--CAN I BUY A VOWEL?


…I have three new stories up:
--“Solitary” At Doorknobs and BodyPaint
--“A Colony of Termites” @ Housefire
--And “Black Notes” @ Pure Slush.
All of them are also here under “Words In Print.”
The latter story is a combination of two I keep coming back to—dementia/Alzheimer’s and lost innocence. Maybe I need to write it in novel form. We’ll see.

…In the tub the other day (what is it about the soothing feel of gurgling water?), I diagrammed the new novel, or did a rough outline of it. Since then, it’s been on my mind, which is good, because the piece needs to be flushed out quite a bit and, also, I find, when I can hold off from jumping in and just writing something, my subconscious works on my conscious, creating a new awareness, so that a lot of the things I see, read or hear become useful fodder for the writing. I watch a show with a blind person in it and think, "Maybe I'll make the sister blind." I read a story about a ghost and suddenly it makes perfect sense to add a delusional character who thinks she sees the ghost of her dead twin, and then it makes me have to come up with a subplot about why the twin died and what makes this person see her dead twin.
It's all quite fun, actually.

…My daughter and I watched two films. One was, “Flipped,” an adorable little coming of age number about falling in love in the year 1963. Evidentially it was adopted from a YA book of the same name. It falls on the cusp of cheesiness, but I bet you won’t be able to watch it and not go “Aw,” several times.
The other film, “Afterschool” was a raw, brutal look at kids in a boarding school who—materially—have it all, but who’ve become desensitized to living for the sake of living, without stimulants, both narcotic and sexual. It’s sort of a “Less Than Zero” reworking for a new generation. Beware: should you decide to watch it. There are many parts which will leave you dry-mouthed, squirming and wishing you weren’t watching it.

…It’s a gray-green morning, misty. The lake wears a wrinkled mauve face. There are no boats. The eagle is somewhere else. A lonesome dog is howling sporadically. The environmental state of things is telling me it’s to be a sad Monday, but I don’t believe that. It’s going to be fantastic.
I can just feel it.
Can’t you?

…Here are some things I like at the start of a new week:

"I will make my soul an envelope for your soul~ And my heart a residence for your beauty~ And my breast a grave for your sorrows~ I shall love you" ~Gibran

‘'Worry looks around, Sorry looks back, Faith looks up.”

"From the beginning, the soul of you and I has been one" ~Rumi

“I have so many words, but not enough beds. So they stand and fall into obedient line, chatterbox gossips with the bionic mouth and the old sleeplessness. But to your name they fold up in a cross: the arch is a bow of great pain. And so reduced, they find a place.” Emily Filocamo

"I like to think of art as living information. You simply go to it and its emotional relevance with just happen to you." Ryan Adams

--"Wisdom is benefiting from other people's pain."
--"Hard and difficult seasons are just the chapters of what you're going through at the time, they're not the story. How you get through those chapters determines the rest of the story." Jeff Knight