Today I thought about The Usual Suspects (affiliate link), the line-up on the cover. Then I thought about Clue (affiliate link) and the color names of the suspects. I also thought about “suspect” as a verb and I suspect that led to some introspection about what I find suspect about my suspicions.
I don’t generally like this in-camera “Poster” effect, but I’m glad I’m in a use-everything phase. It was a great choice for my criminal crayons.
Stream of Consciousness Saturday
Today’s stream of consciousness prompt is fun: Close eyes and point. I imagine myself closing my eyes and pointing all day. It could be dangerous. It says to use the closest print material which for me is A Compendium of Collective Nouns (affiliate link). I’m closing my eyes, opening the book to a random page., I point, and open my eyes . . . L. I got a full yellow page with a big black capital letter L. I tried again and got the letter P. Tried again got the letter E but at least there were some eagles on the page. The collective noun for eagles? A convocation. Finally I landed on a word, “generally.” Generally, I wouldn’t find that very exciting, but since I worked so hard to get to it, I guess I’ll journal “generally” for a while this morning, take a look at generally’s relationship to the usual suspects.
Generally speaking I don’t use generally a lot. Usual has unusual, general has no ungeneral. It has specific. I’m into specifically. Generally accepted, that sounds drab, muddy, generally acceptable sounds judgy and mundane. What is a good aspect of generally? Generally not toxic, not harmful leaves open specific incidents of possibility. Generally understood as convenient, yummy, a good book, those work. People have different tastes, but a general consensus of yummy or convenient is usually worth a risk, so . . .
Maria L. Berg’s journal Nov. 6, 2021
November PAD Chapbook Challenge
The prompt is to make a location the title of my poem.
The Abandoned Property Where the Body Was Found
I thought it would be good exercise
to ride my bike the three miles to practice
I bought a back-pack style padded case
for my bass, lights for my bike, velcro
reflector strips that tied the cuffs of my pants
a safety orange vest with reflectors for my chest
riding with my bass wasn’t that hard
but that road, that road was treacherous.
No twisting, two-lane road should have that much traffic
no sidewalks and barely space between road and railing.
And those hills, three miles shouldn’t have impossible,
winding hills with blind turns, and trucks. No matter
how many times I rode that road, I always had to hop off
and walk to the top of one of the hills, it wasn’t a hill
but a small mountain or technically the other side
of a valley within a mountain. Riding a bike is not
easy around here. And fenders didn’t do much in this rain.
I thought it would be good exercise
to walk the three miles from practice
it was a bit scary without sidewalks
and barely any room between the road
and the hillside when it got dark, but I had
a headlamp, and reflectors, and there wasn’t as much traffic
I never suspected a large abandoned property. Don’t
even know how you got there from the road.
Never saw the burned out mobile home or
the fallen carport by the house.
But she was there the whole time.
Inside a garbage can, tossed away, abandoned
decomposing alone among nature’s reclamation
I rode by. I walked by. I listened to the music I was
learning to play, and would perform soon at the
bar down the hill. I focused on not getting hit.
NaNoWriMo
I’m keeping steady at 2,000 words each day. I’m not quite in the story yet, but I’m getting there. This morning I was so happy that my Scrivener set-up is working for me because I had a few ideas for each section and just jumped in and wrote a little bit before “writing time”. It’s great to not have to search through and waste time, but get where I want to be while the thought is there.
While I was doing my timed, wild, stream of consciousness morning pages, I happened upon an interesting way to make yesterday’s scene more important to the novel. It treads a fine line of really working, or not working at all, but I like how it could tie some things together, so I’m going for it.
Experience Writing 