Flowah

flowah

So I joined a blog of Texas writers and we take turns posting on Mondays. (If you want to give it a look, here’s the link: https://thirdcoastwriters.wordpress.com/) It’s helping me to at least be a little more consistent with writing, which means this blog may be updated more consistently. (Hooray!) We decided to do themes and this month’s theme is “Describe the Indescribable.” Here’s my entry:

Flowah

The place is on the verge of being too warm. A couple more people, a few more smokers, and the air’d be too close, too thick. But for now, it’s comfortable, hazy in a way that feels like contentment. Just slightly sticky tables, a couple of beers, and two blokes in a pub.

But Harry’s determined to disturb the peace. “Come now, no backing out. Give us a definition.”

“But it ain’t –“ Tom rasped, taking a moment to clear his throat. Collect his thoughts. Pull himself from dampened atmosphere. “It ain’t the kinda thing that you can describe.”

“Try.” Harry wasn’t impressed.

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For the Love of a Sandwich

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In honor of this creepy holiday, here’s a “spooky” short story I wrote a few years ago. 🙂

The Crumptons were your average, happy family with one boy, one girl, three dogs, a ferret, and a toad named Phillipo. They lived in a charming two story house, complete with a delightful brick fireplace. The father would work, the mother would teach her children, and the animals would wreck good-natured havoc throughout the day. They lived by routine, right down to the very sandwiches they ate for lunch, which, of course, always consisted of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

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Riven

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(Image taken from: http://fm.cnbc.com/applications/cnbc.com/resources/img/editorial/2014/09/17/102010093-torn-family.1910×1000.jpg)

The door was open.

I hesitated halfway down the staircase, looking into the yawning cavern. Mom kept the door shut because you could see right into the room.

Soft reminders echoed in my ears.

“Close the door. I don’t want to see.”

“Close the door. I don’t want the reminder.”

“Close the door….just….close the door.”

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Retrospect

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It was one of those fall evenings where the light starts to fade earlier and everything feels much later than it should be: the night, the projects due, the dinner that no one’s gotten to yet. The symposium had gone well…what little I could understand of it. Sometimes I wondered how I even got into college and even now I felt like an infiltrator, sitting in the back of the classroom, pretending I could actually be a part of this world where people defended their papers to their peers.

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Rejectamenta!

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I’ve been reading through Pat Schneider’s Writing Alone and with Others, which has been a super helpful resource in getting me over writer’s block and back on track in seeking publication. She has a lot of different exercises at the end of each chapter and one of them was “write about a time your writing got rejected.” So I decided to give it a shot…bear with me as I recount the tales of a woe-begotten nine-year-old. Continue reading