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Eng 323: Writing and Editing for Publications--Blog Post 4

In class, I talked about how Cynthia Gorney’s National Geographic article, “Cuba’s New Now,” read in a way that was similar to fiction. Bringing this up in my blog post for the week probably feels as though I’m beating a dead horse, but I’m truly fascinated by the idea that a National Geographic article could read so easily and spark my imagination.

Yesterday, while I was thinking about the article and our classic discussion, I thought back to all the other National Geographic articles I’ve read throughout my lifetime. I had forgotten how every one of them, from the 1980 article on the Mt. St. Helen Catastrophe to the 2001 special issue about Alaska, has read like an exotic dream. In each and every piece I’m transferred to a world that is not my own, all while learning all this facts and new facets of information. Gorney’s “Cuba” moved me in the same way. Having grown up in an era where Cuba is something “forbidden,” I’ve always imagined it as some exotic world filled with salsa dancing, strong coffee, and excellent pressed sandwiches. I’ve never made the move to learn more about an island nation that has been an influential part of America’s history (or, at least, the history of failed foreign relations).

“Cuba” never seemed to be a work of non-fiction because I’ve never been able to see the real Cuba. It helped that their current situation of national “purgatory” only drove my opinion of the article being more fantasy than reality deeper. In my mind, I could only think, “How could a country be so caught in limbo?” Maybe I would have known the answer if I had been a part of Havana in the 1950s—expensive cars, fancy resorts, and big celebrities. But I wasn’t. I was born at the very end of the USSR and the tumbling Berlin Wall. I was raised to despise communism and regard all such countries as dangerous threats. I truly believe that this is why Gorney’s article read so beautifully for me. Here was an inside glimpse to one of those “off-limits” places. The article painted pictures of absolutely beautiful humanity and the tiniest shreds of hope in a backdrop of crumbling confusion. I only wish all journalism read with such clear, moving beauty. 

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Eng 323: Writing and Editing for Publications--Blog Post 3

In class a few weeks ago we discussed the question: Does the writer create their own audience? I couldn’t have agreed more with the idea that writers construct their own reading audiences and as shocked to see so many of my classmates disagree. The concept of a created audience made complete sense to me. I haven’t met 99% of my selected audience when I write fiction and non-fiction. Even if I had met a large majority of them, which would be an impossible task, my reality will never be the same as their reality. The words I have written will never mean the same thing to them as they read the same words.

In Walter Ong’s article “The Writer’s Audience is Always a Fiction,” a novel laughs at Walter Ong’s idea of imagining each of his individual readers as impractical. Instead of inviting of imaging each reader in the imagined audience, the novelist instead says he “has to write a book that real persons will buy and read.” The novelist errs on the side of the practical. He imagines the audience as the forest for the trees instead of the individual trees contributing to the forest. I happen to love the idea of imagining our own audience and picturing our “readers.” There’s a level of connection that seems to develop as you imagine “the woman on the subway” or the “businessman on vacation” deep in our written works. A relationship seems to bloom through the simple exercise of imagining your audience with minute details. I love the idea of writing to these individual people and their reactions to the story I lead them through.

Not only is the exercise important for expanding our own audience horizons, but I believe it helps the writer focus their writing. When I have a greater purpose than my own personal need to tell a story, there is more weight to the story’s worth (or the worth of the academic article). Overall, I love the idea of creating our own audience and to expand on the fictional existences of our “readers.” Ong’s article is a wonderful resource that I hope to turn to over and over again throughout my writing career. 

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Eng 323: Writing and Editing for Publications--Blog Post 2

Nora Bacon is wonderful at what she does, but she’s beginning to annoy me. There are instances where I can really get into the heart of her message and follow along with her main ideas, but for every easily understood concept, I feel as though I’m left with blunt thoughts that are impossible to connect with.

  This became most apparent to me when we had to use the text as one of our cited works for the style analysis research paper. From the get-go, I wanted to use Chapter 5, particularly the periodic and cumulative sentence, as the stylistic devices for the paper. The articles I researched would define and describe them in beautiful, inspiring ways that only enticed you more and more into learning about the same sentence constructs we’ve been taught since middle school. They were beautiful.

  Francis Christensen described the cumulative sentence in this poetic manner:

  The main clause, which may or may not have a sentence modifier before it, advances the discussion; but the additions move backward, as in this clause, to modify the statement of the main clause or more often to explicate or exemplify it, so that the sentence has a flowing and ebbing movement, advancing to a new position and then pausing to consolidate it, leaping and lingering as the popular ballad does.

  It’s a lovely way to bring to life a usually boring, dry definition of a stylistic device most folk are inclined to read and to forget. Bacon followed in this vein of dry, dry, dry tone: “A cumulative sentence begins with the main clause, then extends the sentence with one or more end modifiers” (Bacon 84). Yes, it’s to the point and gets right to the heart of defining what the cumulative sentence is, but where is the love? Our job as writers is to put love into our work, not tedium. If fewer and fewer people are reading, then it is our most important task to grab those remaining readers and make them fall so deeply in love with the written word that they can never get enough. A good book (hell, even a good text book) should feel like soul food after you’ve read it. You should feel full in heart and in mind.

  People fear reading. They fear thinking. They fear it because it lacks zest, heart, and soul. I understand that Bacon is a student of the plain-style, but what if the plain-style was becoming extinct out of necessity? These new generations what pop, bang, and wow. They don’t want to trudge along, unable to connect to the writer’s ideas because the tone and feel is so restricting that reading becomes a chore. I think Bacon fails here. She fails to bring soul into the academic world. It’s not an impossible task. I had a professor for a rhetoric class who had made it her entire goal to make her academic writing as much of a delight to read as it was to learn from. 

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Eng 323: Writing and Editing for Publications--Blog Post 1

Nora Bacon’s chapter on stylistic approaches in her book, The Well-Crafted Sentence, is a sensible, thoroughly written exploration of plain style, embellishment, and identity. Bacon even goes so far as to admit that, “All three conceptions of style have their merit.” The chapter reads well and covers many valid points of each approach, but I was left wondering, “What about balance?” A good writer would use only one or two, but a great writer would use all three in various ways. Using all three stylistic choices to their best potential would be in the best interest of both the reader and the author.

This combination combines clarity, interesting word play, and unique voice to craft a work that is clearly understood, pleasing to read, and distinctive. The earliest concept of balance Bacon introduces is in her chapter coordination and parallel structures. This section was more of an extended metaphor of connecting clauses with poise and stability. While balance in a sentence is easily achieved by taking choppier, smaller sentences with a similar core and giving them length and flow, this still leaves my question, in regards to stylistic approach, unanswered. Many of us know how to utilize coordinating conjunctions and parallel structures with ease, but there are far fewer who know how to produce a well-balanced work with clear purpose, variety, and distinction.

Even academic writing, a type of prose that is often dry and tasteless, can be transformed into a piece of interest by applying all three approaches. In fact, Bacon seems use this same technique throughout The Well-Crafted Sentence. The reading feels casual while clearly stating its purpose. Bacon easily communicates grammar concepts without boring her audience or using the same formulaic wording in every sentence. She creates interest through her balanced approach. The text is easier to absorb and continue to read than it would be in a duller, more ‘exact’ counterpart. It is my highest hope that Bacon revisits her chapter on stylistic approach later in the text to give us a forth approach: a hybrid of all three. 

Word Count: 343

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a mourning

We sit in our mountain homes and hope these weathered panes do not betray the sins that paste themselves to our walls in sticky-tacky and rusty nails, the parchment proof of our worst human failings. But the hills have eyes and the son grew ears before bursting on the horizon and reminding us that the world leaks into our cracks with each newest day. -- Kristi

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dearest you,

I miss you like I miss constellations embedded -- hopeless -- in an urban sky; pining, but always knowing this ache will only grow. -- Kristi

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I have set sail for tomorrow; may I never return for today. -- Kristi

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finch wisteria meadowlarke

this is not going to be pretty with sweet graphics cause i'm super lazy like that.

finally doing this?

her parents are hippies and she hates that like woah

muggleborn what what

because of that she is sort of still confused by the magical world but it still makes more sense than her family life

ocd as fuq, orderly as fuq, neurotic as fuq, bossy as fuq

kind of a tyrant? like she has all these steep expectations that she keeps for herself and everyone around her. she demands perfection because she thinks that's the key to success.

has a lot of insecurities because of her problems and expectations. 

really kind of bad at socializing because she comes off as such a prickly little poop all the time

that and she ruins graded curves like a boss because must have academic perfection~*~* omg

writes lists on post-it notes that are color coded cause rembralls are dumb. literally has a wall dedicated to her post-it note lists in her dorm. do not touch the post-its. don't do it.

only uses blue ink because all other colors are really uncomfortable on parchment or paper

has both a day planner and a night planner

counts everything by fives.

really bad at detecting sarcasm or dry humor. takes everything pretty literally and is awful at comedy. just awful. 

stubborn if you couldn't tell by all the demands and stuff

not really an awful person? just difficult.

tries too hard to be composed and put together so she just has this air of rigidity and coldness. people think she's a total bitch but that word makes her cry in bathrooms 

she really resents her parents because a lot of her ocd and other issues stem from them

oh she's a sixth year

a sixth year of terror

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joining in on the fun, but still trying to figure out who to bring to the partyyy~

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lou and the seven

louvenia is the young wife of a fairly successful merchant. they live comfortably and enjoy small luxuries, but are far from wealthy. despite being a dutiful wife, louvenia is neglected after it's found that she is infertile and unable to bear her husband an heir and son. she is then thrust into abrupt motherhood when he thrusts the care of his seven illegitimate daughters, each from a different tryst, on poor, blindsided louvenia. he begins to entertain mistresses he believes are fertile enough to give him a son and hardly seems to notice his wife. when louvenia and the seven are in the wrong place at the wrong time, it leads them on the a grand adventure that seems impossible and fantastic all at once. throughout the adventure, they meet Daring Dar, the intrepid woman adventurer who helps louvenia find her sense of identity.

"Darbin?" The masculine points of the woman's name felt clumsy and strange along the back of her tongue. "Pardon me for pressing but, isn't that a man's name?" It was an honest question. Their world had rules. Boundaries defined by gender and well maintained by society--rules were made to create order, to break them could mean certain catastrophe. The corners of the dark woman's lips twitched, curling themselves into a disarming grin; Louvenia thought it rather matched that of a thief: impetuous, wild, and reckless beneath the sly slopes. "Of course it is!" Dar roared, her thieving smile breaking at the hinges with a hearty din of laughter. Laughing suited her; all manners of warmth suited her. "It's a man's world, Louie. If you intend to survive, you might as well have a man's name."

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katherine 'kit' sloane

A riot in the heart, Kit is the girl seduced by the sea. She spends her days on the shore and the shallows yearning for the space of the open with nothing but the horizon and God to witness her, but it's a doomed love affair. Women are meant to make roots from toes buried in the sand, it's the men who are allowed to taste the salt on the tradewinds. 

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we were giants

When we were younger, the world was infinite. It stretched forever before us, full of miracles and wonder. Endless. Next to such vastness, Lena and I should have been miniscule and irrelevant; we were anything but. We were giants. Tall, impossible, and stretching on and ever on. From up there, in the clouds of our girlhood, we could have done anything; anything at all.

It was just girlhood fancy, life never meant for our forever to last. Lena was too fragile for such a fantastic existence, even then. I could see it in the way her eyes seemed to spark, burn, and blow out all at once. They came alive in a moment and faded just as fast. She had always been that way. Our mother used to describe her as the “soft hearted daughter;” the daughter with the wide, round eyes that never seemed to focus when she spoke. Lena was always speaking. Long tales or short stories, the halls of our home were forever echoing with the noise of her constant conversation.

            As the older sister, I was inclined to be the one with the heaviest load of responsibility. It made me old before I knew what it was like to be a child, a reality I sometimes lament whenever I pass the clamor and color of a playground at noon. It was never a spoken rule, but you could feel it floating in-between the spaces of my mother’s words and my father’s stern looks, furrowing their eyebrows for emphasis and placing too-many expectations on the shoulders of their first child.

            But Lena was allowed to remain vibrant and whole. She filled up the moment and held on to life with both fists clenched tight. She was vivacious and tenacious; she was so very loved.

            The summer between my senior year and college was going to be our summer. The start of something new, something that turned us back into the giants we used to be. Graduation sped by in a flash of lights and speeches and stale congratulations, blending into the aftermath; the long days and the hot sun. On a Saturday morning in June, Lena slipped into my room and leaped. The weight of her and the smile that caught the light through the blinds said it all: the day was ours.

            I dressed in a hurry, mismatching something red with something pink and changing again and again every time her nose crinkled in disapproval. Our tastes never quite matched. Lena was loud prints and saddle shoes; I was cut-off jeans and neutrals. “You should dye it blue,” she filled the space between us with something sudden; something spontaneous. “Blue?” I couldn’t imagine my hair being anything but safe, understated brown. She nodded, something starting to spark in those green eyes of hers—I always hated when they’d spark, they always died so soon after. “Yeah, blue. Oceanic blue,” the way she said ‘oceanic blue’ was long and drawn out, she was savoring it.

            “Why not Cosmic Purple? Or Extremely Loud Orange?” I never had her vision of outrageous things. “Because those are ridiculous.” I looked at her with surprise raising a brow. “And Oceanic Blue isn’t?” I might have slapped her and challenged her to a duel, she was so indignant at the suggestion. It showed in the way her eyes fluttered wider, her mouth frowning at the corners before twisting into an ‘o’ of annoyed surprise. “No,” she started, slowly, and I waited for whatever might follow. “Oceanic blue,” her hands started part, her arms fluttering wide in an attempt to gesture at all the wideness, all the emptiness, in-between us, “is a royal color.” Her fingers fluttered through the dust motes in tiny flicks of movement, like a bird’s wings just before flight. “And you’re always acting so dignified and responsible. Don’t you ever think royalty would suit you?”

            Considering myself a royal had not crossed my mind. Ever. The idea was so unfathomable to me, so outside this four bedroom home with the oak tree in the front yard, that it bordered on obscene. It must have shown in the way I looked at her, casting her a side-long look that was as dubious as my unimaginative mind, because she just rolled her eyes and flopped on the bed, moving on to the next subject without hiccup. “Let’s go to Rooster Rock and fly, Mari,” A bald statement, but not unexpected. Every summer we promised to hike up the old rock and leap into the river; we figured it was the closest imitation to flying we could get. Every summer, we never learned how to fly.

            Usually, I made up some excuse or observation that was safe, practical, and predictable. Broken bones, blood, and months of healing for a moment’s bliss never appealed to me, until today. Today felt different. I wanted to fly. I wanted to test the weight of my bones and see how long I could defy logic; how long I could defy what was safe, practical, and, predictable. “Sure, why not?” I accessorized the statement with a subdued shrug, attempting to appear composed despite the hammering in my chest. She grabbed my hand and dragged me out of the house before I could take it all back, again.

            The sun was hot, the Gorge was cool, and the wind was playful as it tied knots and tangles in our hair through the open windows of the car. Something with a good beat was playing on the radio, but laughter drowned it out. By the time the car basked in the shadow of Rooster Rock, my cheeks ached from grinning, “Okay, Lena, let’s fly!” She was spinning idly beside me, looking up at something towards the top of the rock and twisting a piece of hair between her fingers. It was odd, but Lena was always odd. So I thought nothing of it and grabbed her hand, pulling her towards the trail mouth. I ran, she stumbled. Either way we made it to our destination: toes curling over the edge of nothing and the river waiting.

            I held my breath against the drumming of my heart, eyeing everything that lay below—and the nothing that stood between myself and falling—before looking at Lena and knowing, just knowing, that today would be the day we learned to fly. She was vibrating, grinning with her tongue between her teeth and the wind splaying through the soft shades of her golden-brown hair. She looked as alive as I felt. “Let’s do it together,” I offered her my hand, half-suggesting, mostly pleading. The excitement was enough to wash away my worries in their entirety. “Always!” Her enthusiasm was enough to soothe me as she took my hand, sisters linked together in the face of the unknown. We bent at the knees and we leaped. For forty seconds, I knew what birds must know; there is nothing more free than flight.

            The water rushed up to draw us down from our high, clipping our momentary wings and sending us pitching and turning into shocking cold. Finding the surface was instinctive for me, so I clawed and slapped my way to the sunlight above me, gasping and spitting before slapping at the water surface as I clawed my way, inch by struggling inch, to the rocky shoreline. There was hair in my eyes, my ears, and my mouth, and, clinging to those cragged, unfriendly rocks, I had never felt more alive than I did just then. Lena was more graceful in the water than I—a nymph in her own right. She climbed the rocks beside me with ease dripping and breathless, but her eyes belonged to something, someone, else.

            Red, black, and bruised purple, I noticed it then: the tattoo of a small heart on the inside of her wrist encasing the initials B.D. Inflamed, infected, and crudely done, it was out of the ordinary, even for Lena. Without thinking I grabbed for her wrist, staring at with hard eyes and a frown that suited me all too well. “What’s this?” The composure faded as the accusations began, my cool fraying into a high-pitched frenzy of figurative pointed fingers. She screwed her face and jerked her arm away from me, trying to avoid the confrontation with a rolling shrug. “I’ll see you at the car, Mari,” she whispered to me, averting her eyes before she slipped away.

            I didn’t wait at the car, I followed her.

            A group of her classmates were lounging in the shade, mostly girls, and all were focused on the boy at their center. He was golden. Flaxen hair, tanned body—the very image of shallow idealism, and he knew it. Even the sun clung to him with an adoring embrace as he preened before the crowd of admirers, devouring their attention with greed. Lena joined the group as Golden Boy looked up, peering at her through half-lidded, heavy eyes just to see her tremble with want. The smile on his face held a note of familiarity beside its boyish warmth and he held out his hand to her as if to offer his presence to her; like he was a gift, a privilege. It was harmless until he spoke, a hint of laughter mocking Lena and anyone who might choose to listen, “Look gang, Echo’s found us, again.”

            My skin crawled to see his barbed arrogance snapping at vibrant, beautiful Lena; he flayed her naked before the crowd because the sight of her squirming made him laugh. The crowd tittered at the joke, even Lena giggled. The spark in her eyes had begun to burn hot, snapping at his reflection with hunger and want; with need. “Lena!” I cried out, stepping into the fray and breaking the spell. She turned to face me in surprise, her cheeks turning red with embarrassment and silent fury. Her anger would sting, but the way she watched him, the way she leaned into his words, was far more terrifying. In a huff, she stormed for the car and I followed, casting a final look over my shoulder at the Golden Boy and his many suitors.

            Before she could start her tirade, I just shook my head and asked, “Echo, Lena?” It wasn’t her name; it wasn’t even a cool nickname to laugh about through the years. “It’s our thing! Adonis says it’s cute!” By the wistfulness in her voice, ‘Adonis’ never said it was cute—it was what she was dying to hear.

            The car ride home was all crossed arms and hard quiet, the radio playing thirty different songs that had different names and different artists but all ended up sounding exactly the same. I thought it would be the last I ever saw or heard of Lena’s Adonis. It wasn’t.

            Two days later she was in the kitchen staring at the old landline phone, waiting. I didn’t ask who she was waiting for, we both knew he wouldn’t call; he wouldn’t call then, or the next day, or the day after that. A week went by, as normal as it had ever been, before she came home sobbing. The door swung open as she raced into her room, slamming it shut so hard the floorboards trembled. She had shown Adonis her tattoo in hope that it would be enough—it would never be enough. He only liked her for the way his reflection looked in her wide, green eyes.

            She asked him for a date, he asked her to carry his things. She wanted him to love her, he wanted her to love him because he was too beautiful not to be loved. She clung to him, begging him, pleading with him, and he cast her off each time with a different excuse. I like my freedom too much? I don’t want to ruin our friendship. It’s right, but it’s not right, now.

            The lies grew thicker as the days grew longer, until, one day, it ended. The fire went out in her eyes—it sparked, burned, and consumed; it died. Looking at her was to look at a deadened shell of Lena, her lust for life, her tenacity, put out by a broken heart. She spent her days in her room and I spent mine staring at the white paint of her door, worrying. My only relief came when every day, right at noon, she’d pop out from hibernation to watch an hour of television with me. Three weeks into July and her bones seemed brittle in the soft haze of the afternoon sunlight. She looked wasted and fragile; far too thin. Sometimes I’d try to make conversation, to goad her into saying something more than ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ but she kept her eyes on the T.V. I was little more than an object filling up space beside her.

            One afternoon, precisely at 12 p.m., the white door on the left of the hall didn’t swing open. One afternoon, precisely at 1 p.m., I screamed and begged a God I rarely talked to for a miracle; just one measely miracle. One afternoon, precisely at 1:15 p.m., my mother and I clung to one another and heaved our sorrows because the paramedic’s attempts were unsuccessful. That afternoon, Lena made the heart on her wrist a little more permanent and carved a matching one on the opposite arm. She was so very loved, but it wasn’t enough.  

Two months later, he was gone, too. He fell into the river pretending to kiss himself he was too drunk to remember how to swim. When they found the body, no one could remember his name. The boy with the sun in his teeth had been their Adonis, laughingly nicknamed to immortalize their adoration and admiration. A string of broken hearts and spurned lovers knew him as Narcissus—the boy who could only ever love himself. Waterlogged and bloated, their Adonis was no longer golden and bright; their Narcissus no longer playing with their longing desires. The river had turned him blue and pale and cold when it swallowed him whole; where was his beauty now? No one could remember his name. Not the sheriff, not the coroner. I did. I remembered him.

His name was Beau Deeley. Loving him killed my sister.

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short story start #2

a modernized take on persephone and hades. third person. also not sure how I feel about this. probably going to change her name. idk. 

           Life could be dull. It was dull now, with the rain steadily falling on the mostly empty streets of town. Stubborn shoppers forged on through the weather, determined to fulfill their consumer obligations as they jockeyed for the driest sections of sidewalks beneath the eaves. A few lonesome umbrellas bloomed beneath the gloom as gray and bleak as the weather. Not a sliver of color in sight.

            “Lena, stop sighing.” Against the gray, Margaret Rowe’s quiet voice seemed sudden and loud. It grated against the weight of the silence that was hovering over the city and dripping down their apartment window panes, the drops racing one another before colliding together. Thirty-two. She had watched thirty-two races between thirty-two different rain drops sliding down the glass, zig-zagging for the bottom, before her mother told her to stop sighing. Lena was grateful for the interruption. She savored the abrasiveness of sound against the quiet that had washed over their little home in the past two hours. “I’m not sighing,” Not true. She had been sighing, but these walls craved conversation. She craved conversation.

            Her mother fixed her with one of her famous stares: slightly furrowed eyebrows, suspicious eyes, and the beginnings of a frown crinkling the corners of her lips. She tried too hard to look annoyed. “Lena, you’ve been sighing all afternoon,” Margaret pressed gently, peering at her daughter over the wrinkled pages of a too-old book. She looked as worn as the paperback she held, green eyes growing heavy with the day. A bit of potting soil still clung to her shirt as leftovers from her shift at the city Nursery and the chrysanthemum she’s pushed into her hair had long begun to wilt, its petals as tired as the wearer.

            Her  mother had always been something of an “earthy” type, but her eccentricities weren’t Lena’s favorite part about her mother; it was her eyebrows. They were the most vibrant feature of Margaret’s face. Dancing when they were happy, sagging when they were not. Emotional virtuosos, those eyebrows possessed a wider range of theatrical skill than all of Hollywood’s best talents.  

----

want to work this in later:

He shook through her from across the meadow, the dark of his silhouette broken apart by vibrant spring flowers; the very spring flowers that fell from her fingertips, landing in a discarded heap of forgotten pastels in the grass at her feet. There was a drumming in her ears, thrumming louder and clearer the longer they stared. The echoes raced through the her body 

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short story start #1

want to go the route of echo & narcissus with this one. true unrequited love. told from the sister's point of view. 

not sure what to think of it. or if I'm correctly executing it. 

When we were younger, the world was infinite. It stretched forever before us, full of miracles and wonder. Endless. Next to such vastness, Lena and I should have been miniscule and irrelevant; we were anything but. We were giants. Tall, impossible, and stretching on and ever on. From up there, in the clouds of our girlhood, we could have done anything; anything at all.

It was just girlhood fancy, life never meant for our forever to last. Lena was too fragile for such a fantastic existence, even then. I could see it in the way her eyes seemed to spark, burn, and blow out all at once. They came alive in a moment and faded just as fast. She had always been that way. Our mother used to describe her as the “soft hearted daughter;” the daughter with the wide, round eyes that never seemed to focus when she spoke. Lena was always speaking. Long tales or short stories, the halls of our home were forever echoing with the noise of her constant conversation.

            As the older sister, I was inclined to be the one with the heaviest load of responsibility. It made me old before I knew what it was like to be a child, a reality I sometimes lament whenever I pass the clamor and color of a playground at noon. It was never a spoken rule, but you could feel it floating in-between the spaces of my mother’s words and my father’s stern looks, furrowing their eyebrows for emphasis and placing too-many expectations on the shoulders of their first child.

            But Lena was allowed to remain vibrant and whole. She filled up the moment and held on to life with both fists clenched tight. She was vivacious and tenacious; she was so very loved.

            The summer between my senior year and college was going to be our summer. The start of something new, something that turned us back into the giants we used to be. 

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this writer's block could not come at a more inconvenient time. 

I have to have this short story finished by Tuesday and I'm exactly 297 words into it. I'm just not clicking with this idea and I'm not sure how to execute it in the way that my brain wants to. At some point between my brain and my fingers, there has been a very large mass miscommunication. 

Not to mention I have to complete the rest of my portfolio, which means an assload of editing and revising, plus hunting down the original versions. 

And buying colored tabs. 

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She’s found me again, that woman king in the vanity, wild beneath her cornucopia crown, lovely in her vicious smile, but for the inelegant plump and roll to her defiant fists— ‘Fat, fat, fat,’ I think, staring as I do, until she catches my thoughts on teeth bared with the same ferocity she wore like skin. Shame shrinks the spine, and averts my eyes, to look again and she’ll be gone, replaced by sagging bones and sallow skin; an emptiness in the middle.

-- Kristi

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Death in a bar

A wild woman winked at a suit and scotch as he leaned in to whisper, "Are you flirting with me?" -- Kristi