I found these wonderful little light covers yesterday. If I hadn’t been playing with pink flamingos the other day, I wouldn’t have recognized what they were. The rainbow santas and snowmen will probably be riding pink flamingos for Christmas at my house.
#vss very short story
In all the hustle and bustle of the Annual Santa-Snowman Convention, they hadn’t noticed that some of the santas and snowmen weren’t actually supposed to be blue. One santa froze to death and a snowman choked on his own carrot. Was it foul play? They decided to sweep it under the snowbank.
Word Of The Day
I stumbled across a new word this morning and it’s a good one, so I thought I would make it the word of the day.
inanition: noun 1. exhaustion from lack of nourishment; starvation. 2. lack of vigor; lethargy.
May you never know inanition.
Today’s Poetry Prompt and Poem
Prompt: Write a poem about a place that you do not like.
MoSt included some great suggestions for this poem:
Use a crazy number of metaphors and similes. Give that place a costume, a cliche, a smell, a bon mot, an emotion, an inner life, a bunch of lies that lead to a truth, a bunch of truths that lead to a memory that isn’t quite true after all, give it a persona, a breath, a sound — what music would be in that place? what sounds would be just outside? What person comes in and goes out and what do they say? And…you can totally make something up. Remember, you have little obligation to truth. Go wild.
The Office
It doesn’t matter the proprietor
Or even the town, state or country
This room is my living hell
A life of recurring, compelled visits
Empty of answers
though full of testing instruments
The horror-show of the human machine,
Laid bare, completely bare
With the opening at the back
Tortures and fears all created here
Weapons of “health” line the wall
Posters threatening death for non-compliance
And the joke in on me, this torture’s not free
The poking and prodding’s expensive
I pay with my innermost secrets.
Editing Focus
As I continue to go through my scenes looking at value changes, I’m also going to highlight all the passages that show my MC’s inner life as recommended by James Scott Bell in Revision And Self-Editing (Write Great Fiction)
When I’m done highlighting, I’ll read through all the highlighted sections in order and ask myself:
- Is the flow of the interior life understandable and believable?
- Are there places that seem inconsistent?
- Are there gaps that need to be filled with other interior insights?
#FlashFicHive
graphic by Anjela Curtis
Sharing lines will be fun today because I wrote a lot of Creepy Christmas flash fiction over the last few days.
Don’t Forget To Read!
Great news! Gator McBumpypants in Shelley Comes Out Of Her Shell is now available for Kindle!
Experience Writing 