The Drabble put up some flash fiction from me the other day. Go check them (and it) out: https://thedrabble.wordpress.com/2018/01/10/inversion/
writing
Here’s a little ditty…
So here’s a poem called “Thermodynamics” that Arsenic Lobster (which is just about the coolest journal name ever) put up.
On Creating People…
I’m going along, revising my book, my latest little book, by changing all the “stopped” and “plodded” to “stops”and “plods” and I hear these words, all these things my characters are saying to each other, the words that fly between them that I think I really only have some marginal responsibility for and mostly just kind of exist on their own, and I think:
Yes, I am glad you two exist.
(And I am glad I will spend years with you, writing the rest of your story.)
And I don’t really feel they are my creations anymore at all. They simply are. And now I will follow them, write down what they do.
It’s a bit like those other people, the ones who live in my house and kind of look like me.
It’s strange to look at them and just marvel:
You are people, all in your own right and such.
Yes, I just marvel at it all.
New(ish) Novel Available
It occurred to me yesterday that I never made a complete, edited version of my 2013 NaNoWriMo novel available on the site.
That story, retitled Right of Salvage, is now posted under novels. I have not and probably won’t be making it available through Lulu or Amazon, but may post eReader-friendly versions if there’s any demand for that sort of thing at all.
Thanks and enjoy!
Here They Come…
See, this is why I’m not a good blogger.
I went about a month without posting anything here and now I’m getting ready to dump three different things on the web at once.
My process is just too irregular. Ideas come in strange surges at unexpected times. That’s just the way my brain works, I guess, and there’s no point fighting it.
I used to make all sorts of resolutions and pledges to myself–like quitting video games all together, which was sheer madness–because I figured it would make me more productive, but I think I’m finally accepting my process for what it is.
Sometimes the field has to lay fallow for a time, but it will always yield a crop again in the future…in its own time.
So, strap yourselves in. Multiple writings inbound!
A last parenthetical disclaimer, though: I’m still working (and will be for the foreseeable future) on my big literary project (destined to be somewhere in the neighborhood of ten novels) and I’m holding back any serious poetry for possible publication (look for me in Corner Club Press and Arsenic Lobster in the coming weeks) so I’m posting mostly fluff and lighter fare. Sorry for those of you who wanted to be depressed, but you could always go read this. (Get it, the paragraph was loaded with parentheticals while being simultaneously parenthetical to the main post. I’m a genius, right!)
uninhabitable
we’ve been burned out
we
the city you knew
a bruise in history
broken capillaries
speaking to discreet and private calamities
ripe for forgetting
it’s horrifying, creation
atoms in the asphalt buzz
haunting
and we shutter up the windows
board the doors
keep the disharmonies out
pray quietly
for another hour
another season
By way of shameless self-promotion, I offer this.
shoddy metaphor (unremarkable, given the theme)
what’s in there
that hasn’t been ransacked
metaphysics tied up
in half-baked abstracts
stitched together into
relativistic ethical shamanism
it’s just a bucket sloshing over
and all the good apples have been picked out already
woe unto he who searches through
with probing fingers
to the rusty bottom
if
you,
slave to inertia,
plod on
a noisy, cumbersome exercise
but somewhere is made ready
a secret legion
with visions
of crystal towers
cities of justice
and above all
alive inside
with the possibility of myth
the epic
once all the purveyors of painless outrage
have spent their tedious little words
they
the paragons
these
will be left
standing
integrity riveted to their iron frames
the superstructure of that which they have chosen,
an immutable certainty,
heroic in their steadfastness
the last great meaning
Others
They have their drumbeats
and we, our own
autotuned and synthesized
meticulously focus-grouped
slipped through panel after panel
of experts on cool
and soccer mom surrogates
each bass tone
scientifically balanced
anodized
and vulcanized
we drain the life from it through plastic tubes
and pipe in a patented Vivacity Substitute(TM)
until it has all the sheen and luster of genuine music
with half the fat
and this stale, lame thing
we hold up as a shield
against the hard, sharp edges of their bone knives
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