Tag: writing

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Rough Writers Anthology, 2021

Well, you know how I was talking about expressing gratitude for 2021 even though it was a challenging year? One of the challenging things about it for me was producing the Rough Writers Anthology, 2021.

Since the 2019 Anthology was a surprise and the 2020 Anthology was working out the kinks, I kind-of expected that 2021 would be the year that we had everything dialed in. But instead, it felt like we had to drag this project over the finish line kicking and screaming. I’m still a bit surprise that we managed to make it happen.

This year, rather than use an image as the prompt, a writing prompt was selected by members through a blind draw. The prompt was, “write a story in which the main character has a secret.” The subtitle for the book became, “Don’t Tell.”

When I started working on my story (around this time last year) I had been re-reading Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype by Clarissa Pinkola Estés and was inspired to go for my own riff on “The Red Shoes” fable.

I find the idea of the wild woman archetype and the way that Dr. Estés uses fairytales and fables to illustrate the tension between women’s instinctual knowledge and the way that knowledge is devalued and repressed in our rational, patriarchal society very compelling.

I wanted to tell a story about a woman who was tamed, but who yearned to reclaim her true, wild nature. The conflict arises in that she is so disconnected from her true self that she doesn’t understand that’s what is happening.

The irony is, that over the course of working on the story, some of the elements in it came up in real life. So let me take this opportunity to say that:

This is a work of fiction. Unless otherwise indicated, all the names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents in this story are either the product of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Anyway, I finally got my author copies, so it’s time for a give-away!

To enter, you must be a subscriber to this blog and comment below by 5:00pm PST on Friday, January 21. I have a limited number of copies, so depending on the number of comments, I may have to figure out some sort of raffle. I will respond to your comment if you are a winner so check back on Monday, January 24 for instructions on how to claim your copy.

You can find all the Rough Writers Anthologies on Amazon.

A complete set of editorial proofs – don’t know where all the final books have gone.

If you use Goodreads, please add the Rough Writers Anthology, 2021 to your “to read” cue.

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Anyone Having Chips for Thanksgiving?

It’s a special Monday installment of Flash Fiction Friday.

I wrote this little story for my writing group about a fraught Thanksgiving dinner.

When I presented it, I got a really great reaction, so I decided to share it with you here.

Sam and Chip

When Mary called Sam in early October to invite him to Thanksgiving dinner, she made sure to ask if he would like to bring any friends with him. She didn’t want a repeat of last year’s blow up about not being properly invited and everyone assuming that he would be alone.

She was titillated when he responded, “It’ll just be me and my Chip,” and couldn’t wait to tell Frank.

Frank warned her that Sam might not mean what she was thinking and that she might want to keep it to herself anyway because no matter what Sam meant by “his Chip,” he would probably be bent out of shape with Mary for sharing something that he thought of as his news.

Mary hated when Frank was right, but agreed that caution was the better part of valor, especially when it came to Sam. So, when the rest of the family asked if Sam was coming to Thanksgiving, Mary would simply answer, “Yes.”

Sam had been nurturing the chip on his shoulder since last Thanksgiving. When he arrived at Mary’s he had to duck and turn sideways slightly so that his chip could fit through the door.

His eight-year-old niece, Patty, came running up to hug him and a piece fell off. He quickly reached down to gather up the crumbly bits and carefully smoothed them back into place on his chip.

Sam strode around the living room with his chip, waiting for someone to make a sassy comment. At one point he almost clocked Uncle Marty with it, but somehow the old guy ducked at the exact right moment.

When they sat down for dinner, Sam carefully and ceremoniously removed the chip from his shoulder and set it in the middle of the table. With a smug grin he looked around. He waited. No one said anything.

Then Mary set the turkey down right on top of it and it shattered. Chips of Sam’s chip went everywhere. It was the moment that he had been waiting for.

May your Thanksgiving be full of love and friendship and community. I hope that however you celebrate, no one is serving up their chips!

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National Authors Day

Since today is National Authors Day, I thought what better time to get back to writing my blog after an unexpectedly long hiatus.

One thing I love even more than reading is talking about what I’ve read with other lovers of reading. I feel an instant bond when I discover someone who has the same passion for a certain author; those people have a very special place in my heart. I also love when someone can turn me on to an author who I haven’t read before or give me a good reason to reconsider one who I had dismissed.

So, let’s take this opportunity to talk about authors and National Author’s Day!

What is National Author’s Day?

The purpose of National Authors Day is to take a moment to appreciate those authors who have written some of your favorite works.

The philosopher Michel Foucault once asked, “What is an author?” What is provocative about that question is that maybe someone who you would think of as an author – Homer for example, never actually wrote anything down. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines an author as, “the writer of a literary work (such as a book),” but also as “one that originates or creates something.”

An author (who writes things down) whose work I appreciate, Stephen Kotler, likes to say that reading books gives you the most bang for your buck, so to speak, because the amount of time that has gone into researching, synthesizing, and presenting the information in a book is exponentially greater than the time it takes to read it. Books are like a superfood.

Although someone doesn’t necessarily need to write a book to be an author, for our purposes today, it may be more fun to think about those who do.

Photo by Yannick Pulver on Unsplash

The History of National Authors Day

Unlike many this-or-that days, National Author’s Day actually has an interesting history. In 1928, Nellie Verne Burt McPherson, the president of the Illinois Women’s Club sent a letter of appreciation to the author of a book she had just read. The author responded and that exchange inspired her to establish an official day, “… to recognize all the people who have contributed to American literature.”

In 1929 the General Federation of Women’s Clubs approved observance of National Authors Day as a way to recognize American authors. The day was acknowledged by the U.S. Department of Commerce in 1949.

Some of My Favorite Authors and Books

For the sake of getting the conversation started, here are some authors of books who I appreciate:

  • Ken Kesey, Sometimes A Great Notion.
  • Kurt Vonnegut
  • Barbara Kingsolver’s early work like The Bean Trees and Animal Dreams.
  • Deborah Harkness’s Witches Trilogy (it’s up to four books, I’m eagerly awaiting the fifth).
  • Elizabeth Gilbert, City of Girls (no, I didn’t know she wrote fiction either, but she does, and you should read it).
  • Benjamin Dreyer, Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style. Yes, I read grammar books cover to cover. This one made me laugh out loud on multiple occasions.
  • Sylvia Plath. I just recently read The Bell Jar for the first time and I have a lot to say about how much I loved it.
  • Larry McMurtry. I may have actually read almost everything he’s written. If you haven’t read any of his books already, start now.

“The inconvenient – even distressing – lack of a Wanda means that I’m apt to be writing a one-character book, that one character being someone I have only a modest and flickering interest in: myself.”  

Larry McMurtry, Roads: Driving America’s Great Highways, p.22.

National Author’s Day Activities

If you’re feeling up for celebrating National Author’s Day with me, here are some suggested activities:

  • Tweet at your favorite author (or just follow them on Twitter – it is one of the best uses of the platform as far as I’m concerned).
  • Buy yourself a new book or give one of your favorites to a friend.
  • Be your own author, write something! (November also happens to be National Novel Writing Month, aka: NaNoWriMo.)

In celebration of National Authors Day, thank you for reading this post!

Also, if you would care to share, I would love to know some of your favorite authors and why.

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Flash Fiction Friday – Let Sleeping Cats Lie

It seemed like a good time for another installment of Flash Fiction Friday.

This is the prompt that my story is based on:

Write the beginning of a story that takes place in the protagonist’s home. Use at least 3 senses to describe your scene or set an emotion. Please write 350 words max.

I was feeling onery the day I wrote this and wanted to write something that would create an unpleasant or at least uncomfortable impression.

Let me know what you think!

Let Sleeping Cats Lie

With a sigh, she turned the key and pushed. The door opened three inches, then stopped. Crap, those damn cats must have knocked something over, she thought to herself.

Taking a deep breath and bracing her shoulder against the door, she shoved. One, two, three. It budged just a bit more. At least there was now enough of an opening that she could squeeze herself inside.

Gripping the door frame with one hand and the doorknob with the other, she stepped up onto a pile of junk mail, books, and empty takeout containers. As she began to hoist herself upwards, a black flash shot past her and she fell.

“Darnit Jasper! You had better get back here!”

She named all of her black cats Jasper, it was just easier that way.

Refocusing on the task in front of her, she pushed her substantial girth up onto the mound that was blocking the door, teetering cautiously atop it.

The reek of ammonia sucker punched her. She attempted to blink the sting away. This was another reason why she didn’t like to leave her house, any length of time in fresh air intensified the cat urine stench when she returned.

She told herself that her accumulation of things was actually a budget-friendly, cat-centric decorating technique – using found objects to craft a multi-level, feline wonderland. But the boxes she collected for the cardboard cat fort she once intended to build had become a haphazard catchall.   

Twisting, she pushed the door shut before prying eyes caught a glimpse inside. Darkness engulfed her. Last summer she had covered the windows with aluminum foil to try to keep the house cooler. It had been sort of cozy until her electricity was shut off, now it was like living in a cave. This wasn’t a problem for the cats, they could see in the dark. She told herself that the darkness was just another way that she was providing for her feline companions.

The avalanche had thrown off her established route to the sofa. She shuffled ahead slowly. After bumping into a familiar pattern of knee and waist high piles, she arrived at her destination. Her hands fumbled for the one, clear spot where she could sit. It was covered with sleeping cats.

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The Writing Sprint Challenge Prompt Was: Mercy

Have you ever participated in a writing sprint challenge?

Neither had I until a couple of weeks ago. Someone was doing one on Instagram and I signed up right away because there were prizes. There are probably a lot of things that I can be motivated to do for the sake of artisanal smelly candles. I should remember that. 

Ok, back to the writing sprint.

The challenge was that there were prompts for each day and you would write for a set amount of time and then post on Instagram for accountability. The writing sprint prompt one day really captured my attention and I decided to turn it into this blog post. It was just one word: mercy.

Mercy. It isn’t an unusual or exotic word. But it struck me that this is not a word that I use or hear a lot. It’s not really in the zeitgeist the way that forgiveness is for example. It’s an ordinary word, why did it feel uncommon? What thoughts/ideas/feelings does the word evoke?

My first thought was that mercy correlates to surrender. Not that there is some sort of causal relationship, they’re not two sides of the same coin; but maybe they live in the same room.

So where does that correlation come from?

I started to pull my idea apart. Mercy is an act from a position of power, isn’t it? Whereas surrender seems to be something that the one who is being acted upon would do. Asking for mercy is a means of surrender.

That got me thinking about affirmations and all that jargon. Forgiveness is very trendy these days. But what about mercy?

Mercy means that you were in an acknowledged position of power and chose to relinquish your advantage. That rather than impose your will, you showed restraint. I suppose that mercy takes a good deal more awareness and self-control than forgiveness.

By the time that you get to forgiveness the thing is done. You stayed strong and kept plowing ahead with a single-minded determination, then when it’s over, you can evaluate and choose to forgive.

Mercy requires evaluating the impact of your actions while in process. That’s no fun.

If you follow the etymology of mercy all the way back to its Latin root, you find the word merx which means “wares” or “merchandise.” There is something tangible about giving up one’s advantage in a power dynamic, isn’t there?

All that being said, I wonder if we all couldn’t use a little more mercy in our hearts, even more so than forgiveness.

Just because something is within our power to make happen doesn’t mean that we always need to. Maybe have mercy for your feet by not wearing those shoes (you know which ones I’m talking about – they are really cute). Rather than say the unkind thing that you will apologize for later, demonstrate mercy by not saying it at all. You could even get meta with it – I’m thinking things like buying hand soap at the refill-your-own-container store (mercy) instead of putting another plastic container in the recycling bin (forgiveness).

What do you think? Did I get too in-between on this?

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Flash Fiction Friday – Prose to Poetry

Did you know that April is National Poetry Month? I love to read poetry though I don’t do it regularly. Last year, I tried to post a poem (not written by me) every day on social media. The best part about the endeavor is that it got me reading and thinking about poetry again and I’ve been playing around with the form here and there ever since.

A while back, the prompt from my writing group was:

I want you to paint a picture with words. Set the scene where the action is taking place. Where is the character in your story: mall, bookstore, the kitchen. It could also be France, Italy, or the desert! You could describe a house, room in the house.

I knew that there would be roses. That was about it. There was no story, no plot. I just wanted to create something indulgently descriptive. It felt more like writing poetry than prose fiction. So after I presented it to my group, I decided to take the original 350-word draft and turn it into a poem. It was really fun to take the sentences apart, just keeping the juiciest words and essential ideas, and to play with the typesetting – using line breaks, spacing, and punctuation in ways that I would never let anyone get away with in text.

Here is the result. I hope you enjoy it.

She stepped into the garden

The loamy, chocolate brown soil
     hugged her ghostly bare feet
          the way that children hug each other –
                                                                      in an ecstatic, joyful embrace

Unkempt rosemary sentinels
     guarded the open-air hide-away and
     brushed her threadbare, calico-printed skirt,
lush branches of spiky green leaves releasing their spell
                                                                               … remember, remember …

As she inhaled deeply,
a long-forgotten door in her addled mind
     began to open

The air was still heavy with the chill of the previous night
     and she shuddered
     (did that door create a draft?)

Morning’s golden rays
     flooded into the small clearing,
illuminating a stone bench
     that resembled a leopard, lounging
     on a low-hanging Buffalothorn branch
Somber black granite shone like polished obsidian,
     the leopard luxuriating in the sunlight
          as if alive

Eleven paces to the beckoning beast
     (how did she know that?)
Eleven paces to the warmth that the stone creature offered
     (how long since she felt warm?)
But she didn’t move, 
     hesitant to mar the pristine surface of the undisturbed, tender dirt path
     with her footprints

Roses the size of outstretched hands lined the path
The petals,
     yellow near the center,
          graduating to peach,
               then to salmon,
     a coral flourish dancing along the edges
Blossoms stretching toward the morning sun,
     asking it to lighten the burden of last night’s dew

For one bloom, the sunlight came too late
Its laden petals could no longer hold the weight
     and collapsed

She sprung toward the disintegrating rose,
attempting to capture it
     before the pieces
     fluttered to the ground

Crushing the petals in her hands,
     the heady fragrance engulfed her
Her timid demeanor
     evaporated in rose-scented sunlight

She strode confidently to,
     and then reclined upon,
the sunlit cat

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Rough Writers 2020 Anthology

rough writers 2020 anthology

I have an exciting announcement for y’all today: we have just published the Rough Writers 2020 Anthology: A Field Day for Creativity. This is the third Rough Writers Anthology (they published a collection in 2017, before I joined the club) and I think we’re really starting to get the hang of it.

You may remember last year’s post about the 2019 Anthology. Well, as we all know, no good deed goes unpunished and I agreed to serve as Editor for this year’s anthology as well. At least this way, I was able to apply some of the lessons that I learned the hard way putting together the 2019 book.

The subtitle, A Field Day for Creativity, was proposed by one of our members as a response to the prompt and our club’s innovative way of applying Toastmaster’s curriculum to our creative writing pursuits.

Rough Writers 2020 Anthology writing prompt
This image was our writing prompt. Photo by Branislav Belko on Unsplash.

Intrigued? 

Good. Here’s an excerpt from my story:

Mrs. Bistone’s perfectly rendered exterior was her armor. It was a barrier both invisible and impenetrable. People were so taken with the apparition in front of them that they didn’t even notice what she was getting them to do, or say, or agree to. Her directives tended to be delivered in the form of questions, those kinds of small requests that would be rude to decline. She wouldn’t say she was manipulative. She just understood that by exercising absolute control over how she presented herself, she could exercise the same control over that to which she presented herself.

Everyone who had met her would say that they knew her, that they were dear friends. They would describe her poise and immaculate appearance in detail, but no one could ever recall one personal thing about her – where she grew up, what her interests were beyond the banal hobbies of any woman of means, or even the date of her birthday.  Moreover, no one ever seemed to notice, which was the way that Mrs. Bistone preferred it.

Aren’t you dying to know how that has anything to do with the photo?

Well guess what? I’m giving away several copies of the Rough Writers 2020 Anthology!

All you have to do is be a subscriber to this blog and leave a comment below by 5:00pm on Friday, November 20.

I only have a limited number of author copies, so depending on the response, I’ll come up with some random way to select winners.

If you don’t want to leave it up to chance, you can order your own copy on Amazon (and if you don’t want to use the hyperlink, just put “Rough Writers 2020 Anthology” in your Amazon search bar). There is even a Kindle version if you prefer.

Monday, November 23 at 7:00 pm is our official book launch on Zoom. If you would like to find out more about the diverse voices who contributed stories to this volume, please join us – just leave a comment below and I will send you the sign-in details.

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Flash Fiction Friday – Cat Mask

Ok guys, here’s another delight for you for Flash Fiction Friday. It’s been a tense week and I thought you might enjoy a little something to lighten the mood. Something about a cat mask maybe.

This time the exercise given to my writing group involved exploring using a point of view in storytelling.

Our instructions were: write a scene involving a central character and one or more strangers (people the character has never met before) using either the first-person, third-person limited, or third-person omniscient point of view. Try to pick a point of view that you don’t normally use. Also, try to limit the use of dialog, instead using descriptive language to show how people behave and interact.

I had forgotten what I wrote for this exercise and when I pulled it out, I laughed out loud. Hopefully, you will too. 

Cat Mask

Ugh, what is that guy looking at?  He is totally staring at me in a super creepy way. As if I can’t tell just because he is wearing a mask. As bizarre as it seems, wearing a mask these days is not creepy. But even with everyone’s face covered, you can still tell when someone is giving off a creepy vibe.

That’s one thing I mostly love about COVID times, the mask wearing. I feel very conspicuous, but in a completely anonymous way. I’ve taken to wearing the flashiest masks possible, confident in the knowledge that if anyone had to describe me later, they would say something along the lines of, “Oh, she was wearing a bejeweled Día de los Muertos mask,” and that would be it.

By the same token, this guy’s interest in me goes beyond delight at the fact that today’s embroidered kitty-cat mask sports very realistic-looking whiskers. And, yes, of course I accessorized my accessory with cat-eye sunglasses. And no, I am not planning on taking them off inside of the store, it is part of the look.  Geez!

I planned my entire ensemble today as an expression of my inner cattiness. The cat-eye sunglasses and be-whiskered mask are just the icing on the cake. It is finally cool enough to wear a sweater and I have the perfect cardigan with a faux fur collar and cuffs that can be pulled down over my hands. Fuzzy slippers seemed like completely appropriate footwear for the occasion. The only problem I had when I was getting dressed was deciding on the right pants to wear. In the end, I wound up going with … um … well shoot, this is embarrassing.

I may have been so excited about my whisker mask that I might have gotten distracted and forgotten to put on pants before I left the house. Yikes! Well alright creepy guy, you win. I suppose a chubby, middle-aged lady prancing through the Trader Joes parking lot without any pants on would get my attention as well.

At least no one will know that it’s me!

P.S. If anyone knows where I can get a cat face mask with whiskers, let me know!

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Fresh Flash Fiction

The other week, my writing group had a flash fiction exercise. We were to write 350 words on the photo below.  That was it. The entire prompt.

Photo by Starr Canon
www.Instagram.com/starrchez

I had a lot of fun writing my story and decided that I would share it with you here. Let me know what you think!

The Unbridled Fury of a Woman of a Certain Age

As I merged into freeway traffic, a smile spread across my face. Ah, this is what they mean when they say precision, German engineering.

The irony of driving a vehicle manufactured by the same company that built engines for the last fascist regime to nearly conquer the free world in order to escape from the current fascist takeover of the western United States is almost too much. I mean, if this car actually belonged to me and hadn’t just been stolen, I might not care about the militarized takeover of every major city on the western seaboard.

Unfortunately, I have the great misfortune of believing in the beautiful idea of constitutional, representative democracy. However flawed the execution of it has been over the past 200+ years, there has at least been a modicum of respect for the rule of law by those who would choose to usurp it. Today, the Constitution may as well be used paper in a golden toilet.

When I arrive at the nearest resistance encampment in the Sierras, the “baby on board” sticker in the rear window will guarantee my access. I was able to procure an older model station wagon, we will have enough seatbelts to take six (not including the driver) on protest runs. I just hope that the fact that I’m not actually a mom won’t keep me from being able to join the most effective resistance faction, the Wall of Moms.

People seem surprised that the most effective, most radical branch of the resistance is middle-aged women. That’s because the patriarchal hegemony doesn’t understand the superpowers that this segment of the population possesses. It turns out that women are born with a finite number of both eggs and fucks to give. They tend to run out around the same age. This is also around the time that women discover that they have the power of invisibility.  

Think about it, what would you do if you were invisible and out of fucks? Drink chardonnay and shoplift? I know, that was my plan too, until the fascists came to town.

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I Published a Book!

Rough Writers Anthology 2019:
Moments in Space & Time

Guys, something cool happened … I published a book!  Crazy right? Full disclosure, I didn’t WRITE a whole book, I published a book with my writing club. I did however write many parts of a book.  First, I contributed a story and then I somehow got tricked into being the editor. 

  • rough writers anthology 2019
    beautiful cover art courtesy of Ben Horak
This is the proof of the book, hense the “not for resale” stripe.

Once I had agreed, I found out that being the editor didn’t mean just working with the other authors on their stories and/or editing the manuscript, it also happened to include project managing the whole shebang and creating the other bits of text that go into a book (which I learned is called the front matter and back matter).

Since I have been on a bit of a hiatus from project managing, I may have taken a few things for granted and not kept as tight reigns on things as I used to.  Fortunately, I had a talented and motivated team working with me and we finally crossed all the t’s and dotted all the i’s and now we have a book!

The book is a collection of stories contributed by members of the Rough Writers Toastmasters club.  We named it the Rough Writers Anthology 2019 because we have some delusion (at least I do) that we will do this annually. Moments in Space & Time is a nod to the writing prompt.

Everyone wrote their story using the same photo as a prompt (I don’t have permission to publish the photo here, but it is in the back matter of the book).  One of the benefits of being the editor was that I had early access to read everyone’s work.  I was so entertained by the range of perspectives. Even the stories that sort-of took the same tack are very different. Some folks had a specific message that they wanted to get across.  I let the photo take me for a ride (it was a strange ride, don’t ask me how I got there).

Here is a little snippet from my story:

As Bill approached the clipboard girl, she eyed him up and down and shot a look to the man standing next to her who was roughly the size of a refrigerator. This girl could tell Bill was trouble from 50 yards. The refrigerator nodded. Bill was used to being aggressive and intimidating to girls to get his way, but her disdainful gaze and pet refrigerator made him feel very small as he approached. Clipboard girl was already on to his game.

from Carl’s Green Galaxy by Cynthia Gellis

Our book, the Rough Writers Anthology 2019: Moments in Space & Time is available on Amazon!  Mr. Man says that it is the perfect size for a stocking stuffer (wink, wink).  If you want me to get you a signed copy, comment below or message me and we can make that happen.

I hope you’ll check it out!