Let Me Take You on a Musical Journey

I fell down a rabbit hole today. This actually happens frequently with me, but it's usually work related. I'll go to check one fact and see something interesting and then look to find more about that interesting thing and next thing you know I'm miles down the garden path.

Today, it was a music video that caught my interest. A link was posted on Twitter and that led me to the video and that video blew me away. Not the video itself, but the music.

Consider this an official announcement: I am now a fan of Postmodern Jukebox.

Postmodern Jukebox is a group that reworks pop songs into mid- or early twentieth century musical styles. After watching that video, I found more on YouTube and then found the band's albums on iTunes and now I'm trying to figure out how many songs I can afford to buy.

I'm not really a fan of contemporary pop music. I couldn't even tell you who's popular these days. Consequently, I haven't heard the original versions of many of the songs Postmodern Jukebox covers. But oh, how I have fallen in love with the covers.

Seriously, they are worth checking out. You can start here with "All About That Bass," the song that got me hooked:

The Story Behind the Story: A Seat at the Bar

God bless NYC Midnight. This story, too, is a product of their Flash Fiction Challenge. It was the second round of their 2013 FFC, and I was assigned a ghost story in a hotel bar with sunglasses.

I'd written most of a story set in the early 1900s when it occurred to me to check the year sunglasses were invented. Turns out, they're a product of the 1920s--1929, to be exact. Oops. Draft 1 scrapped.

On to Draft 2.

I tried using third person narration. I tried a more traditional structure. But this story insisted on being something different. The story didn't flow until I transcribed the bartender's monologue word for word.

The nontraditional format had mixed results. The feedback from the NYC Midnight judges was largely negative, but they award the story more points than my other flash fiction entries. Go figure.

After the competition, I workshopped the story in my writer's group and tweaked it here and there to fix some inconsistencies. The result is the story you see now, over on Fiction First.

Happy Halloween!

To read "A Seat at the Bar" click here.

It's All Coming Back to Me Now

At the end of August, I was Burned Out. My energy, creative and otherwise, was depleted. I needed a break and so I decided to take a sabbatical from writing for a month. That month is approaching an end. I know this not just because the calendar tells me so, but also because the creative centers of my brain tell me so.

After weeks of nothing, my characters are once again making cameo appearances in my daily life. A hello wave from characters in The New Novel when I was swimming. A wink and a nod from the main character in my last piece of flash fiction as I was falling asleep. A postcard from a short story that I'd set aside to work on later.

It's not enough yet for me to resume my regular writing schedule, but it's a sign--a comforting one--that my creative batteries are, in fact, recharging and that my fictional friends will be ready and waiting whenever I get back to them.

The Story Behind the Story: Potions 101

It's Back-to-School season, so I chose this month to post a school story.

I wrote this story for the NYC Midnight 2013 Flash Fiction Challenge . It's actually the story that knocked me out of the competition. (Well, the original version did. What's posted here is a revised version.)

My prompt for this particular challenge was to write a 1,000-word fantasy that included a classroom and a cigarette. As with every other NYC Midnight Flash Fiction Challenge, I had one weekend to complete the story.

The idea of a young witch in a potions class came to me very quickly, as did her lack of talent in the kitchen. To be honest, I'm not sure where the idea came from. It's entirely possible I was mainlining Harry Potter movies that weekend. But Belva Emerson is no Hermione Granger. If anything, she's got more in common with Ron Weasley.

The story came quickly. It's not ground-breaking or particularly deep, but it's cute and it's fun. That wasn't enough for the NYC Midnight judges, but it was enough for me.

Enjoy the read!

To read "Potions 101," click here.

Low Battery

Low battery symbol courtesy of GNOME icon artists via Wikimedia Commons under GNU General Public License.

If my creative energy had an indicator light, it would be flashing Low Battery. The events of the summer have drained me, and my writing has suffered as a result. It's amazing how the stresses of my non-writing life affect my ability to write. My writing has gotten flatter, simplistic, shallow. Even the act of writing--the basic stringing of words together--has gotten more difficult.

The external stresses are starting to let up, but my energy remains depleted. What I really need is a true getaway vacation. Unfortunately, for a wide variety of reasons, that is not an option. So, I've decided to take a vacation from writing instead.

I write for a living and that writing will need to continue. My fiction writing, though, is being set aside for a while. I know there are writers who would consider that blasphemy--a writer writes! every day! for hours! producing thousands of words! This writer, though, subscribes to a different school of thought. One that says that fallow times are necessary. One that says plants need the dormancy of winter in order to bloom in the spring. (I borrowed that from someone, but I don't remember who. Whoever you are, thank you! Please let me know who you are so I can give you credit.)

It's time for my fiction writing to go dormant. I need to read and sleep and swim and quilt. I need to exercise my creative impulses in other ways. I need to recharge my creative battery, let new ideas germinate, give myself a break, before I burn out completely. So begins my writing sabbatical, so that new stories may blossom later.