Archive | 9:31 PM

Poem Series Day 4: So long August!

31 Aug

I could fill this whole box with complaints about the day’s shorty, which I worked very hard on and yet it refused to be anything but a pretty, preening piece of crap. Instead I will congratulate myself for finishing my 4th month of the Daily Shorty challenge! That’s a THIRD of my year, folks! Have a red velvet cupcake on me to celebrate. The wonderful poem that inspired today’s shorty is “The Meantime” by Craig Morgan Teicher, from To Keep Love Blurry, BOA Editions. The first four lines as a teaser: “It’s easy to overjoy a window with brilliant flowers / but what if long-longed-for time suddenly bubbled / over the lip of the clock, as if each day doubled / due to a lost job or loved one slaughtered, leaving hours”

Working Title: Noon
1st Sentence: Tuesday.
Favorite Sentence: She watched the sand sift, tiny breaths of particles at a time, falling through the hour glass from possibility to past.
Word Length: 1,736

Thanks to my friend Mark and sister Amy for taking this picture.

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Aside

Avoiding Complication

31 Aug

I finally picked up the craft book Rules of Thumb, edited by Michael Martone and Susan Neville, and I wanted to mention an early piece on “Complexity” by Paul Maliszewski. He talks about reading work by students who avoid complication in their stories—one student puts and keeps a husband in a coma while the wife rails at his recent sins, but, of course, rails alone—and how much playing it so safe drains the story of any energy. I’m not doing him justice, so you’ll have to get the book, but I wanted to remind myself and any writer friends following this project: Don’t skip the hard stuff! A character gets fired but you skipped the firing? Why? A woman leaves her husband but you don’t give us the scene when he catches her packing? What gives? The story is supposed to be about the hard stuff. Take a deep breath, and, yeah, go there.

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