Afternoon off. Lee gave me the afternoon off yesterday. I fed the bebe, pumped her a snack, and took off. Dropped off movies, picked up a roll of quarters…ate lunch, wrote, watched LOTR:TFOTR again. Cinemark has no scruples about playing a flick until the sountrack hiccups, the jerks. Otherwise a great day. Came home. Bebe […]

Where do you get your ideas? Stop! Read “Snippet: Love” first if you’re going to read this one. …which is the under-two-hundred-word flash fiction (snippet) that I submitted to the Banshee studios contest (see April 17th). The theme of the contest for flash fiction is “journeys.” I decided not to go for the obvious choices,

Snippet: Love. She doesn’t ride rides or eat cotton candy. Love alone brings her. Or else prudence. Come time to tote up the balance, she has self-sacrifice on her side. Shit. Where’s her daughter? Acts like she’s the kid’s evil stepmother, often as she runs off. And the guys. Why couldn’t they let her stay

Words back from Banshee. Apparently the editors figured out where I have my blog–not that I make a secret of it–and read the post I put up: “All rights (I read your blog – nosy, aren’t I?) remain with the author – we put a copyright statement at the end of each piece with the

Pointless reply. Oh well. A forewarning of sex and uncomfortable issues. I read a couple of useless tirades–located at a bastion of geekines—over Lee’s shoulder last night: here are the things, they claimed, that men just wish women would know. And I went through the same cycle I always go through: humor, anger, self-questioning, more

Shhh. Everybody’s asleep but me! Ray can hold her tummy off the floor now for brief moments. She recognizes it when I copy what she’s doing — she thinks it’s funny. She can sit up for a short time, longer if you tuck a blanket around her. She still doesn’t sleep through the night. She

Snippets are addictive. Please note: wrassling with bebe foots and finners as I type. If more things happened to me on a daily basis, I wouldn’t have such an overactive imagination. Not that anybody would believe me if I said I’d been abducted by aliens at this point. So. I find myself sitting in front

Snippet: Theme and Other Insidious Obsessions. It’s not immediately apparent what it is that I’ll be spending the rest of my life writing about. Isn’t that a terrible sentence? I can’t help thinking about it, how terrible that sentence is, and how, at the end of my life as a writer, I may read that

Snippet: All the Things You Fear The fear of nightmares, of monsters under the bed, of the boogeyman in the closet: those are childhood fears. Childhood fears evolve, don’t they? One fears spiders, snakes, dogs, heights, enclosed spaces… Or of things more exotic. No matter. The little old woman cowering before me, humpbacked and–what’s the

When I die, I just wanna be DIRT! That was something that got passed around a bit in college. Anyway, Ray and I went on a picnic this afternoon. This, as it turns out, is not such a great idea on a Sunday afternoon. What’s with all these mooks fishing from a stocked pond? No