Month: July 2009

City in a Garden: Poem

C.J.

(So, here’s the poem that I wrote for the Juggler, only this is the version that I edited afterwards.  I liked the original, but I think it needed some updating, so I thought I’d post the new version here for anyone who wanted to see it.  Plus I had a busy day and this might have to count for my daily blog.  Eep.)

 

I like sunshine on street corners

And the glare of urban blooms in crayon-box colors

Flashing defiance to gray grass and gunmetal grime,

            pulling cheap obscenities from lipsticked mouths,

                        pushing yellow-checked beasts into battle with neon-white men

                                    and jeering hands.   

I worship the windows,

Bejeweled in vault arches with blustery locks,

            the irises gilt Kremlin of Mint-greens and golds

                        and foul reds winking, victors flaunting starry warspoils of Eastern dominion,

                                    suffering only the name and Time’s fingers unbloodied,  

Closing steel lashes at dusk

on hard-booted feet making freckles in evening slush,

on teardrops sterilizing blacklung reservoirs in the corners of gutters,

                        sewers gaped to swallow trench-coats and cold-popping death notes 

and husks of old smoke-eyed dodgers flicking ash

across Capone’s eroding seeds.

I breath in the chill off the waters,

Gray-blue titans sunk deep into the iron earth

            running icy around the ankles of old White ghosts

                        and Technicolor giants rolling clenched hearts into clouds,

                                    weaving through monogrammed ribs black and gold like faded jazz

                                                and flowing sick-green in drunkards’ glass eyes. 

I bow to the gridlines,

The vast game of checkers hedged with glassy rows

            and pieces that spit on tiny scalding bodies spotting steam marble-prints,

                        spurt feverish Mozart and shoot steel rainbows on tar,

                                    erupt fizzing star-bombs and white-pebble pockmarks and cries of

Southern victory and Northern defeat,

flicker on off on like molten streams gurgling from the

Heart. 

To this Heart mine is owed,

The great gleaming God,

The steel tyrant,

            fervid dreams twice surpassed

                        but not broken,  

Coke-black shimmered with an old ages’ burnish like reflections of Fire,

                        of steel tubes belching lava from stone treetops,

                                    of the New World’s wonders and metal descendents,  

                                                of the wilds of the prairie and its green teeth attacking—

But the God beats back the hedges

and the prairie’s posh shears

                        and the city grows wild and tall,

                                    a giant with scraggly hair shored against the raging long grasses, 

And its crooked mouth smiles.

Coraline: Movie Review

C.J.

When I was just a little girl, full of childhood whimsy, one of my favorite, favorite movies was The Nightmare Before Christmas. Maybe I was a morbid little kid, but there was something about those eerily stylized characters, the haunting melodies, and the fancifully sinister plot that made me watch it over and over. Jack and Sally were my Romeo and Juliet. Halloween Town was my Oz. So, naturally my first peek of the Coraline trailer dredged up all that comfortable nostalgia. Wrapped like a burrito in my comforter, I pressed play on the TV and prepared to be delighted.

I was immediately struck by the familiar artistic style, those odd-shaped claymation-style characters with their spindly limbs and soulful eyes–not to mention the meticulous detail put into the scenery, sweet and sinister, a Gorey Wonderland. As the first scenes of the movie played out, with Coraline’s introduction and venture into her new house, my heart fluttered a few worried beats. The characters were typical Henry Selick, off-the-wall and eerily endearing, but the plot in the first twenty minutes or slow was slow to develop.

Once it did, Coraline delivered all it promised. With a manipulative and beautifully ridiculous villain, carefully placed foreshadowing, and a mix of suspense, self-realization, and the touch of morbid flair that makes Selick so remarkable, it offered a plot both accessible to children and intricate enough for adults. Some of the punchy jokes and racier scenes would probably scare off most parents and the macabre mood and nightmarish animation might traumatize some sensitive children, but I know that the five-year-old me would have worn out the DVD (VHS, then!). While Nightmare will always own my black little heart, Coraline has definitely earned a place on my shelf.

From Alyssa to Mike – Story

C.J.

Prompt:  Write a short scene in which one character reduces another to uncontrollable sobs without touching him or speaking.

 

Here’s a long one.  Bear with me! 

 

She would call it “unpleasant.”  Not “bad” or “horrifying” or “likely to make her crush herself into a dark alcove and shiver like a hypothermia victim.”  No, she would call it “unpleasant” and she would lift her chin and screw her innocent doe-eyes into hard slits, and they would return to their racy magazines and football practices.  She would return to her quiet corner in the dining hall where she ate her slightly wilted spinach salad and read romance novels disguised in the slip covers of Oxford’s World Classics and he would forget her name. 

 

He started with a note.  Plain white, ripped straight off his handout about the chronology of the existentialist movement in France, it landed on her desk in a little dime-sized ball halfway through Professor Rewston’s lecture on the theme of despair in Sartre’s No Exit.  Until she caught his pleading eyes from two desks over, she thought someone had missed the trash can spectacularly.  After she identified him, she thought he had missed the cute blonde in the too-tight cardigan sweater.  Tall.  Reasonably muscular.  Face approaching the golden ratio.  Athlete.  If she paid any attention to the basketball team, she would have known the name to attach to that genetically gifted face. 

 

She was neither an athlete nor a jersey chaser, but she was certain that he was looking right at her, then at the ball of rubbish, then at her again.  Can you meet me after class? it said, half blurred out by the crinkles.  She pointed to herself.  He nodded.  Right after Rewston’s lecture, which she heard only half of and recorded only a third of in her pink unicorn notebook, she stopped next to him in the hallway, doll-sized compared to his basketball-god’s height. 

 

“Alexa, right?” 

 

“Alyssa.”  She clutched her notebook like a flat, jagged teddy bear.  The spirals cut swirls into her forearm. 

 

“Right, Alyssa.  You’re really smart.” 

 

She shrugged, mouse-like. 

 

“I . . . need help.”  He ruffled a hand through that wavy brown hair, wafting pine aftershave and shampoo into her nose.  “I’ll lose my spot on the team if I fail this class.  I can’t drop it.”  Her silence made his lip twitch, dimpling his cheek.  “I want you to tutor me.” 

 

“Me?” she squeaked, wondering how he had chosen her, of all the halfway competent students in the class, wondering if he sensed her sneering detachment from his world. 

 

“I don’t get this stuff.  But you do.  You always answer Rewston’s questions.” 

 

She bit a red line into her lip.  Sheepishly, he fished for a piece of paper from his pocket and pressed it into the space between her arm and her notebook.  “Just think about it, okay?” 

 

Once his head, half a foot higher than even the tallest people in the crowd, had bobbed down the hallway and around a corner, she unfolded the note.  ‘Mike,’ it said in characters almost like an ancient alphabet, and a phone number. 

 

He had a reputation as a nice guy and he had snagged, as a freshman, one of the coveted starting spots on the basketball team.  He pronounced Nietzsche like “Nee-chee” and Camus like “Cay-muss” and spelled Kierkegaard five different ways.  But his smile made his cheek dimple and crinkled his eyes, and when she flipped through their textbook and talked about ego and personal responsibility and facticity, he listened and took notes in his cipher-like script and asked her the kind of questions that no one else cared about. 

 

Questions like where she came from and how she got to be so smart and why she wrote volumes in her little spider-letters on tests but never spoke to anyone.  And she answered him in her mouse-voice and told him all about her clapboard house in Omaha and her five dogs all named Zippy and the white cap-sleeved dress that she wore to the Basilica every Sunday to receive communion and hear the choir sing to the painted angels on the ceiling.  And he told her about his basketball career and numbers that she didn’t understand and people that she knew as faces on the television who now had names and stories and favorite colors. 

 

After his first passing essay, a five-page clutter of text with four paragraphs and three block quotes and a big clumsy ‘C’ scratched at the top, he hugged her in his big forearms and bought them raspberry smoothies at the student center.  They sat at a booth in the basement and listened to Manchester Orchestra on the same set of headphones and counted how many times they heard someone mention how bad the pizza was. 

 

He found her crying, once, in the courtyard of the Humanities building, with a ‘D’ math test fanned in her hand.  He squeezed her shoulder and walked her with his hands over her eyes to what he called “one of those artsy movies you like” at the performing arts center.  While she focused between the French subtitles and the heat his arm left on the armrest, he squinted his eyes and pretended to appreciate the dramatic cinematography.  Over soggy cheese fries, they both agreed that the movie was terrible and retreated to the quad to watch The Matrix on his laptop. 

 

“It would kick ass to jump like Neo.  I’d be MVP every year,” he said, punching the air as Keanu Reeves flipped on screen. 

 

With her knees pushed up against her chest, she watched his skin tense around the veins in his arm.  “It’s all philosophy,” she half-whispered, half muted by the chill wind crackling leaves across their toes.  “And religion.” 

 

Like it did when she described determinism or existential despair, his forehead creased in the middle, and his lower lip puffed out.  “You’re kidding.  It’s about fighting and the machines . . . and stuff.” 

 

“Neo is Jesus, and Trinity is Mary Magdalene . . . and her name is the Holy Trinity too.  And Morpheus is like a prophet, or an apostle.”  She poked a finger into the dirt, tracing circles that wound around the toes of her ballerina flats, and described the hidden symbolism to him.  His eyes lit like candle flames on a five-year-old’s birthday cake.  She had to break the news that he couldn’t reference the Wachowski Brothers in his essay on Kafka.  But when he dropped her in front of her dorm, he hugged her so tightly her feet cleared the floor and demanded that she watch the movie with him again and show him all its secrets.  She would, she promised, if he brought raspberry smoothies.    

 

For her, he represented many firsts—not the squeamish romantic kind, though she might have entertained a small crush if he could learn how to spell Kierkegaard with two A’s, but the innocent and necessary kind that she had missed.  He was the first classmate to start a full conversation with her, and the first collegiate stranger to become a friend.  He was the first visitor to sit on the new futon in her dorm room, and the first audience member to clap for her violin solo.  He first introduced her to the not-so-tedious game of basketball, and the shamefully addictive world of competitive Halo.  Sometimes she could beat him now, though she knew he let her win. 

 

She also knew that their worlds would never completely merge, even with the glue of inside jokes and late-night pizza runs and bad two-dollar movies from the student center.  “Practice,” he would apologize before cutting their Halo game short.  “See you later,” he would say when she crossed him in the student center with a skinny collegiate Venus—still with a smile, but she knew he wanted her to buy her coffee and sip it in another corner of the room, where her naïve intelligence would not intimidate his conquest.  But he would sugar her scratched pride later with a raspberry smoothie and a heavy-armed hug.  She had no other friends to tell, and his friends knew who she was, her name at least attached to a face, but no one joined or witnessed their stolen moments.  She liked it that way—she told herself, and half the time believed.    

 

He ended with a note.  Simple notebook paper, clean and bright white—not the yellowy kind that looked tea-aged in her binder.  She couldn’t have told you, after, why she wrote it.  Maybe she feared that the week of Fall break would twist apart their soft bond.  Maybe she thought that he deserved to know his own merit, and knew no other way to show it.  Maybe she just needed to peel the words off her brain so she could be sure that the feelings would exist somewhere outside of her, tangibly.  Maybe she had never had anyone else to write them to.  She sealed the neatly folded square from her to him, with a sketchy, childish penned heart. 

 

Two days passed before she promised herself to deliver it.  Too anxious to make an appointment, she circled the quad for him, skirting the edge of the athlete gaggle where she knew she might catch his eye and draw him out.  The grating laughter halted her toes at the edge of the grass. 

 

“’I just wanted you to know how much your friendship means to me,’” read the tall, broad-shouldered boys in a backwards cap, spitting her own words back at her with a sneer.  She fished uselessly in her empty purse pocket.    

 

His friend snatched the paper and acted in falsetto, “’I had a really hard time adjusting when I first got here, coming from a class of thirty to a class of three thousand—‘”

 

“’And you’ve been there for me when I needed someone, even though I was supposed to be the one helping you.  I know I can count on you, and I just wanted to thank you for being my friend.’” 

 

They only noticed her then, when they had blinked out all the laughing tears and could focus on the five-foot-nothing bumpkin with the square glasses and the secondhand dress with faded yellow flowers.  They looked her up and down, the boys in their tight perforated jerseys and the girls with their department store lipstick and airbrushed legs, and then they looked at him.  He just bit his lip and looked at her, and frowned, and shrugged. 

 

She left him studying the dirt with his hands in his pockets and curled, sobbing, into the gnarled roots of the oak tree in the deserted Humanities courtyard, until her lashes stuck together and snot salted her lips.  Yes, she would call it “unpleasant” and she would forget him, and raspberry smoothies, and the five different ways to spell Kierkegaard.

 

 

(P.S.:  This story was inspired by a lost note that I and a few of my friends found in the dining hall.  We didn’t open it, but it was addressed from Alyssa to Mike.  Just a short, quick piece.  Helpful critique and comments are welcome.) 

More Bizarre Writing Prompts

C.J.

Because six websites just aren’t enough, and because I’m supposed to be reading my Personality Psych textbook right now, I decided to scrawl down a few mind-bending prompts of my own. Take them, try them, and tell me how they went! And if you’re brave enough, send me a snippet. Seriously, I’m not that frightening.

Also, feel free to send me prompts of your own for my next compilation. I’ll be happy to include and credit you!

The Prompts

1. Write a story in which a rubber, water-filled, tomato-shaped ball is a key plot device.

2. Think of your favorite food. It just walked through that door and pulled a gun on you. What do you do?

3. The characters from your favorite novel decide to go on strike. What is their platform? Who is their leader? What are their demands?

4. A man turns into a fluffy pink bunny rabbit every time there’s a thunderstorm.

5. A millionnaire is dying and reveals to his daughter that he had a life long affair with the accountant, who is the daughter’s real mother. Write the death scene. Do not mention the millionnaire, the accountant, or the affair–and no one can speak.

6. End a story with this sentence: Even after everything he had done, she still wished that she could rub his toes just one more time.

7. A man throws himself off of the roof of his house. Write the story from the point of view of his twelve-year-old dachshund.

8. A flight attendant, twenty-five bottle rockets, fifty yards of silver chain, a Barry Manilow discography box set, a bag of superbounce balls, and a disgruntled garbage truck driver named Stacy. What’s going on here?

9. You are a superhero. Your sidekick is a painting of Elvis on black velvet. Your arch enemy just blew up the state building. How do you proceed?

10. Pick one of your favorite novels. Rewrite the plot as a rap song, a country song, a rock song, and a medieval-style ballad.

Happy writing!

Bizarre Writing Prompts

C.J.

Let’s put it this way.  I’m sick of writing prompts that go along the lines of “Write a diary for your main character” or “He never realized she would come after him” or “Write a story that uses the words paper, copy machine, and lawyer.”  Seriously, people?  We’re writers.  Is that the best we can come up with?  All those cute prompts are fine if you’re blocked beyond hope, but if you’re like me, you take one look, think “Hm, that’s mildly interesting,” and twitch a little bit while your brain turns to mush.  Forget outside of the box.  I want outside the planet.  So, I scoured the web for something more unusual. Here are a few sites to stretch your brain.

1. Writing Companion // Rating: 3/5
This site is pretty hit or miss. Some of the prompts are pretty interesting, and others are just so-so. If you really need to get writing, however, they have good ideas for ways to pull great ideas from mundane sources. Type “Writing Prompt” into the search box and see if anything strikes you.

Sample Prompt: Collect random sentences from magazines, newspaper articles, stories, etc. Unify them into one story.

2. Story Spinner // Rating: 3/5
Click the wheel and you’ll get a setting, an opening line, and four words that you have to include. A little commonplace sometimes, but it’s a good way to get something started if you’re stuck, and some of the combinations are so ridiculous that you can’t fail to laugh . . . and then write all about it.

Sample Prompt: Setting for your story: During intermission / Starting phrase for your story: I remember spitting / Four words you must include in your story: Yard, Mush, Diagram, Drip

3. Easy Street Prompts // Rating: 4/5
A great list of hundreds of minimalist prompts. Some are short, evocative phrases and others are bizarre pictures (you know what they say about pictures and words) and videos. With the creepy black background that already has me thinking surreal, it’s a great place to find something that will spark an instant story in your head.

Sample Prompt: Phrase: fashionably excommunicated. Picture: a blurred out house about to be wrecking-balled.

4. Director’s Bureau // Rating: 4/5
The ultimate minimalist. The whole site is a javascript generator: three dials with random words. Click the button and the dials will spin around to give you a three-word phrase. Most of the combinations are pretty bizarre and can bring up some vivid mental images, but others fit together too well. Thankfully, generating new combos takes all of three seconds (as your time-wasting blogger knows all too well).

Sample Prompts: Do-it-yourself torture game; Inexpensive nuclear garden; Secret foam art

5. Leucrota Press // Rating: 5/5
The blog itself is a great resource for all things writing, and this short list of prompts has some of the most unusual I’ve ever seen. Though they may make you cringe, squirm, or say “What the hell?”, they’ll definitely test your imagination. But with a title like ‘Disturbing Writing Prompts,’ what would you expect?

Sample Prompt: You’re falling asleep at your desk when your nose starts itching. You sneeze, and an earthworm slips out.

6. McSweeney’s // Rating: 5/5
A little tamer than Leucrota, so you’re not as likely to screech or gag, but just as interesting. This short list ranges from the very unusual to the very tricky, forcing you to envision bizarre situations or to write about a scene without mentioning its key components.

Sample Prompt: A husband and wife are meeting in a restaurant to finalize the terms of their impending divorce. Write the scene from the point of view of a busboy snorting cocaine in the restroom.

Inspired yet? Then do what I’m supposed to be doing and go write!

P.S. Have another addition to this list? Post it here or shoot me a note. Cheers!

Da Vinci … Maybe Next Time

C.J.

If there’s one thing all the great Masters have in common, it’s oil paint.  (Horrid generalization, but work with me here.)  Now, I’ve painted quite a bit.  Having a painter and former art teacher for a father kind of lends itself to that.  But let’s just say I have a whole new respect for all those old Masters.  Painting a landscape sounds really easy; then, all of the sudden, you’re half-covered in blue paint and throwing sponges across the garage because the bush you’ve been painstakingly speckling is now a green-crimson blob.  There is nothing more frustrating then getting all that perfect linework down on your canvas, only to start blending and, oh! look, you have a lovely blue-green-gray smudge.  It’s like trying to write a story in Italian and realizing that you don’t know any of the rules anymore. 

At the same time, it was amazing fun.  Having dad there to show me the tricks step-by-step didn’t hurt either.  It’s also amazingly freeing–in a way, more forgiving then acrylics, since it can take days to dry and mistakes can be rubbed away into the background or scraped off and filled in.  It’s like spending all your life writing on a typewriter and suddenly being given a computer with that magical Backspace key.  So for an obsessive-compulsive editor like me, it’s the perfect magic medium.  Next step?  Portraiture.  And maybe by the time I do my second painting, I’ll have gotten all the blue off my elbows. 

And now for something completely different.  (Oh, Monty Python, how I love you and your oddball antics!)  Third story submitted to fourth literary magazine.  Paper copy of first story still not mailed.  Butt still not in gear.  Fourth story . . . sort of kind of not really in progress. 

Hey, at least I’m thinking about it.  Cheers.

Bye Bye Blackbird

C.J.

So, the birds have flown.  Two stories have been sent out to three literary magazines.  Well, okay, technically two literary magazines, but there will be a third tomorrow when I get off my slighty-less-than-motivated backside and mail it.  Perhaps a few more submissions will follow tonight or tomorrow, if I can find something that fits.  But as exciting as it is to hit that Send button or to seal it, stamp it, and ship it off, it’s also (read carefully) scary as hell. 

Now, this isn’t the first time I’ve sent out queries.  In its various iterations, Dark Moon 1 has been queried probably half a dozen times, and sadly, no bites yet.  But as much as rejection letters make your stomach twist like spaghetti wound too tight, there’s nothing quite like the half-sick, half-stoked brain haze you get when you send the thing in.  You want to be optimistic and all that, but if you’re a happy cynic like me, your brain keeps poking all sorts of possible disasters into your little happy-bubble. 

Best case (okay, fine, best case after it being published and you becoming the next J. K. Rowling) it gets published and you realize, “Oh, wait, that’s actually absolute trash and now an obscene amount of people are going to see it.”  Take my poem that got into the Juggler.  I had a sneaking feeling that it would, because I had just found all sorts of bits to edit a few weeks after I submitted it.  But hey, Scenario 1 isn’t that bad.  You’re published.  P-u-b-l-i-s-h-e-d.  I’d take it any day. 

Think about it.  If you really are published, or just passed around the editor’s office, a small piece of your soul (yes, melodramatic as that sounds, your soul) is now floating around the world for the scrutinizing eyes of dozens.  Or hundreds.  Or thousands.  Doesn’t matter if you’re a suburban housewife with three kids and your book is about androgynous space aliens who speak in clicks.  You eke out of every word as sure as if you’d given them a detailed diary of your thoughts.  Anonymity is dead. 

But the truly scary part?  Sending that query is final.  It’s done.  The whole time before you send it, your future can be whatever you want to be.  Anything can happen with you and your book or your story until then, because until that moment, it’s all in your head.  But as soon as you send it, your life is on a path, on track for triumph or tragedy.  Once it’s done, you’re open to rejection. 

What keeps you hanging on to that hope is that maybe one of those little birds will land somewhere.

Publishing a Novel in 2009

C.J.

A few weeks ago, I strolled into the Young Adult section of my local Borders bookseller, curious to find the ends to a few favorite series and a new book or two.  I unknowingly waltzed into a kiosk full of Twilight conversation hearts, bookmarks, and umbrellas.  This kiosk flanked two long shelves stocked only with the Twilight saga.  Intrigued, I took a spin around the nearby shelves.  Vampires.  Vampires.  And, you guessed it, more vampires. 

As an aspiring author, I thought, by gum! this could be the key to selling that first novel.  But others needed to know this information too.  So, after a few hours of perusal, I compiled this penetrating guide into the 2009 book market.  Fear not, writers!  Just follow these agonizingly easy steps and you will soon be smothered by a mob of girls throwing wads of cash at you in exchange for the fruits of your pen. 

1.  Write a vampire romance.  Yes, you guessed it.  With Stephenie Meyer taking an indefinite break from Midnight Sun, the next installment in the Twilight saga, vampire fan girls must unearth their seductive night-bound heroes in other places.  Fortunately for the fang-frenzied, one stop in the Young Adult section of a major bookseller will satisfy their cravings.  With Meyer’s saga raking in millions in print, film, and merchandise, dozens of new vampire romances have squeezed their way onto shelves. 

2.  Create your characters.  So, now that you have your genre, you need a leading lad and lady.  They must be or at least look like teenagers.  The girl can vary.  She is just a placeholder for the female reader to fill.  Make her a vampire or a strong-willed human, as long as she can fulfill the fantasy.  Your hero, however, should be darkly handsome, with chiseled features described in minute detail and eyes for your reader to drown in.  Add an aloof personality, a tortured past, and inner turmoil, and you will have every reader writing Mrs. Vampire on her notebooks.  Do not dwell on names.  Pick something mysterious, unusual, or mystical sounding.  Cassandra?  Yes.  Jennifer?  Not so much. 

3.  Craft a plot.  The plotline can vary widely, as long as you stick to a few key elements.  First of all, you need to introduce your vampire!  Either your hero or heroine should be a new student, or maybe your hero is a familiar student with a mysterious reputation.  They can traipse on whatever adventures you like as long as you include a healthy dose of loving gazes, passionate proclamations, and sizzling make-out scenes. 

4.  Pick a title.  This will hook your reader and alert them to your genre, so choose wisely for both your book and series (of course you will be writing more than one!).  You can pick something punny (Frostbite), sexual (Untamed, Shadow Kiss), cryptic (Hunted, Marked, Wicked, Huntress), dark (Night World, City of Night), or blatant (Vampire Academy, Royal Blood, Vampire Kisses), as long as it clearly reads vampire! 

5.  Design a cover.  You may not need this until later, but keep it in mind.  Either a half-naked guy and girl half turned from the viewer or a cryptic, Egyptian or Celtic object or symbol will do, as long as the style is black and Victorian. 

6.  Sell!  Yes, it is easy as that.  Send off your completed manuscript and wait for the critical acclaim to roll in. 

So, aspiring authors, you have the tools you need.  Good luck on your enterprise!  May the powers of the vampires inspire you. 

Disclaimer:  This article is not intended to be a factual or comprehensive to the real publishing market, nor is it intended to derogate the works mentioned.  It is an overgeneralization intended for the purposes of humor only. 

Over the Threshold

C.J.

So, today I join the hundreds (thousands?) of other writers peddling their work on the good ol’ internet. Why, you ask? (Or maybe you don’t. You could already be sick of me at this stage. But let’s assume you still care.) Anyway, I guess if I want to be an actual published author some day, that means getting serious about writing. It means getting my work into the world and practicing until I get carpal tunnel.

Since so many writers seemed to have embraced this whole blog thing as a way of doing just that, I’m officially jumping on the bandwagon. And clinging to it until either I fall off and roll into a ditch or jump off into somewhere more productive than the stagnant water that is here.

So, hopefully-real readers, this is it. The beginning. (Sound dramatic, doesn’t it? I feel like I should be writing soaps.) Check back for ponderings, poetry, prompts, and . . . there’s really no way to make short stories start with a ‘p.’ Basically, whatever bits of creativity I can squeeze out of my brain on a regular basis. Enjoy the madness. Rock on.

P.S. Many thanks to “Karma Police” by Radiohead for the title of this blog, as well as Adobe Photoshop and stock photos for allowing me to create the banner. Cheers!