My Nasty Romance

Microfiction Monday #37 is up at Stony River.  Your task is, given the picture, write something 140 characters or less (something to do with this thing called Twitter you hear about).

This week’s picture:

This week’s piece:

Upon the sea she did abide. Until she didn’t. Called home to the slumbering deep where dreams are forever and waking is aloof, untouchable.

Yep, I was feeling literary.  This is my first pre-scheduled post because I’m out of town.  Hope it works!

Janet Reid, Literary Agent, has a little contest running through to tonight.  Write 100 words, five of which must be tramp, epic, shuffle, lair and even.  Extra points for the phrase “til death us do part.”  Perfect opportunity to work on Budget Elvis from Microfiction Monday #36.

Turns out, Budget Elvis’ name is Roscoe Diggins and he’s a rockabilly man.  Here’s what I’ve submitted to Ms. Reid’s contest:

Rockabilly Roscoe Diggins ain’t so proud not to notice an angel what masquerades like a tramp.  Ain’t had a groupie before and likely not since so I took her up.  Every woman needs love and I got me some lovin’.

Shuffled round camp-resorts, dinosaur gardens, even a putt-putt course.  Played ‘em all: cave, lair, and bungalow.  Back-roads Elvis making low-rent a lifestyle.

What happened in that 1986 Fleetwood Tioga was epic like matrimony.  Weren’t no preacher or padre, but the Lord was there.

And true enough words as said when they passed my lips, “Til death us do part, baby.”

Original story had 153 words.  Editing was… painful.  But I like where old Roscoe is going.  I’m currently working on a short story with Diggins and a corner preacher.

This week’s Microfiction Monday from Stony River gives this picture for the prompt:

And here is the story in 140 characters or less:

Dinosaur gardens and putt-putt golf… I was the budget Elvis of the camp-resort circuit, a Rockabilly boy making low-rent a lifestyle.

Not so much a microfiction as it is a micro-character sketch, I guess.  But I like him.

In other news – I bought a smartphone a little bit ago.  It has a Wordpress app so I was thinking about pic-posting writing prompts but haven’t thought of the proper twist to make it interesting.  Any ideas?  Any interest?

Is this a wonderful new era for My Nasty Romance? Maybe. This is my first mobile post to the blog. What uses might this have? Well… I’m not really sure.

Ideas include:
- Writing prompts as they occur to me
- …

Yeah, not a lot of ideas yet.

And here we are again with another Microfiction Monday.  Or is it just another Microfiction Monday?  I daresay not.

I saw the picture yesterday, instantly had an idea for the story, and then didn’t write it because it was controversial.  It would be taken wrong.  I would be pilloried for having written it.  Why risk losing what few readers I have?  Surely not the best course of action.

These thoughts gave way to guilt.  If I don’t write it, I’m not being true to my own voice.  I’m letting people scare me off.  How can I possibly be afraid if I have enough confidence in my own writing?  And that’s where I stumbled upon the truth.  I thought about not having the confidence I’d like in my own writing.  But that didn’t make much sense.  I truly believe in my writing.  I know where it’s weak and where it’s strong.  I can pull chapters out of Gospel of Lazlo and say “I hate this, but it was necessary” or “I didn’t have the skill to write this portion in the way I wanted.”  I can be honest with myself about that.  So what was it?

Inevitably, the truth came into focus.  I didn’t have confidence in my audience.  I lacked faith in you, the reader.  I dismissed those kind enough to spend their moments reading my writing as small-minded, temperamental lynch mob elements.  This is a disservice, of course.  And I apologize.  And so I fall back to my process used in writing my book: Pretend no one else is ever going to read it.  Not my mom, my uncles, or my dear old grandma.

And so, with this picture:

You get this story:

He cringed when I brought an Oriental home. Openly scowled at finding a Negro in my room. I was giddy to see poor daddy’s reaction to Bobo.

Why did this come to mind?  Students of writing are, as Tom Spanbauer insists, students of life.  Along those same lines, Natalie Goldberg alleges that writers live their lives twice.  They experience things once as it happens and again as they deconstruct the experience in their mind.  It was during the later deconstruction with a female friend who dates exclusively outside her race that I began to suspect she dated these men in order to needle her father.  This wasn’t a conclusion arrived at lightly.  I hold this friend near and dear to me and would not confront her with it, but I did test the subject a bit, taking careful note of how she developed her conversation when the subject came up.

With a 100% occurance rate, daddy disapproving of her dating choices based on race would arise.  Accompanying each conversation were litanies of her father’s faults.  In fact, sometimes her father’s faults would kick off a conversation leading to her dating habits.

Being writerly – further deconstruction ensued.  For example, was it fair to those being dated to be chosen on her criteria?  I wondered if the seeminly race-blind act of dating interracially could actually be more bigoted than dating normally.  Isn’t the person dating based solely on race making assumptions they expect to be met just because of your skin color?  Lots and lots of questions came up when I really got into it.

And then the character was born.  Poor little rich girl wanting daddy’s attention so badly.  She’s surely a bigot but will date anything she can find in order to get even a disapproving scowl.  Pay careful attention to her language.  She uses words generally considered unacceptable and feels not only joy over her father’s discomfort, but looks forward to seeing more!  What at first seems to be all about race to the reader is all about daddy to the narrator while, in reality, is all about the girl in question.

While this post has taken quite a long time to type up, the actual process of deciding what story went with that picture took seconds.  The background work took more, but it’s not like this will be the only usable thought to arise from it.

I’ve probably taken enough of your time now.  Hope I gave you something to think about.  And I hope you write bravely so I have something to chew on when I visit.

I spent seven years in the Army working as an intelligence analyst.  I learned to tell what bad guys were doing by looking at the areas we didn’t have information on.  That seems counterintuitive, but that’s how it works.  Imagine a jig-saw puzzle missing dozens of pieces out of a clear blue sky portion, the one that gives you fits trying to figure out.  One of the holes is shaped like a cross.  You have 6 pieces that fit together like a cross… you get the picture?

Well, one of those missing pieces I learned to watch out for was the “little pause.”  Little pauses always mean something, even in a personal setting.  If your scout forces have made regular contact with enemy scouts and suddenly find themselves with nothing to look at, you’re in a new universe of hurt.  That little pause means the main force is about to slam into you.  Working out of a scout tactical operations center this meant you had about 15 minutes to break down your tents, computers, and other equipment and get out of the area before tanks roll over you.

Years later, working at a juvenile detention center, I got to know a kid who I’ll call Terry.  Terry was a big kid, smile as big as the moon, and hands that could cover your whole face if he wanted to.  This was just a big, happy kid who had gotten into a little trouble because, well, he was a diagnosed schizophrenic who’s disorder manifested with psychotic breaks.  I worked with him for nearly four months without so much as a cross word and then… sitting in a classroom one day the teacher decided she didn’t like his attitude.  She stood over him repeating the same criticism over and over in various different ways that all meant the same thing – you’re acting like a big baby.  Terry’s smile melted from his face.  He turned sideways in his chair and slouched, his elbows on his legs and eyes straight forward staring at nothing.  As the teacher ranted on, Terry seemed to become as still as rock devoid of any kind of emotion.  It was that little pause that told me he had to go.  Turned out I was right, Terry told me later that if I hadn’t stepped in he had almost finished planning what he was going to do to that teacher.  That rock devoid of any kind of emotion was a volcano.

What’s the point of all this?  Well, from time to time there are little pauses here at My Nasty Romance.  It doesn’t mean I’m not thinking about this place.  It just means I’m getting the next big thing ready.  I’m planning to submit to Glimmertrain at the end of the month and I think I have a shot with what I’m writing.  It’s about time I did something on purpose and not just hope for the best.  I’m making deliberate plans to get some publishing credits on my resume to attract some attention.

So permit me my little pause.  It won’t be here long.  Follow the links I put in the page if you need something more interesting to read than my little excuse post.

While still in the single digits age-wise, I remember sitting in my grandparents’ A-frame house across from Lake Huron and pounding out… ok, chicken-pecking out short fiction, usually of the fantasy variety.  I can tell you what the monsters were called (banters, for some reason) and that they were hard to kill.  Most of all I remember the typewriter.  It was a black and brass Underwood that would look at home on any steam-train message taker’s desk.  My grandma is an avid reader and keeps a notebook with authors’ names at the top of each page listing each book she’s read by which author in order not to accidentally read the same book twice.  Yes, she reads THAT much.  Naturally, she encouraged me with my writing even when I was very little.

With this in mind, when my grandmother asked me to send her a copy of my book, I did.  I warned her that it was vulgar in places and she said, “you have no idea what I read here, Jeffrey.”  Ok, signed copy off to grandma.

A couple weeks later I get a call from my father.  This is a rare occurance, I usually have to call him.   In fact, I can only remember maybe three times he’s called me since 1998, though I talk to him three or four times a month, sometimes more.  Flipped open the cellphone, “Dad?”

“Yeah, it’s me.  I got your book.”  The way he said “got your book” was like “found your little brother with a Playboy.”  I asked him where he bought it, wondering if the Amazon and Barnes & Noble thing was paying out.

“I got it from your grandmother.  She said she couldn’t finish it, didn’t like thinking of her grandson talking about penises that way.”  Crushed.  Grandma thinks I’m a perv.  Ah well, she’ll get over it.

Dad went on to give me his opinions on what he’d read so far.  He liked it more than I thought he would, that could be paternal bias, though.  Then a couple days later I got this:

Hi Son,

Sitting here thinking of your call the other day, and I realized that while I made a comment about your book, I failed to tell you the rest of it. I didn’t tell you how proud I am that you actually wrote, edited and published a novel. A novel for chrissakes! That you actually DID what many people just talk about doing. If you never write another word, you’re a winner. I guess I forgot to tell you that. You show a talent for writing and I hope to read more.

Love ya kid.

Dad

Best feedback ever.  Thanks, Dad.

Susan finally has both feet firmly on Terra Americana and brings us Microfiction Monday #32 – fiction of 140 characters or less.  Our weekly challenge of brevity.

This week’s picture:

And this week’s story:

I put my religion in storage to feel more modern. But faith followed into the box and my new modernity did nothing for my new emptiness.

Book 2 update: The title will probably be “Voices in the Water.”  It’s a supernatural conspiracy thriller.  I have two main characters, three if you count the dead woman.  I have the underlying conspiracy.  What I don’t have is a bad guy…  still working on that one.  I’m also looking for that twist to make the plot more than a rise, climax, rise-again borefest.  It’s coming, I can feel it.

As for GoL – When it came out on Amazon and Barnes and Noble I had a flurry of people let me know they were going to rush out and pick it up.  Several had even read the preview on Amazon and expressed interest based on that.  But the numbers still haven’t gone up.  I’m not sure if the books haven’t been purchased yet or if there is a different accounting system they go through.  The net effect, though, is to bum me out.  We’ll see how it goes.

There was an excellent post on Ben White’s web site concerning Twitter fiction (nano-fiction to you and me) and how change makes all the difference.  Well worth a few moments of reading.

A note for my visitors to Microfiction Monday posts: I visit quite a lot of your sites.  Unfortunately, if the site requires me to log-in using either a Wordpress or Google long-in, I don’t leave comments.  Those two lead to links I’d rather keep separate from this blog.  Personally, I prefer the ability to leave comments with name, link, and email address if requested.  I just wanted to let you know that if you left me a comment, I definitely visited your site.

Another Monday, another microfiction.  Stony River dares us to tell a story in 140 characters or less given a picture.

This week’s picture:

And this week’s 140 characters:

Cleaning out the cellar was a domestic affair, something earthy and of the home. Something safe. Yet behind the pickles lurked a surprise.

And this week’s book plug: If you buy THIS BOOK, your excess pounds will melt away.  You will also experience fulfilling male enhancement – it’s better than Enzyte.

And this week’s blog plug: Read about in medias res so the next time someone says it, you’ll know what they’re talking about.