August 5, 2017 at 3:16 pm (Places, Traveling, Women Writers, Writing)
Tags: art, inspiration, London, museum, restaurants, short story, work-in-progress, writing process
Setting, The Wallace Collection, London:
Fragonard’s “The Swing” Originally, the lady was to have been pushed by a bishop. But this was evidently too much. So, instead, we have an elderly gent sitting on a stone balustrade, in the shadows behind.
- She walked past the Flemish Masters in the East Drawing Room, strode past Titian’s Madonna and David Teniers the Younger’s the Deliverance of Saint Peter.
Later, self took her notes and added this sentence (while having lunch at Chez Nous, 22 Hanway Street):
- She was more of a café person than her friend Maxine, who’d set the bar pretty high, whose idea of dinner was to go to the Ottolenghi in Islington, who had impressed her parents into gifting her a trip to London (she couldn’t be bothered to learn French, so London it was) by getting an A on a paper about the Thirty Years War (“1618 to 1648,” she told her mother, Cici, who blushed with maternal pride).
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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August 3, 2017 at 6:18 pm (Women Writers, Writing)
Tags: short story, writing process
Working Title: Magellan’s Mirror
Opening Sentence, Story # 1:
Her cousin believed that the sinking of the Titanic was part of a Russian plot to eliminate John Jacob Astor and other American imperialists.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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August 3, 2017 at 6:04 pm (Conversations, Women Writers, Writing)
Tags: dystopia, fantasy, short story, work-in-progress
Tags: dystopia, fantasy, the future, the Philippines
Engage cornea slips. Again.
“Nature,” Fire Lizard begins, “will vindicate her laws.”
Laws.
New word. What does it mean?
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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July 28, 2017 at 7:52 am (Artists and Writers, Women Writers, Writing)
Tags: Annaghmakerrig, dystopia, Fridays, Ireland, science fiction, short story, Tyrone Guthrie Centre
K thinks the boss is in love with her.
She looks like a mosaic puffball, her skin covered with checkered patterns.
The boss was born Earthstar. He’d never look her way. His spores were meant to go else: to a Silverleaf. Or a Shag. Not K that smelled like wet rot. All scaly cap and throat gills. She belonged with other Common.
Varnish and varnish. I’ll say this for K: she is tenacious. Especially about her delusions.
Wrote this story coming out of the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, 2014. Got all of the imagery from a book about mushrooms.
Stay tuned.
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July 24, 2017 at 6:04 pm (Artists and Writers, Conversations, Places, plans, Traveling, Women Writers, Writing)
Tags: artists residency, British authors, Edinburgh, fantasy, Hawthornden, inspiration, memories, Mondays, Scotland, short story, writing process
Just to show you how mind-numbingly slow her mind is, there are stories she’s begun five, even 10 years ago, whose words sit in her MacBook, languishing.
Five years ago, while self was in Hawthornden, she met two British poets: Joan McGavin and Jenny Lewis.
After dinner, while we all gathered in the parlor, these two would talk. And if self did nothing in that whole month she was there (June 2012) except listen to the stories, she would count that month well spent.
She also remembers visiting the National Museum in Edinburgh, and seeing there a figure of Dolly the Sheep. And dreaming of a giant Dolly the Sheep looking in through the manor windows.
Dolly the Sheep was the first successfully cloned sheep. She was born on 5 July 1996 and died on 14 February 2003.
Self was channeling sheep apparently because she even began writing a Dolly the Sheep story, which began:
- The ghost of Dolly the Sheep, and three dun-polled cows.
Hawthornden was the place where self worked on editing Magellan’s Mirror for J Journal. And that is quite a fantastical story (The Philippines populated by a race of giants).
Then she began going to Ireland and started writing dystopia.
Goal for today: Finish that Dolly the Sheep story!
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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July 23, 2017 at 5:34 pm (Artists and Writers, Sundays, Women Writers, Writing)
Tags: dystopia, fantasy, Literary Magazines, New Orleans Review, science fiction, short story
The factories still cry out sometimes. When we hear the keening sound, we know it is herds of ghost pigs, running into walls and crying because they can never find their way out. They are inside people’s heads, like the memory of old ways. And when people’s heads get too full of memories, the first ones to tumble out are the pigs, running every which way and squealing.
— from New Orleans Review 38.1, 2012
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July 23, 2017 at 4:07 pm (Artists and Writers, Sundays, Women Writers, Writing)
Tags: dystopia, fantasy, Literary Magazines, New Orleans Review, science fiction, short story
- We pig tenders go about our work with cowls pulled forward, shielding our faces. The sun is too bright: it scalds everything. At least, with a cowl, we still have faces.
— New Orleans Review 38.1, 2012
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July 22, 2017 at 9:14 pm (Conversations, Surprises, Women Writers, Writing)
Tags: fantasy, Literary Magazines, Saturday, science fiction, short story
“Thing” was the first of self’s dystopian fantasies to be published. It appeared in New Orleans Review, Vol. 38.1, 2012.
In the far future, a zoo for pigs exists in the desert. The minders are mutants, like the pigs they care for. The characters have names like Shrimp and Plankton (An editor asked if I got the names from SpongeBob Squarepants and I was so confused)
We feed the animals, clean their pens, that kind of thing. Our pigs are the result of experiments. They have all kinds of weird traits: one had a mouth in the middle of its forehead. Another had six legs. Another stared skyward, unable to bend its neck. Still another had the body of a snake and three noses. Each of the Not-Rights was unique and completely different from the others.
The mouth-in-the-forehead pig was mine. I named it Ed. I remembered that name from somewhere, I’m not sure where. When it cried, white foam spilled out of its mouth; the red of its pupils was astonishing, like fire. I never got tired of looking at it. It lasted longer than the others, I even let myself hope that it would happen differently. But one day its bristles started to fall out — big, black clumps of them, all over the pen. After that, it was just days.
But why should a pig cry, Shrimp said. What gives it the right?
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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July 10, 2017 at 6:33 am (Artists and Writers, plans, Sundays, Women Writers, Writing)
Tags: historical fiction, short story, writing process
Self’s an fiction is suffering but on the other hand, she is crushing all her other writing.
Today she wrote:
Philip II glances at his ministers. They nod solemnly in return.
Hallelujah! Hell’s bells!
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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June 5, 2017 at 10:30 am (Conversations, destinations, Explorers, Filipino Writers, Places, Women Writers, Writing)
Tags: dystopia, fantasy, flash fiction, humor, Mondays, Paris, short story, writing process
Self worked on this story in Paris. It’s about the end of the world, naturalement.
A pink bathosphere named Pinkie Pi (Joke, joke, joke!), navigated by a pair of squabbling men, is the last to leave the surface of the planet (A new city awaits on the Ocean Floor):
We’re going under.
When?
Today.
Just like that.
Oui. N’est-ce pas. What do you think?
You’re talking about under.
That’s what I’m saying, oui.
That down there, on the ocean floor, we can — je ne sais quoi.
Yes.
In the shift and roll of waves . . .
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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