You did it! You survived National Poetry Month and my terrible poetry. Let’s close it out with a short one.
Good job, everybody.
***
On Hair Removal
The truth of it is
when you shave fat legs
often you end up
with shredded pork.
Tag: writing
Poem–“Hips”
We’re in the home stretch of National Poetry Month. You’re almost there, kids. And since you’re already struggling, let’s do a poem that’s sure to make you really uncomfortable.
I admit it. I like to watch you squirm.
***
Hips
There’s something about her hips.
The way they’re spread wide
and far, like the rumor of
good things to come.
The way the curve of them
begs for hands to grip
just at the top, squeeze,
hold on for the ride of your
Life.
Poem–“Where Do You Get Your Ideas From?”
We’re half-way through National Poetry Month. Are you feeling the burn? Don’t worry. You’re doing great. And this poem is a fun one. It answers a question writers get all the time.
I don’t think you’ll like my answer, though.
***
Where Do You Get Your Ideas From?
I want to say my mind is a prism,
that it fractures the light of reality
into a rainbow, creates a palette
I paint with to please the masses.
In actuality, my mind is a kitchen sink drain
that I clean out now and then
and save the best bits of gunk
to make a meal no one eats.
Poem–“Let’s Eat”
National Poetry Month continues, and so does the onslaught of my bad poetry. Let’s have some fun with a poem that would have folks loudly declaring that the shoe doesn’t fit if they read it.
Good thing nobody’s read it.
***
Let’s Eat
Men are vegetarian dogs.
They like to chew on skinny things-
matchsticks, toothpicks,
meatless bones
picked clean by high standards.
A man is finicky about his meal.
Women, though, women like to dine,
feast, indulge in the banquet
laid before them, the tastes,
the textures, the variety, the flavors
washing over their tongues, savoring.
A woman is not a picky eater.
Poem–“This Is a Bad Poem”
It’s National Poetry Month, my yearly excuse to inflict my terrible poetry on your delicate sensibilities, a weekly barrage of cringe-worthy attempts at art.
I hope you like abuse.
***
This Is a Bad Poem
This is a bad poem.
First and foremost it doesn’t rhyme,
except by accident one time.
Secondly, it doesn’t use enough devices.
It lacks metaphors like a drought lacks rain.
It has all the symbolism of an anvil
dropped from a great height
onto a cartoon character
who never saw it coming
despite the music.
Lastly, it took me only ten minutes to write it
and five minutes to edit it.
Fifteen minutes too many because
this is a bad poem.
Holy Shit, I Haven’t Published Anything in Five Years
You may have noticed that the latest release on the site hasn’t changed in a while. A little over five years, actually. I had this realization late one night while my brain was doing its mental gymnastics before it finally shut up and let me sleep.
Holy shit, I haven’t published anything in five years.
It should go without saying that I’m not counting the freebies here or the Patreon projects I’ve done. I’m talking about self-publishing or in the very rare case traditional publishing. Haven’t published a damn thing in five years.
There was a period of time between 2013 and 2019 that I had something published at least once a year, and in many case, multiple things. Those were the boon years, I suppose. I had a ton of ideas, a ton of projects, a ton of time and dedication to getting things written, revised, polished, and published for the masses.
Now, by no means was I successful. I think my best-selling title has sold a little over 500 copies in its entire existence. But I was productive. I always had something going. I felt like as long as I kept churning out stories, something would eventually catch. I’d build that mythological platform that agents and publishers look for and I’d be able to take the next step in my writing career.
Instead, the bottom fell out.
Writing became hard. The ideas dried up. I shifted focus to just getting through Murderville for Patreon because everything was so difficult. I had nothing going. Nothing to publish. It all dried up. I think unconsciously I decided that I was done. Not necessarily writing because I don’t know how to be done writing even when it’s hard. But I was done publishing. I was never going to write anything that anyone would want to read and it was too hard to write anything for myself that I’d want anyone to read for a price. I was just kinda done.
Then by some miracle writing stopped being hard.
But the urge to publish hasn’t exactly returned. At least it’s not exactly like it used to be.
While I am looking to get back into the game and reacquaint myself with the business of submitting short stories while also keeping my eyes open for agents that might be a good fit for me if I ever manage to finish a book that wouldn’t be a waste of their time to read, the drive to be focused on producing and publishing as much as possible hasn’t returned. That frantic urge that pushed me to publish multiple novellas and short story collections in a year is nowhere to be found. And honestly, I’m kind of glad for that.
It’s been nice to write without it feeling like I’m sucking out my own bone marrow with a crazy straw. I want to enjoy it. And I want to take my time reintroducing myself to getting published, be it traditionally or self-done. Why be balls to the wall when I don’t have to be? There’s plenty of time for me to go full-tilt when I’m ready.
So I guess that latest release will just remain unchanged.
For now.
Flash Fiction–“The Children’s Floor”
It’s Leap Day and since February is extended by one day, let’s do another little bit of a flash fiction.
And by little bit of flash fiction, I mean a 100 word story. Until I was inspired by yet another contest, I’d never considered writing a story so short. It proved to be a wonderful challenge.
Of course, I didn’t win the contest, but I did gain a new story skill.
The Children’s Floor
It was the way the library was designed. That was the problem. The way sound ricocheted around the building, showed up in unexpected places. That’s why Alice hated working the second floor, the children’s floor. She only had to cover an occasional hour here and there, but those always seemed to be the dead hours when there were no children or parents or anyone else. Only her.
Alice and the voices.
The ghostly conversations, disembodied voices asking questions, stifled giggles mocking her unease.
That’s what she hated about the children’s floor.
Alice would never know if it was really haunted.
Flash Fiction– “Haunted House”
Since February is the shortest month -even during a leap year- it seems fitting to take advantage of that and post some flash fiction.
This is a 500 word story that I initially wrote during a NaNoWriMo while doing several pieces to make my 50,000 word count. The first draft was twice as long and not working. A 500 word story contest inspired me to cut it in half and I was much happier with it.
I lost the contest, but I gained a story.
Haunted House
She’s hiding behind a desk in a room. Not under it. She doesn’t want to get trapped. Under it, she would be trapped. Behind it, she can jump and run. And she can keep an eye on the door, peering over the ruined wood as she kneels on cracked and crackling tile.
He’s hunkered down in the room across the hall. She can’t see him even though the door is ajar. There’s only a little bit of light in the hallway. Everything is in black and white. The only color is the writing on the wall, the drippy numbers that mean nothing to her. The big blue three looms over her.
She doesn’t know him. She snuck in on a dare. He was already inside. But now they’re both in this together, a sacred pact of bad decisions.
It’s quiet. All she hears is her own breathing.
And footsteps. Echoing. Closer.
She wants to cry. Instead, she ducks down and holds her breath, afraid he’ll hear her breathe.
Can he hear her heart pound?
She nearly bolts when she hears a door squeak open. Nearly. It’s not her door. It’s his. The door to the room across the hall where her friend in poor life choices is hiding.
She risks a peek and sees the monster they’re hiding from disappear inside, tall and grimy, with filthy hair stringing down his back, his soiled wifebeater somehow stark in the scant light.
He’s in there now. He’s in there with him.
She risks a breath, afraid it’ll turn into a scream. She hopes to whatever God might be around that the monster doesn’t find him.
She should run before the monster finds her.
Vague sounds of movement. A muffled scramble.
The reverberation of a crack!thud gags her. The body of the friend she never knew falls through the door, his balding head now a bloody mash on one side. The unblemished side smacks the tile, causing another ripple of nausea. He lies there, his head and shoulders in the hallway, the rest of him swallowed into the darkness of the room he’d been hiding in.
She stares in horror because what else can she do? The worst has already happened, right?
Another muffled noise from across the hall and then the fresh corpse is jerked into the darkness of the room.
Adrenaline floods her body.
Now she’s running.
She’s out from behind the desk and into the hallway before she allows herself to process that she’s moving, her footfalls giving her away as she pounds down the busted tile in search of freedom in the dim maze.
The echoes become a stampede.
He’s right behind her, he’s gaining, and she can’t remember how to get out.
She can’t get out.
Her last thought in life isn’t a fear-driven plea for escape. It isn’t even panicked.
It’s the calm answer to the question that caused her to sneak inside in the first place.
“So, that’s why the haunted house corpses look so real.”
2023 NaNo Winner!
For the 16th year in a row (out of 20 years with 17 total wins), I have crossed the 50,000 word threshold in 30 days officially making NaNo 2023 a winner. I hit the mark on the 28th and I used the last two days to finish up the first draft. Total words written in November will hit right around 53,000 and the total words for this first draft will be around 55,000 because I kept some of the original short story, but not all of it.
When I started working on the expansion of What Happened to the Man in the Cabin?, I thought I knew the story I was writing. By that I mean that I thought I knew what the story was truly about and where the ending was. And then I hit a point in the word accumulation when I realized that the story was actually really about something else and the ending wasn’t the ending. I had something of an outline written, but as I wrote, the story revealed more of itself and I ended up surprising myself, which always thrills me. It makes me feel like I actually know what I’m doing.
It also made the words difficult to come by about half-way through. I went from hitting my daily word count before heading off to my library shift to having to finish the day’s writing after I got home. I ended up gamifying my writing to get my words written in a timely fashion (I play a game that has ad breaks; every ad break, I’d write 500 words before I go back to my game).
It also didn’t help that I didn’t do a very good job of preparing my schedule for NaNo like I’d done in previous years. I failed to get as much podcasting stuff done before November and as a result, I ended up with a bit of a full schedule that made writing more of a chore than it should have been. That is not a mistake I wish to repeat and I endeavor to do better about that next year.
This year, though, is in the books. I have a decent first draft that I can work with to revise into something that could be pretty nifty. It’s so different from anything I’ve written before. Revising it will be interesting.
Meanwhile, my hope to keep up with That’s Punk while also doing NaNo did not work out. I made it about half-way through the month, but ended up failing due to other scheduling commitments. Thems the breaks. Hopefully, I’ll be finished with the first draft of that story by the next NaNo.
As for this NaNo, it was a little more challenging than I would have liked, but I’m not going to argue with the results.
I do love a winner.
NaNo 2023
Ah, yes. It’s that time of year again. The time when I drive myself to the brink of insanity by writing a 50,000 word novel in a month.
Okay, that’s pretty dramatic considering this will be my 19th NaNo and I long ago mastered the art of writing those 50,000 words in 30 days, though I do admit that sometimes it can be stressful.
Last year, I actually wrote a novel, a real change of pace from some of the NaNo shenanigans I’ve pulled in previous years. This year, I’m back to my shenanigans. Sort of. I’m still working on a novel, it’s just that I’m adding to an existing story rather than writing a novel from scratch.
My goal for this year is to add 50,000 words to the story What Happened to the Man in the Cabin?.
When I initially wrote what turned out to be a longer short story, I thought it had the potential to be a novella or maybe a novel, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to go through with adding words. I also had other projects going, so I didn’t really have the time, focus or energy to really explore that option. But, having thought about it for months and having come up with a reasonable expansion plan, I think NaNo is the time to do it.
This will be something of an adventure for me. The original story dealt with two different timelines -the present, where Newly Lowell is being interrogated by Sheriff Adam Joe about an incident that happened thirty years prior; and the past, the incident that took place when Newly and her brothers Thad and Quint were twelve. The expansion plan intends to shift the viewpoint of the past from Newly’s to a more general one, allowing for the past to be expanded more, and to add in the viewpoint of Sheriff Adam Joe, but from the recent past, starting when he finds the Lowell triplets’ father dead and knows they’ll be headed back to town, which will be his opportunity to get answers.
Ambitious? Absolutely. Am I good enough to pull it off? Probably not. But, I think the doing will be very educational and I might end up with something that I can work with in rewrites.
I will also still be working on That’s Punk while I do NaNo, which should make for a fun warm-up if I stick to doing at least 100 words a day on it like I have been. And I’ll be working on podcasting and other audio projects during the month because I failed to appropriately plan ahead this year, so that should be fun and stressful.
This year I plan to keep my daily word count to about 1,700 words a day, just above minimum, writing every day of the month. I think the lower word count will help to counteract the stress of doing something difficult during a busier schedule.
At least that’s what I’m telling myself.
We’ll see how I feel at the end of the month.
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