Guest posted!

Over the last week or so, I’ve been toying with a guest post for another blogfic, the Inventor. Yesterday, it went live! Huzzah!

I’ve been meaning to write a post about this blogfic for a while. It is written by a very good friend of mine, Julie, who did a guest post for me on the Apocalypse Blog.

The Inventor started in October (2009) and posts three or so times a week. It tells the story of a teenaged girl who has run away from home to the streets of San Francisco. She spins a different story to every person she meets, and she lies to herself just as often, while she struggles to figure out how to survive homeless, jobless, and friendless.

Julie uses some great images and turns of phrase in her writing, and she doesn’t shy away from the unpleasantness and vulnerability of living on the streets. I can’t wait to see where she’s going to take the story.

I was delighted when she invited me to do a guest post for her. For some reason, my brain immediately jumped on the idea of a hooker (what does that say about me?). Julie said she wanted to bring in prostitution sooner rather than later, so I started poking at it right away (hmm, not sure that’s the right phrasing). And thus, Savannah was born.

Writing the post has been a welcome distraction, a bit of a break from my usual Apocalypse Blog writing, and great fun. It’s a lot lighter than much of the stuff I’ve been writing of late! It also came out in present tense – I’m not sure why. I thought about switching it into past tense, but it seemed fairly comfortable in present (and Julie didn’t mind), so I didn’t bother.

So there we go. I have starred in another blogfic! Go me! Go read it, tell me what you think!

I have four posts left of the Apocalypse Blog. Only four! Time to go work on them.

Flashing fiction

Back in February, I entered the Two Sentence Story competition. I didn’t get anywhere in it, but it was an interesting exercise and I’m glad that I entered. A two-sentence story is curious beast – how do you get a whole story across in just that amount of space, without cheating? (By cheating, I mean replacing what should be full stops with commas and having two huge, run-on, nightmare sentences).

The thing I found most challenging was to put plot in there and not just present a situation. For me, that’s the difference between a snapshot and a story. 

When I looked back over my entries for the competition, I thought that my third entry was closer to a situation than a true story:

Planting the Seed

Sitting awkwardly and gripping the tools, there is a moment of reverence before the act and a whispered prayer for fertility.

In an uncomfortable moment, she can’t help but wonder if people will be able to tell that the baby’s father was a turkey baster.

(I admit, I was going more for the humour in that.)

I think this one was closer to having a plot, though the middle is wide and gaping. It could be filled with many different things, but I think part of the punch is that it isn’t specific:

Casualties

Attention is a click of heels, perfect creases, heads lifted, jaws set, and chests filled proudly with the hope of doing something good and right.

Four months later, heels click again, heads lift and jaws set as we wait for the gun salute in much shorter lines.

My favourite is still the first one that I wrote for the competition. I can’t decide if it’s more situation than story; I have a story for it sneaking around in the back of my head, and it’s hard to say how much of that came through. It was one of those pieces that just gelled when I wrote it, and I always love when that happens.

Snow Love

I have the tears of a snowman at the kiss of your sun, welcoming your fire with a scarf slipping askew.

When you go, I will be the space left behind, warmed but empty.

When I took this to my writing group to do an exercise on writing stories this way, one of my writers asked me if the last phrase should be switched around – empty but warmed. I hadn’t even thought about it, but I think I like it the way it is; that downturn at the end feels right to me. There’s the notion that there is no love (s’no love! get it?) in this self-destructive relationship, and the narrator knows it.

I like this form – it’s fun to play with. Maybe I’ll do some more soon, practice with it a bit. Even just writing about it like this is giving me ideas. Maybe later, when my to-do list is a bit shorter.