Dear Page

[flash fiction]

Dear Page/ Dear Screen/ Dear Void,

I'm writing because I haven't written. You poor neglected beast.

I haven't been writing but I've been thinking my head.

Thoughts that are better left unsaid.

Those hasty generalizations and anxious bursts of feeling that can only cause trouble. Averse to trouble as I am I have a way of finding it, probably because of those thoughts. They nip at my heels like playful pups with their sharp milk teeth. Like cats they crawl up to my chest while I'm sleeping and suck my breath. 

They are the thoughts entertained by anyone. Or so I must assume. I can't confirm that because I won't let them see the light of day, poor children chained under the porch while I enjoy the cookies and milk. 

They starve of neglect, but wither and do not pass. Rather I pass them in the street and deny them coins. 

They sneak into my bed at night and leave changelings.

They are disagreeable. Personas non gratas. uninvited guests. But their voices twitter outside the windows and their nails scrape the panes. I leave them in the cold. They never let me forget it.

So I am sorry I have not written. I do miss you. 

Love,

Me

Cherries

Flash fiction

She knew this was supposed to be like eating summer cherries, fleeting but sweet, the hard pits something to roll around in her mouth until all that remained were small bitter shreds of flesh, like the hole in the gums when a molar comes out. It was supposed to be sweet like that, pregnant with its own nostalgia. 

It wasn't terrible, torturous, or an aching grief. But instead of sweet cherries, it was the cherries you buy from the supermarket because they are plump and taut, a deep ripe red, and you buy lots of them because it is mid-summer, and these prices won't last, and you remove them from their ziplocked plastic bag and wash them in a colander because then they look like a feast. But when you finally try one, they are neutral. The texture is right, but somehow modern living has chlorinated out the sweetness.

You roll the cherry against the edge of your teeth, stripping the flesh free of the pit, because maybe, if you eat a whole mouthful, you can conjure the flavor. But no, just cherry-textured neutral. Not sour enough or overripe enough to return to the store. Any romance in the fruit has been lost as a thin film over the asphalt that stretches from the orchards in Washington to the air-conditioned interior habitats of summer in the desert.

So you are left with a pit, shreds of cherry in your teeth, and a colander load of subtle disappointment. 

That's how it was for her. It didn't sour her or leave her hardened. Just fed, in the least satisfying kind of way.

What my Students Learned from NaNoWriMo

Summary of what I'm seeing in their reflections...

• Dedication to a long-term goal and the realities of time.
• How difficult it is to create a well-crafted story.
• Daily discipline and how it can add up to amazing things.
• Giving oneself permission to explore... giving oneself the freedom to not finish the story, to drop characters, to add in surprising ideas and elements into their writing.
• Becoming involved in their novels made them realize how much fun it can be to lose oneself in one's story... they liked that feeling of immersion in the characters, plot and setting.
• Genre-bending.  Fictionalization of reality; begging, borrowing and stealing ideas and making them their own; "lectures" on relationships, etc. 
• Google Drive.  
• How conversations with friends and supporters can move us forward. 
• Things don't have to be perfect for there to be a nugget of awesomeness in there somewhere.
• Even something unfinished can have value.
• Accomplishing a long-term goal that has been hard-won feels fantastic.
• Sometimes planning leads to awesomeness.  Sometimes planning leads to frustration and stiltedness.  
• Our minds are surprisingly fertile.
• For some people, noveling is not their optimum medium of creativity.
• It is surprising what we can accomplish when we invest time and energy in our own minds.
• It feels good to tell a story that NEEDS to be told.

When I look at this list, I realize that I didn't teach most of this in the traditional sense.  We discussed some of these ideas during the process; I had lots of conversations with students.  But mostly, I feel like I offered them the space and opportunity to experience this learning for themselves.  That's the beauty of NaNoWriMo:  when we trust our students' minds, we see that indeed they can discover their own paths.  I provide time, structure ,goal-setting, strategies... they provide the rest.  They are not empty vessels.  I wish there was time in all my classes to take them through NaNoWriMo.

Accidental Rip-Off. NaNoWriMo Tragedy.

Like I needed any bad news today. 

I went to the library catalog online to see if they had a copy of the children's book about the boy who swam with the seals, which is supposedly based on a Chinook story, which I was hoping would help me with my story. 

So, turns out after searching "boy" AND "seals" that The Secret of Roan Inish is basically a rip-off of my book.  Or actually, my book is a semi-rip-off of that movie, except the problem is that I have never seen this movie. 

Rgh. 

I mean, my "novel" (i.e. collection of disjointed scenes and concepts which is working its way toward being a novel) is a little more complicated.  There are two strands written in two different POV's.  The first is a girl who is a double amputee & competitive swimmer, and sort of her coming of age story and story of getting her first prosthetic legs at an older age.  The second strand is a story she is writing or creating in her mind in which her mother turns out to be a selkie (but they are called something else in my book-- they are sea lion people) and it turns out that instead of losing her brother in the ocean as a baby, he transformed into his selkie form and has grown up in their community, and is now a leader of sorts and is figuring out how to transform into his human form.  Then I haven't decided whether in that story she actually figures out that she is a selkie, too.  I think she probably does, because why not?  It's all part of her fantasy world that she is creating.  I think there will be tsunamis in both stories-- one more devastating than the other.

So, now my question is, do I go watch the movie just to make sure I'm not completely ripping it off?  Or do I refuse to see it just so I am not tempted to rip it off or refer to it in any way, shape or form?  Or do I incorporate the movie into my novel purposefully?  The third option could make some sense, because both stories are based in the selkie and chinook mythology anyway already.  But I don't like the idea of popular culture references because they go dead after a while for the reader-- they date the story.

Rgh.  Just when I need to be chugging out amazing word count which is going to wrap up this sucker...