your smooth flesh is marble, etched hard muscles like no man [save supermodels] evanescent beauty is forever yours vita brevis arta longa the mold of you casts a shadow across me still how did you find the time to perfect mind and body and still work 40 hours each week? my beauty is rain in…
My eyes are deceiving me
Can you trust your eyes and ears? Can we trust the eyes and ears of a character? Playing with narrator reliability can be fun, but it’s a double-edged sword. Readers must never feel tricked or lied to, so substantiating the unreliability of a first-person narrator is important. “I’m a liar. I’m a known liar, that’s…
Let’s talk about sex, baby
Ah, the sex scene. Some writers seem to love the lurid detail and intimacy of a graphic sex scene. For others, the idea of intimate detail is a bit more difficult to approach. In my writing, I have mostly done the movie equivalent of “the camera pans away as things get hot and heavy.” In…
If food is culture…
I do not want to eat some watered down bastardized version of Moo Goo Gia Pan. I want to eat real Chinese food. I do not want to eat complacent middle American tacos and burritos. I want authentic Mexican food. I have had enough hamburgers, artificial flavors, artificial colors, reconstituted chicken product and processed cheese…
What lies beneath?
For me really good acting is about subtext. Clive Owen Strong characters and strong stories often have subtext*–the story underneath that tells us more about our humanity, in some instances, than the main story. I think this is especially true in horror stories. At the front we have something sinister, horrific, terrifying, but the subtext…
(sitting on an urban park bench)
she resembled a grandma doll with dried apple for head, staring eerily from its perch on a shelf. wild on her head, her hair had turned white and was stained yellow, like gauze left on a wound too long. her clothes, old, musty like air blowing from an abandoned building. her orthopedic shoes tap…
willow
She lay on the ground head propped against the willow tree, a lonesome Grace, spent from dance In her eyes lived a deep, inherent sadness, delicate, and always weeping… as the leaves of the willow around her billowed like a shroud for pain
Red Haze, Book Excerpt
~January~ Spring Rush Week Chapter 1: Thursday An obsidian silence unfurled around Marne Montgomery as she stepped out of earshot of the Greek side of campus. Her heels clicked on the sidewalk, a sharp crack in the night air. Marne cast her eyes from side-to-side, suspicious of the shadows washing toward the sidewalk, like the…
A thought for today: inspiration
Inspiration is hard to come by. You have to take it where you find it. —Bob Dylan The inspiration for an idea for a story, poem, or novel is sometimes immediate—you have an ‘a-ha’ moment where a thought floods you. What’s harder is finding the inspiration to complete a project. I look for motivation in…
summer breeze
the Aeolian song of chimes outside my window deliver me to peace as warmth and wonder caress my skin. petals dither on stems and branches and fall in velvet kisses to the grass.
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