The waiting is going to kill me and it hasn't even been a week yet.

Deep breaths, Allyson. Deep deep deep. They won't do anything about the waiting, but if you breath deep enough, you'll at least feel stoned.

Keys

Put your fingers to the piano keys
Let them linger, let them tease and bite
Skin to ivory, perfect calloused tips
Beat the rhythm, all in black and white.

Where I sit, languid and listening
All my world awash in liquid sound
Every wire takes its time to sing
Struck by hammers, notes both flat and round.

Ebony and rosewood are your base
Echoes from a box of rare delight
Treble laughing, bass and midrange full
Drape themselves across my dreams at night.

You strike the keys, and make those hammers fall
And I'll come dancing to that siren's call.

God, Deb, that's gorgeous.

Amy, 100 words on the first try, no editing.

Sometimes you get lucky...

You know what's funny? I wasn't even thinking drabble when I read it -- I was thinking lyrics.

I'm thinking maybe I'll see about setting them to music. That would be three song lyrics written in the space of as many months, when I hadn't written any in 25 years. But truth to tell, it was a drabble.

Damn.

What AmyLiz said. That is downright gawjus, Deb! As soon as I started saying it to myself, it felt like it needed music.

ETA: Not saying things clearly. It doesn't need music so much as it felt like there was already music there that I could almost hear and touch. It made me shiver. Better?

Seem to have a quorum, there. Music there should probably be.

drabble

I choose each word deliberately, weighing nuance and insinuation with the delicate precision of one for whom Roget's Thesaurus is bedside reading. There is an ego whose defenses must be circumvented so that certain truths may be told.

He has been very important to me, but I have finally reached a place where I know I don't accept certain ways he treats me. I craft sentences that tell how he's offended me. I ask if this is the note he wants to leave a five-year relationship on.

I pause, then strike the words out with a firm stroke of the pen. If it were not how he wanted to end things, then things would have ended differently. He has chosen. And now so do I. We have not exchanged one word in twenty years.

Um, that rule about how I'm supposed to let the manuscript rest for at least a week?

Is it one of those rare Rule rules, or can I take it as a suggestion rule? Because while I know that just 48 hours ago I was in a funk and thinking I was a worthless writer with a hopeless story, I had this epiphany last night that the real theme of my novel is something I'd been thinking of as a mere sub-theme, and I'm all excited about the story and champing at the bit to get back into it.

If this is a Universal Bad Thing, someone stop me soon before I open the file....