The Great Write Way, Chapter Two: Twice upon a time...
A place for Buffistas to discuss, beta and otherwise deal and dish on their non-fan fiction projects.
Kristin - really? Or is it fiction? Do you guys not do Home Ec at school? 'cause if not - wow. Bless you.
I just checked the thread and laughed a lot that my little throwaway drabble got you all talking so. Hee! Yes Fay, 100 percent true. It happened when I was 22, no less. We had home ec classes in junior high, but the ones in high school were electives. I did takre several parenting type classes, but alas no cooking ones. Truly it should have been mandatory. What I didn't say in the drabble was that, eyes streaming from the onions, I finally called my mom, sobbing. After she stifled her laughter she said, "Oh Kristin...I've failed you." She still feels guilty about the fact she never taught me to cook.
Superstition
It's the colour of jealousy: Green-eyed envy, dissatisfaction with your own life, your own arrangements, the dancing little devil of wanting what you can't have and don't necessarily deserve.
It's the colour of money: Greed, that hard crusty bitterness, avarice's maid of honour, the moneychangers in the temple.
It's the colour of bad luck: No green at a wedding.
I look at my wedding ring, the emerald that warmed his skin and mine. I look at it with my green eyes.
I'm jealous of nobody. And the ring has been there for nearly a quarter century.
Green? My favourite colour.
My eye has grown used to what the desert calls green, a faded, greyish, yellowy sort of green. Even where stupid people drown their lawns in precious water, the green seems hollow.
The pictures from my home in Pennsylvania baffled me at first. Had I used a filter? Was it cloudy that day? Had the photo emulsion changed?
No. Green is dark, thick, rolling for acres under the summer sun in a land where water flows without need for a name. I miss green. I would like to go back to that land in the end, to feed the green.
Very nice.
Connie, I definitely hear yours. I'm sitting in Indiana, looking out the door at lush green yards -- everyone is complaining about how brown they are -- and in eighteen hours I'll be on my way to the desert and the gorgeous faint hints of green that mean the plants that look completely dead are actually thriving. Well, technically on the way. By way of a freaking water park, and a couple of towns.
Oh, and Susan, I need your snail mail. I thought I had it but can't find it. I'm so sick of being on the road. So can you send it to my profile addy?
Got it, thanks, Susan. Your brochures will hit the mail tomorrow.
From One Island to Another
It was the third leg of a 28-hour trip. Confined to the inside of that silver metal tube, hour after hour, with only brief stops to refuel where we might be allowed an hour to desultorily scan the duty free shops for gifts left me feeling cheated of the experience of landing in new countries: nothing I could touch, taste, smell or hear. Only the meager view from the window before landing. Yet, even today, there’s one I’ll never forget. So many shades of green, I thought we’d need new words for them. But, really, we already have one: Ireland.
Oh, lovely! Ireland, first time you see it from air or sea, has exactly that effect.
Oh, yeah. That's one place I definitely want to go back to. I used to think Wisconsin was green, until we flew into Shannon. The colors were so remarkable, I could have stared out the window for hours.
Results of the 2005 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest [link]
Winner:
As he stared at her ample bosom, he daydreamed of the dual Stromberg carburetors in his vintage Triumph Spitfire, highly functional yet pleasingly formed, perched prominently on top of the intake manifold, aching for experienced hands, the small knurled caps of the oil dampeners begging to be inspected and adjusted as described in chapter seven of the shop manual. -- Dan McKay, Fargo, ND
Another good one--dishonorable mention in the Children's Literature category:
"What are you doing in my bedroom at this time of night, Ernie, and why are you grinning at me with those sharp teeth and how come you've been spending so much time with the Count lately, and why has Big Bird disappeared, and you should really do something about that breath, or my name isn't Bert the muppet." -- Vicki Nunn, Gladstone, Queensland, Australia
