It Came in the Night

The dishes will toast.
The dust bunnies will mingle.
The socks will eat their young.
The beds will make whoopie.
The laundry will pucker.
The vacuum will sulk.
Let them.
The words are hungry.

More Words to Write By

From writer Gary Lutz:

"...there needs to be an intimacy between the words, a togetherness that has nothing to do with grammar or syntax but instead has to do with the very shapes and sounds, the forms and contours, of the gathered words. This intimacy is what we mean when we say of a piece of writing that it has a felicity—a fitness, an aptness, a rightness about the phrasing. The words in the sentence must bear some physical and sonic resemblance to each other—the way people and their dogs are said to come to resemble each other, the way children take after their parents, the way pairs and groups of friends evolve their own manner of dress and gesture and speech. A pausing, enraptured reader should be able to look deeply into the sentence and discern among the words all of the traits and characteristics they share. The impression to be given is that the words in the sentence have lived with each other for quite some time, decisive time, and have deepened and grown and matured in each other’s company—and that they cannot live without each other."

See full text of his speech to Columbia University, The Sentence is a Lonely Place.

Feeling Feisty

My tools.

Nice word: Feisty. Mix a decent mood with a shaker of belligerence, a tablespoon of cat-scratch and a dollop of uppity, and Tah Dah, FEISTY.

Can't say why I feel feisty today, except that: 1) I've found a Portland critique group to join after months of searching; 2) I've discovered a friendly local writer who has a webpage full of resources to help others; and 3) I generally want to quash all negativity. I wish I had the kind of personality that prevents bad thoughts from seeping under the ball cap (wearing mine now. GO UB!). I've got a psychobabble friend who says it's okay to have an open mind. Generally, staying open to ideas is a positive attribute. But, she says, be careful who you let come in and sit on your mind couch and eat chips.

"Hey, you prickly, devil-horned editor who says my writing is graduate-school dribble. Take a hike!" Whew, that was easy. Better yet, treat the couch hog like a blood-sucking vampire (no, I don't write about vampires), and refuse them welcome in the first place.

Okay, time for a little self-assessment of why I want to continue clawing (see, cat-scratching comes in handy) for a career as a writer:

--I've written some books. Hey, that was fun.
--I have way too many ideas for several more. Whoa, Silver. (I loved the Lone Ranger as much as parenthetical material).
--I could actually get paid to do this someday.
--I almost care less if I get paid to do this someday. Emphasis on the almost.
--I love filling up spiral notebooks and reading things I like in them later.
--Writing makes me happy.

So, on with the feisty show, and maybe a few words worth a few cents. This one's gratis.