February 2012
6 posts
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Red Wine Thoughts
I think I can hold my breath longer when I’m drunk.
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Some Days
Some days can be really great in an exhausting way. Like you’re not used to good things happening without bad things in between. Some days your story is workshopped and you feel overwhelmingly happy afterwards; like they finally got what you’ve been trying to say all along. Then you go home and open a Valentine’s Day package from your mom. She’s sent you a gas station gift...
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Excerpt Time!
Jerry usually pretended to read the newspaper in the mornings to avoid talking to his daughter, but he usually just looked at the pictures. He didn’t hate her. Sometimes he would even smile when he thought about her jerky dancing as she tried to find a rhythm to the endless guitar solo that is “Jessica.” But they didn’t talk much and both of them liked it that way. Melissa liked how, when they...
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Writing Life
Why is it that the one night you actually want to go to bed early, you almost always have this invincible urge to stay up all night writing?
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Tussy Mussy
As a child, my favorite outfit consisted of a pair of white sweatpants, with elastic in the waistband and at the ankles, and a white sweatshirt onto which my grandma had ironed the image of a raggedy bunny doll and then she’d outlined the bunny in gold glitter fabric paint; I suppose so it would look like something a little girl would wear or for the more practical reason of securing the...
January 2012
7 posts
4 tags
“Jack: What makes you laugh?
Kenneth: The usual, I suppose. Two hobos sharing a...”
– What’s scary about this is those are the types of things that make me laugh and not in a “it’s funny because Kenneth is a freak” kind of way and he’s the butt of his own joke. Those things make me laugh because two hobos sharing a bean is legitimately one of the funniest things I can imagine,...
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False Advertising
I just saw a commercial for Johnsonville sausage that told me that if I make meatballs with this sausage then those “meatballs will change your life.” I don’t know if it’s just the fact that I haven’t eaten meat for five years, but that seems like a huge claim to make for some pre-packaged sausage. Are people allowed to make bombastic statements like that? Or should...
roxiehastoomuchtosay asked: Hey, thanks for following my blog. I noticed you're an MFA student. I'm in the process of applying and it's so daunting. I want to tear my hair out. I was scrolling through your Tumblr and saw some of your writing; it's fantastic! Best of luck in your program, and hope to see you on Tumblr soon. - Roxie
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Weird dreams
I had a dream that I won an extremely close race, with lots of shoving involved, against a very overweight man. Victory?
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Are Dreams Considered Non-Fiction?
In my experience, dreams that occur during one or two hour midday naps tend to be way more strange than normal night dreams. They usually have a lot going on and have a super-condensed intensity to them. They are also the ones I remember most vividly.
The other day I had a nap dream in which I was traveling by train. Not very weird. But then I arrived at my destination, a small village that...
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Coming Soon
New posts are on their way. I’ve been very lazy over Christmas break.
December 2011
3 posts
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Home
Stepped off the airplane and into The Flying Biscuit. Then I stuffed my face with shrimp and grits. Food porn.
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The Great Enigma of Life
My favorite Christmas movie is The Santa Clause, because people forget that Tim Allen murders Santa in the beginning. His freaky, bowl-cut haired child sees the body and fails to report the crime because he’s too excited to see Santa’s corpse. It also poses deep existential questions like, does Santa cease to be Santa when he dies? Does that mean that I can be Santa because I am...
November 2011
20 posts
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If you can stop playing Angry Birds or cleaning...
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I’ve been watching Cake Boss all day. My favorite line of the day? “What’s turkey without a cream puff?” I really don’t know the answer.
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Sort of Home for the Holidays
I’ve never been a huge fan of Thanksgiving. I don’t like to feel like I’m about to explode and that’s pretty much unavoidable when you put a mountain of mashed potatoes in front of me. To make matters worse, I’ve been a vegetarian/sometimes pesscatarian for the last few years, so I miss out on the one thing that used to define Thankgsgiving for...
9 tags
Heaven is a Man in a Suit
Men have the market cornered when it comes to suits. They just look better in them- with their broad shoulders and chiseled jaws. I wish women looked half as good in suits as men do. If they did I would be the Donna Draper of the twenty-first century, alcoholism and all. If I looked good in a suit I would throw out my rainbow of dresses and replace them with two expensive suits- one black and one...
“I draw the line at any kind of research and even object to looking up words in...”
– Flannery O’Connor
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Feeling Accomplished
Today, I will finish my longest story to date. I’m not done with it yet, but I’m expecting it to be at least eighteen pages. I’m a slow writer. On a good day, a day where the waterfall of wine never ends, I can maybe churn out five pages. I will probably keep two or three of those pages. So I’m always leaping forward and then running backwards. Some days I won’t write...
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Church Shopping: An Update to a Work in Progress
Twelve of Maude’s cigarette breaks later, the store had seen eight customers, four of them bought “My Kid is a Georgia Bulldawg” bumper stickers and said some version of “Oh what a bargain” as Claire rang them up, three who thought it was an antique place and bought a bag of five for a dollar, crookless, candy canes to make it seem like they came in with the sole intention of buying cheap...
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HELLO Mr. Gatsby!
I guess Leo as Jay Gatsby works for me, but this whole 3-D thing is an Avatar-sized bummer.
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Church Shopping: A Work in Progress
And now after thirty-seven years of believing in almost nothing, Gary started to think he was missing out on something. After the divorce was finalized and Gary had relocated his entire collection of ancient gaming systems to the other side of town, he was struck with a rare case of what his physician called “early-onset hypogonadism; informally known as male menopause.” Usually occurring in...
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Occupy Nursing Home
In Delray, protesting is not just for the young and restless hipsters. The old and toothless retirees hold up their angry poster boards with the best of them. It’s an odd scene, taking place on the distinct line where the wealthy side of town ends and the poor side begins. A blue-haired lady dressed like she’s on vacation- khakis, a gossamer, white shirt, a straw hat,sandals, and...
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An interesting shop name in Delray Beach causes me to question myself. Who’s Karen? Who is Caryn? (to use my preferred spelling of the name) I’m not really sure how I would answer this shop’s existential question. From the looks of the store, Karen is probably a middle-aged woman who likes floral beachwear and great deals. But Caryn is another animal; or so I’d...
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“When I remember that dizzy summer, that dull, stupid, lovely, dire summer, it...”
– -Michael Chabon The Mysteries of Pittsburg
If the last words of my first novel are even half as amazing as Chabon’s, I will be content when I die.
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Only in Boca?
While grading papers in Starbucks, I’m surrounded by an elderly trio discussing how they’ve just acquired free vacation homes in the Florida Keys and quartet of middle aged ladies who appear to be knitting tiny clothes for cats.
And I thought Atlanta was strange.
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And Now the Aforementioned Sentence
But first some background info so it isn’t totally without context. My protagonist of sorts is a middle-aged man, tentatively named Gary, who is going ‘church shopping.’ On his way home from one particularly disorienting sermon, he nearly collides with a young boy who calls him an asshole; this event causes Gary to throw up a bit of Egg McMuffin. But he has a problem: Gary...
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Small Victories
I just wrote my favorite sentence I’ve ever written. Totally blows the pants off of the ladies and babies one. It’s also two-hundred-and-sixty-four words long. Will post later, when I’m not typing from an iPhone. Only 1,023 words away from beating Faulkner’s record. I won’t even attempt to beat James Joyce’s 4000+ or that other guy who wrote over 13,000. That...
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Inspiration/Envy
Reading A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan is making me realize that I have a long way to go. That said, it’s becoming one of my new favorite books. Amazing, amazing amazing. Wow.
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A Spooky Story
She was only three years old the first time it happened. She would later say that it felt like those bugs you see in mummy movies were burrowing under her skin. But that was just what she said to make herself feel better in it’s absence. And it happened a lot, back then, so she felt like her skin was constantly in motion. She got used to it, like a steady vibration. It happened when she...
October 2011
8 posts
10 tags
Seating Arrangements
The old man entered the waiting room and scanned the loop of heads around the perimeter and then the smaller cluster of hairy, blonde, grey, red, and even purple islands in the center, looking for a gap that would indicate either an end table or an empty seat. A large woman, nothing, then a teenager with a dangerous boil on his cheek, but an open seat was an open seat.
Unless that open seat was...
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New Flash Fiction Soon
Come back later…much later…like maybe around 2am…I’m working on the wine part right now…working on the story part later…sneak peek?…okay…it’s about a man who just wants to sit down…tantalizing, I know.
edit: A teaser of a sentence that I enjoyed writing: Before the war, or, at least, before the old man was in the war, seats were for...
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The Age-Old Question
Is it a one-eyed, one-horned, flying, purple people eater or a one-eyed, one-horned flying, purple, people eater? In one case, the monster is racist and only eats people with purple skin; on the other hand, the monster is purple and doesn’t discriminate against the flesh he consumes. This Halloween themed English lesson has been brought to you by the Oxford comma.
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“So I’m just thinking about it, how you can go in with $600, more like...”
– Lydia Davis, “Break It Down”
note: this is one of the only stories about dying relationships that I can relate to.
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The Amazing Baby Lizard Lady
You know those days when you feel like the most brilliant person on earth, or at least in your school? Multiply that by five and you’ll have my past week. I feel like all of my sleepless nights and bottles of red wine have finally paid off.
I’m beginning to feel like an actual teacher, writer, and graduate student. Before I was just going through some weird...
September 2011
6 posts
3 tags
“Wonderful, the way I feel.”
– Yim Yames
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“Bevel rolled his eyes in a comical way and thrust his face forward, close to the...”
– Flannery O’Connor, “The River”
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EDIMGIAFAD
As I begin my ‘new’ life in Boca Raton, I’m constantly thinking back to the ‘old’ life I had in Georgia. Atlanta was my secondary home, but the majority of my time alive has been spent in Warner Robins. As boring as that place sounds, it is where I grew up and almost all of my fondest memories are located within its setting. But the place is boring,...