A Spork in the Road

The anthology Last Drink Bird Head, edited by Jeff VanderMeer and Ann VanderMeer, is wending its way towards limited hardcover publication later this year, if all goes well, followed by a trade paperback next year.

The anthology comprises flash fiction from a wide variety of authors, including moi, and promises to be a fun, fascinating read. Each piece is the author’s interpretation of “Last Drink Bird Head” — whatever that may be.

I’m proud to say that proceeds will go to ProLiteracy.org.

Further bulletins as events warrant!

Cancer swag pays off real-time in the blog! Recently Clarion pal Rick Polney sent me two books (thus tipping the swag balance back in favor of the East Coast, oh-ho!), including Ursula K. LeGuin’s Steering the Craft: Exercises and Discussions on Story Writing for the Lone Navigator or the Mutinous Crew, in which I found the perfect writing exercise.

Simple but difficult: write a descriptive page, 250-300 words, without using any adjectives or adverbs. No dialogue. Try it and link to yours in the comments of this post.

LeGuin calls the exercise “chastity,” for obvious reasons.

Here is mine:

A chair huddled beside a table. Beside it crouched a twin, and so around the perimeter. The chairs formed a quorum and held their council. A runner crawled across the expanse of oak, then draped at the ends. Tassels quivered in the air.

A window yawned from the end of the room, inviting breezes. Muslin billowed, breathing in the summer. Flies drifted into, across, around, out of the room, buzzed their harmonies and escaped. They found neither butter nor sugar nor fly-paper, thus found neither reason to tarry nor reason to flee.

The sideboard bore a teapot whose belly contained air. Vines encircled its handle and lid. It dreamed in silence, conjuring steam and honey, the tang of lemons, leaves that steeped and released notes into the afternoon. Its neighbor languished at the edge: a basket of flowers that aimed for reality and missed by a yard of silk. The blooms collected dust and the corpses of flies that had surrendered to the gloom.

Two sofas squared off. Each claimed the rug, could defend an edge. Each held the loyalty of a brigade of pillows. The war stretched across years. No one in the room imagined its conclusion.

The rug slept. It recalled the history of the room from drywall to redecoration. It hoped for traffic but accepted breezes, dust, accumulation. Accepted the anticipation that permeated the house, awaiting a destiny, awaiting the action that would transform them into an existence they could not imagine but would inhabit with joy and abandon.

In a moment, I’m going to ramble about high-value tasks vs. low-value tasks and the role of inefficiency in the creative process, but first:

It’s a bright and beautiful Saturday morning, and I’ve slept off most of my steroid hangover. I feel a little prickly and achy from the poisons still coursing through my veins, but mentally I’m more alert today than yesterday and feeling positive.

On chemo Fridays I tend to have the intellectual force of a radish.

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Courage utterly opposes the bold hope that this is such fine stuff the work needs it, or the world. Courage, exhausted, stands on bare reality; this writing weakens the work. You must demolish the work and start over. You can save some of the sentences, like bricks. It will be a miracle if you can save some of the paragraphs, no matter how excellent in themselves or hard-won. You can waste a year worrying about it, or you can get it over with now. (Are you a woman, or a mouse?)
— Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

I’m rereading The Writing Life, which profoundly affected me when I first read it almost a decade ago, and which is affecting me even more profoundly this time around.

I have a motto: “To go faster, slow down.” This applies in coding software, and in typing, and in making sandwiches, and in learning a language. And in writing.

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