Back to Blogging

So yes, it has been over two months since I have posted anything. Which is not to say that I haven't been writing - Quite contrare, I have been writing more than ever recently. Just not anything particularly fun. I've spent the past several months feverishly writing business plans, policy memos, energy audit reports, statements of qualifications, project proposals and essays (yes, my favorite!). But now is time for me to get back to basics and back to blogging. After a number of rejections from Everyday Fiction, I have started writing a few new flash fiction stories and hope to have a few more ready for them soon. If anyone has a cool prompt, please send it to me. Thanks!!

Oh...the horror...

Yes, yes is has been a long time since I have posted anything, which is probably not that big a deal since I am likely the only person who ever logs onto this site. I feel like a third grader who painstakingly arranges and rearranges the Star Wars action figure collection that no one comes by to admire, like the millionaire who sits on his deck overlooking his Pacific Ocean, surrounded by the toys and trinkets that no one will ever see - not that I am comparing my ramblings to treasures of the likes I have never seen. No, it's just right about now, I recognize the fact that the main point of this blog, at least for now, is for me to write write write, something that I have actually done a rather poor job at doing since nearly a month has past since my last post. One (and I don't know which one...) may infer that this lapse of writing must mean that I have once again been pulled away from my writing in some way or another. I suppose that there is some truth in this, as work and other personal responsibilities have kept me from doing too much writing. But I have acutally done quite a bit of writing. I wrote a short story entitled "Body Parts," about a man who gets a brief respite from a mysterious bartender as he sits at a tropical resort, intent on drinking himself to death. Admittedly, it is terrible so far, but then again it is still in draft form. I got the idea as I was trying to brainstorm ideas about a horror screenplay that I was challenged to write. I don't really write horror, but I saw it as a challenge - one that I was looking forward to until I really started getting into it, and was contacted by the producer asking me to be his friend on myspace. Sorta creepy. But maybe that was point...

Writers Digest: Prompt of the Week - "Driven to Insanity"

Okay, so Writer's Digest posts a weekly prompt on their website, as an exercise to warm-up writers. I thought it would be fun. One writing assignment per week - how hard could it be? I recall the brief time I spent in a writing class a few years ago. At the end of each class, our instructor would give us an assignment that would be read to the class the following week. Deadlines are good.

I was excited to read the prompt of the week - You just run into an old lover - the one that got away - on Valentine's Day. What happens?

I started brainstorming, but before I had time to put a coherent story together, I realized that the prompt was for the previous week. I was too late.

Okay, I thought - what is this week's prompt?

Write a 26-line poem using all the letters of the alphabet, where the first line starts with the letter "A," the second "B," the third "C," etc., culminating with the final line starting with "Z."

I groaned. I think I've written two poems in the twenty years since I spewed countless lines of self-pity during my high school days. Oh well. A deadline is a deadline. I played around with it for about forty-five minutes.

So here goes nothing...

Driven to Insanity

And almost as quickly as it had started it had ended
Bricks from the crumbled façade fell with a thud onto the hood of my car
Cries of the fallen left in my deadly wake resonated in my head
“Damn,” I think. “Now, I’m going to be late for work.”

Eleven dead, thirty-six injured
Far from the death toll I had planned
Gunning my Chevrolet through the crowded open air marketplace
Higher, I thought. The number should be higher. Twenty-six to be exact.

I remember them falling one by one as the alphabet song played in my head
Just a few more, I thought, with my hands griped around the cold steering wheel
Killing by numbers never seemed so easy
Lives extinguished by a writer gone made

Maybe if the writer’s prompt had been more conventional
No one would have had to die on this morning
Or maybe if I had just spent more time, more effort, more tears it wouldn’t have to have been
Perhaps, instead, the fruitless years and countless rejection letters had finally taken their toll

Quincy the mailman screamed in terror as he met his fate underneath my front driver’s side tire
Rachel described the horrific scene to her best friend on her cell phone, until she too became part of the story
Samantha tried to duck to the left, but my reflexes proved better than she had expected
Thomas was oblivious, not knowing that the Miley Cyrus song blasting through his ipod would be his last

Under bright lights the doctors examined me
Volumes would be written about this in the future and I laughed at the irony
What would drive a man to such derangement? they asked each other
X-rays proved negative – oh come on, like you didn’t see that one coming?

Yes, I finally admitted, chuckling to myself– how much had been accomplished over the previous twenty-five lines?
Zero.

The Realm of the Ball

What exactly is the realm of the ball?

"No one really knows," Ana said. "She stole my purse...and now she's stealing my life..."

Lost amidst plastic toy planes, empty shoe boxes, orange monkeys, and tarantulas -like fragments from a dream, jumbled together in a way that starts to tell a story, but falls woefully short. Like a crazed madman, driving his car through a crowded marketplace. 11 dead, 36 injured.

It doesn't make any sense. Or maybe it's not supposed to...

Rewind twenty years to a cramped cabin in a small vessel floating down the Rhine River. Two boys passing time with a small rubber ball. Back and forth. Back and forth.

And then it's gone.

To that sliver of time and space, that enoz between snorkelfork and forkelsnork where mismatched socks are banished for eternity.

Lost forever.

In the realm of the ball...