s on top of the few dozen issues of the New Yorker and the handful of Shambhala Suns I caught up on this summer, the literary journals I’ve read, and all the writing I’ve done this year, including the Writer’s Notebook every week, the travel journals I’ve kept, and something like 140,000 words of fiction.** So, win for me!
Here’s the list as it looks right now (where possible, I’ve linked to the actual edition I read; newer editions might be available):
Ali Alsaloom, Ask Ali: A Guide to Abu Dhabi (Ali’s book isn’t available for purchase online yet, but you can find them in bookstores all over the UAE; here, the title links to the review page in Goodreads)
Brian Azzarello and Jim Lee, Absolute Superman: For Tomorrow
Lynda Barry, One Hundred Demons
Andrew Bender, Lonely Planet: Amsterdam ***
Andrew Burke, et al, Lonely Planet: Thailand’s Islands & Beaches
Anton Chekhov, Early Short Stories: 1883-1888
John Cheever, The Stories of John Cheever
Rob Chestney and Alex Sanchez, Star Wars: The Old Republic: Threat of Peace
Douglas Davies, Brief History of Death
Philip K. Dick, A Scanner Darkly
DK Eyewitness Travel: Top 10 Bangkok
Daphne du Maurier, The Birds and Other Stories
Dungtrin, Vipassana 101, trans. Anaya Ruangma, ed. Kongsak Tanphaichitr
P. D. Eastman, Sam and the Firefly
Will Eisner, Comics and Sequential Art
Garth Ennis, Glenn Fabry, and Steve Dillon, Preacher (I actually read these serially, as single issues; the title here links to Volume 1 of the collected series)
M.C. Escher, Escher on Escher: Exploring the Infinite
Eyewitness Travel: The Netherlands
Beth Ann Fennelly, Unmentionables
Alan Dean Foster, Terminator Salvation
Alexander Freed and Dave Ross, Star Wars: The Old Republic: Blood of the Empire
Neil Gaiman, Fragile Things
—, Neverwhere
—, The Sandman: Endless Nights
Neil Gaiman and Charles Vess, Stardust: Being a Romance Within the Realms of Faerie
Maha Gargash, The Sandfish: A Novel from Dubai
William Goldman, The Princess Bride
Ernest Hemingway, The Torrents of Spring
Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go
Shirley Jackson, The Lottery and Other Stories
Lyndon W. Joslin, Count Dracula Goes to the Movies: Stoker’s Novel Adapted, 1922-1995
Hideyuki Kikuchi, Vampire Hunter D
Lati Rinpoche and Jeffrey Hopkins, Death, Intermediate State and Rebirth
Rudolf and Elisabeth Leopold, Egon Schiele: The Leopold Collection, Vienna (this is the hardcover edition from Amazon; ours is the softcover we bought at the Leopold)
Judith Levine, Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children From Sex
Pamela Logan, Tibetan Rescue: The Extraordinary Quest to Save the Sacred Art Treasures of Tibet
Joseph Maddrey, Nightmares in Red, White and Blue: The Evolution of the American Horror Film
Scott McCloud, Making Comics: Storytelling Secrets of Comics, Manga and Graphic Novels
Frank Miller, 300
Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, The Watchmen
Alice Munro, Lives of Girls and Women
Greta Nagel, The Tao of Teaching: The Ageless Wisdom of Taoism and the Art of Teaching
Seyyed Hossein Nasr, The Heart of Islam: Enduring Values for Humanity
Steve Noyes, Ghost Country
Robert C. O’Brien, Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIHM
Colin Murray Parkes, Pittu Laungani, and Bill Young (eds), Death and Bereavement Across Cultures
Michel Peissel, Tibetan Pilgrimage: Architecture of the Sacred Land
Trina Robbins, The Great Women Cartoonists
Bee Rowlatt and May Witwit, Talking about Jane Austen in Baghdad: The True Story of an Unlikely Friendship
Anna C. Salter, Predators: Pedophiles, Rapists, and Other Sex Offenders
Marjane Satrapi, Chicken with Plums
Marcus Sedgwick, My Swordhand Is Singing
Dr. Seuss, The Cat in the Hat
Shams of Tabirz, Rumi’s Sun: The Teachings of Shams of Tabriz
Shantideva, A Guide to the Bodhisattva Way of Life
Osamu Tezuka, Buddha: Deer Park
James Turner, Nil: A Land Beyond Belief
Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra, Y: The Last Man (as with Preacher, I read these serially, as single issues; the title here links to Volume 1 of the collected series)
Gerard Way and Gabriel Ba, The Umbrella Academy: Apocalypse Suite
—, The Umbrella Academy: Dallas
Kentaro Yabuki, Black Cat (Vol. 1)
Looking back over the list, it’s interesting to see what I’ve been into this year. I’ve read several guide books (5), of course, because my wife and I traveled a bit this year. And I’ve read my share of novels (10, so far), but I’ve also dived back into reading short fiction heavily (9 books). I’ve read a lot of Alice Munro (4 books) and Neil Gaiman (4 books), which is an odd mix. I’ve also balanced my heavy “academic” reading (Cheever, Chekhov, Hemingway, Jackson) with some truly frivolous tripe (that Terminator novel).
One of the things that kind of surprised me was the sheer volume of graphic fiction I’ve read this year. I’ve read fully 16 graphic novels, and two of those — Preacher and Y: The Last Man — are utterly epic in size as well as scope, each spanning something like 10 volumes and around 1,500 pages. Each! That’s huge.
I’m also pleased to see I’m keeping up on my religious reading (8 books), a favorite subject of mine. My nonfiction feels okay to me, too (9 books), including two memoirs and two books on the craft of writing. But I’m shocked at how little poetry I’ve read this year! Only two books! Okay, one of them is by Beth Ann Fennelly, probably my favorite poet writing today (and a hell of a cool woman!), but still. I will definitely be hitting the poetry harder next year.
There’s also a wealth of fiction I’ve missed out on this year because I live overseas and having books shipped here is a bit of a hassle and I have to wait till I’m in the States to get books not widely or not yet available over here. So Lori Ann Bloomfield, Darin Bradley, Tom Franklin, Susannah Morgan: I’m getting to you this coming summer, if not sooner! I promise.
* A friend of mine playing the game has managed a suspicious 280 points so far. I don’t know what her actual book count is, but at 2 pts a book, she has to be in the ballpark of Annalemma-Chris’s 120-book goal. And she’s a full-time university professor with an ungodly grading load and an academic agenda that has her reading and writing I don’t know how many articles each year. Where she finds the time to read 280 points-worth of books is beyond me.
** You know, it occurs to me that I probably should be counting the stuff I write. I mean, I had to read it, too, yes? Okay, a lot of that is unpublished, but I did manage to place a handful of stories this year, and I wrote and printed a small travel/family history book for my grandfather as a 90th-birthday present. Maybe I should just tack on a few more points for that….
*** Not sure why, but Amazon is showing our edition of Lonely Planet: Amsterdam — same year, same cover — as having been written by Jeremy Gray, even though our book clearly names Andrew Bender as the author. Weird.
**** Check it out: my copy of Lullaby is autographed! I’ve never met Palahniuk; my wife just picked this up for me from a library book sale. But there’s his signature, squiggled on the title page. Awesome.
“Metta photography.” Buddhist monks with cameras, Thailand, 16 & 17 November 2010.
* For all my nerd friends, no, I didn’t misspell “meta-“. Click the links to see the difference. 🙂
Okay, as promised, I’ve caught up with the Writer’s Notebook, and with two really fun entries. (They were fun to write, anyway. I’ll let you decide if they were worth the wait.)
Also as promised, I’ve backdated them to fit where they belong, so you can find the first entry on December 3 and the second on December 10.
Thanks for the patience, gang. I’ve been working hard, but it feels good to be catching up.
Point me to the advance ticket sales, please!
Dan Chaon posted this on his Facebook page, which is where I found it. Sounds like a fantastic (and potentially depressing) jaunt into cold, blinding reality. A bit like “the Bulwer-Lytton contest meets 90% of all graduate writing workshops.” Which is exactly how I’d have pitched this.
Favorite (and probably truest) line in the trailer: “Yeah, I had a big Hemingway boner….”
Update on the computer situation:
Speaking of bad writing…. Obviously I’m back online now, so expect to see my Writer’s Notebook posts later today or first thing tomorrow. I’m still going to backdate them to fit where they belong, so you might have to look for them, but I’ll also post a short message in “real time” with links to them, just to keep everyone on track. Same goes for last week’s Photo blog, too.
Also, I have a kind of backlog of topics I’ve been wanting to write about the past two weeks but, because of this computer situation, couldn’t. I’m full up with important projects to finish and get in the mail this week, but keep an eye open for other posts anyway, because I know sooner or later I’ll crack and write up a new blog post or two just to let off the steam.
No intro this week. Just the story, and then, below, the exercise.
The first things he did when he got home from work was shuck his coat and pull a beer from the fridge. It was cold and wet outside, the rain thin but icy, the kind that freezes in your hair and stabs down the back of your collar. He had nothing special planned for the evening and had decided on the way home to just pack it in, have a dinner of beer and maybe some popcorn, work his way through his collection of spaghetti westerns on dvd.
On his way into the den, he reached his phone from his hip pocket. He planned to switch it off, shut out the world, but he’d gotten a call on the way home and figured he’d check the message in case it was Harvey. If Harvey’d jacked up the orders system again, there wasn’t much anyone could do about it until tomorrow, but he felt compelled to check in anyway, some part of him addicted to disgruntlement. Better to know Harvey’d screwed up and spend the evening pissed and bitter than to wonder what the message was and spend the evening worrying. Also, pissed and bitter, he could enjoy the violence of the movies more. He would be Clint Eastwood, getting up from every bullet, shouting at the world, “You’ll have to do better than that!” Bastards.
But it wasn’t Harvey’s voice on the voice mail. He didn’t know whose it was. Some woman’s, throaty and monotone. She had a bit of a lisp. She said, “Hello again. I spoke to Kim today, she had spoke to Anna. I need to move on.” There was a pause on the message, a small plastic creak like the woman was squeezing the phone or leaning back in a chair or something. Then, “I need to give up. I fell in love with her, Mon, I mean I really fell i–” and then it ended.
Just like that.
He checked the number, but it wasn’t one he recognized. He wondered who Mon was, and what it was short for. Monica or Monique? Maybe Mona, but who shortens Mona? Besides, it had that short o, not the long o in Mona. It could be a guy, Montgomery or Montague, but those are usually Monty, and no one has names like that any more anyway. Had to be a woman.
Kim. Anna. “I fell in love with her.” Lesbians. He looked at his phone, quick flashes of indistinct erotica skipping through his mind, then he chuckled and tossed the phone on the coffee table.
“If ever there was a time for Clint fucking Eastwood,” he said out loud. He dug his remote from between the cushions and punched on the TV, then he looked at the phone and smiled. “Fucking lesbians,” he said, still out loud.
Twenty minutes in, he was ready for his second beer, so he punched pause on the remote but heard a sharp beep and the movie played on. He was holding his phone. He hadn’t realized he’d picked up it. The little screen glowed a moment and then switched off. He found the remote and stopped the movie, then he looked at the phone again. He opened the call registry, studied the phone number. It was his calling area. He ran his thumb over the buttons like a worry stone and thought. Maybe he should call the woman. Maybe she hadn’t realized she’d left a message on the wrong phone. He’d drunk dialed enough to feel sorry for her.
He shook his head and set down the phone, stood, went to the kitchen for more beer. Then the phone rang.
No idea where this is headed. But I can tell you where it started: While nosing around the website Object Not Found (which I mentioned in the last Writer’s Notebook), I found a “found e-mail” and thought it would be fun to try a story based on it. Except the e-mail thing felt dry to me, and I realized I wanted a voice, which felt if not more intriguing then at least more pathetic. I liked the idea of hearing this poor person’s voice. So I changed it to a voice message.
If it goes anywhere, I’ll let you know here in the blog. In the meantime, check out the crazy stuff at the Object Not Found site–the “stuff” category is particularly wild!
I’m still waiting on my computer. The part necessary to get it back to full capacity is on order, but it’s taking extraordinarily long, so in the meantime I’m still working on my much older, much slower laptop. I’ve managed to post my Photo blog entries for last week, but it literally took the entire day to do so. The work necessary to get this week’s Photo blog (today’s, in fact) as well as my Writer’s Notebook entries up is simply beyond the capabilities of this poor little substitute laptop. I’m still writing, but I’ll have to wait till next week to post anything else. I’ll try to make it worth the wait.
So, as I wrote a while ago, HerInteractive is sponsoring a story contest, and I decided to play along. This isn’t a story I’d submit (for one thing, it isn’t finished; for another, I broke the rules), but here’s what I’ve done so far with the instructions for the contest.
Isn’t it marvelous to be up and about when others are sound asleep? I find my brainwaves are at their most powerful during this time. The caffeine helps too, of course. I prefer that mix the college students drink, the one where you add a shot or two of espresso to your cup of coffee? They have different names for it. Headbanger. Redeye. Hammerhead, is the one I prefer. I like the idea of a shark swimming loose in my bloodstream, in my brain. You know, most sharks can’t ever stop swimming. They need their own motion to push water through their gills so they can breathe. They stop swimming, they die. I think my brain’s a lot like that, I need to keep thinking, need to always be in motion. Even when I’m asleep. So I stay up all night drinking coffee and thinking and writing, and when it finally comes time for me to pack it in, when everyone else is waking up and starting their days and threatening to clutter up my thinking with all their daytime problems, well, I just hit one last shot of coffee and head to bed. That way, with that caffeine still in me so soon before bed, I’m still thinking away even in my sleep. Always on the go.
That’s how I came across this situation I find myself in now. I was up working at, oh, I don’t know, maybe three or four in the morning—I don’t have much use for clocks, I wake whenever I wake and I sleep whenever everyone else wakes up, and in between it’s all write write write—and I heard this racket outside my house. Tin banging on tin, hell of a noise, and I knew right away it was the trashcans. Everyone I know has those big rubber bins, the ones on wheels that the city sells you, with the lid on a hinge. Ugly blue things. I can’t abide them. Besides, they’re too quiet. Someone goes to snoop in your garbage, those rubber bins make almost no noise at all. I myself have lifted the lids and rooted in the bags there, then all but dropped the lid back, didn’t really bother placing it down carefully, and sure enough, not much sound at all. I certainly never woke anyone up with it. But me, I like to know when someone’s in my trash. Can’t be too careful these days.
What I do is innocent enough, I assure you, just looking for ideas to write about. You can find all sorts of great stories in trash—I once came across a whole stash of pornographic cartoons, these little squares of paper with photocopied drawings of people doing things you could never imagine. Well, Gerald four doors down could certainly imagine, but you, I’m sure you would never in your life dream of the things drawn on these rumbled sheets of paper. That was where I got my story “Guzzling Viola,” the one that appeared in—well, you read it.
Where was I?
Oh, so I take great care with my own trash. I throw out plenty of ideas I have no use for, but they’re still my ideas, and it just wouldn’t do for someone to come along and take credit for some perfectly good story I’d pitched out. I’ve learned to be suspicious of everyone. It’s good for the brain, I think. Nothing like a good sneaking suspicion to keep you on your toes, I say. Hence, my metal trash cans. And this night, everything dark and quiet outside, suddenly there go my trash cans. You can imagine how quickly I ran to my side window. I made sure to turn out the lights before I peeked through the curtains, both so I could see better and so I couldn’t be seen. But whoever was in my trash was long gone.
I suspected my neighbor on that side at first, but that seemed too obvious to me. More likely, I figured, it was the kid across the street. Real brooder, that boy, all that black, his hair in his eyes. Plus, I know he’s a writer, too, or thinks he is anyway. I’ve seen him out some evenings, just sitting on the curb outside his house scribbling in this big, worn notebook he carries everywhere. All the other kids in the neighborhood are riding their bikes or their skateboards up and down the street, and he just sits there, writing and writing. They make fun of him a lot. I can hear them teasing him from across the street, drives me crazy—don’t they know I’m trying to think in here?—and sometimes I’ve seen them too, throwing things at him. He just sits there and takes it all, like he’s a teenage Jesus, still writing and writing and never looking up at his tormentors. That’s where I got the idea for my story “False Prophets Feel the Love.”
So I stayed awake well after sunrise, endured all those comings and goings in the neighborhood, folks forgetting their breakfast bars and briefcases and running back and forth between the cars and the houses, couples kissing each other good-bye and parents shouting at teenagers to hurry the hell up. I didn’t get one piece of good thinking done that whole morning, I can tell you, but I was determined. And sure enough, about a quarter to eight, here comes that boy trudging out his door. He was writing while he walked. I have to admire that, though, of course, he hasn’t published anything that I know of, which was why, I figured, he was in my trash, looking to steal a good idea that I’d deemed not quite good enough but that still was mine. That’s probably what he was writing this very morning—his version of my story. So I barged outdoors and confronted him, right there in the street. I said, “Hey, you boy, you were in my trash last night!”
“No ma’am,” he said.
“Yes you were, you were looking for story ideas. You read my story “Forget the Hypocritical Aura” and figured you’d steal it for yourself!”
“No, ma’am,” he said. “‘N it’d suit me just fine if I never saw it again.”
For the contest rules–and thereby, the writing exercise–check out the announcement on HerInteractive’s blog. But I’ve already broken the rules of the exercise: the maximum length is 1,000 words, and this is 1,045 and it isn’t even finished yet. It probably never will be, though I have to admit, I’ve had a lot of fun writing this, and I love this narrator. So, maybe I’ll play with it and develop this into something after all.
Incidentally, as a kind of bonus exercise, the narrator mentions something she does to get the ideas flowing: digging through trash. Please, for the sake of your neighbors’ sanity and your own health, don’t go rooting in trash bins. But you can indeed get a lot of good ideas from found objects, especially things that have been lost or discarded. To that end, take a walk and keep an eye in the ditches, or, better still, join a highway clean-up campaign and help reduce roadside litter, then pocket the most interesting trash while you work. Or, for a cleaner way to go about this, hit the rummage bins at garage sales or your local charity thrift store. Or for you shut-ins out there, check out the website Object Not Found.
Also, in case anyone’s curious, the titles the narrator mentions come from a file I keep of titles created with online random band-name generators. But that’s a whole other Writer’s Notebook entry….
“National Day: 2 December 2010.” Street-side lights celebrating the United Arab Emirates’ 39th year as a nation. Muroor Street in Abu Dhabi, UAE, 1 December 2010.
Samuel Snoek-Brown