New "How To Succeed As A Failing Writer" column up:

True Tales of Workshop Terror.

I liked it, Victor. Found it very relatable, even if I was dumb this morning.

All of the Pose drabbles were fantastic, especially erika's and Deb's poem.

New topic, La Tep?

Thanks, Amy Liz. I was afraid it was too "Bob doesn't want my carrots."

Sneaking one in under the wire. Porny.

There's No "i" in Pose

Pose, poise. So many different meanings, shadings, variations, ways to use them both, ways to get them confused.

Posed: me, dressed to blend with the backstage curtains, dusky velvet. Poised: Your head twisted sideways, your hands above the keyboard, waiting for the piano cue from the lead guitar.

Or posed: me, hands out, palms up and open in surrender, not moving, not breathing, the dusky velvet dress on your bedroom floor. poised: you, naked above me.

In the end? I still confuse those two words, those meanings and shadings, those imperfect memories, the two of us in time, posed, poised.

New drabble topic!

Challenge #85 (pose[s]) is now closed.

Challenge #86 is lost and found. NB: that's one topic, inclusive -- lostandfound, if you will. Not two separate topics.

....or I could come up with a different topic?

I like it -- I'm just letting it brew a bit.

I'm still thinking... not a bad topic, just not like "write about apples" There are a couple places I could take that...

I'm first? Well, I went with some of my other obsessions this morning

My Life, Season Thirty: The Wire Season Two

“This isn’t a war. Wars end.”

Out there, I’m nobody. Out there, it’s sprawling and hot, and I left my direction in my other pants.I am, to mix my worlds a little, “a no-job-having motherfucker” who deeply longs to be a “working man”(A “working girl” being a completely different beast and not likely since I can’t stand to have someone drink from my glass. My hooker name would be Lady MacBeth. But I can’t stand to have my sex disrespected so I think again. I want to be a...citizen. Strong, solid, gender-neutral.Contributing.)

In here, it’s cloudy...there’s a breeze off the docks and the lines are blurry in a way I recognize from my own life where I frequently give spelling tips to those who, in theory, at least, have power over me. I have told one the kinds of questions to ask when she talks to her daughter’s teacher about her failures in English. It’s not hard to imagine that the barrier between cop and criminal might get...soft, like that, too. In the little bits of Baltimore I see on TV, though, they can admit it, which makes it less like my life, unless suddenly cops began turning to young dealers, pages in hand, and saying “Are you getting everything you need?”

And I keep up my end by not making a cornerboy reply like “Fuck, no. Where’s my props, yo? I represent.” Sometimes I think I understand the quest for respect, although so far I’m both uncoordinated and peaceful enough to undertake it without weapons, although out there I’m relatively young. There’s still time.

In the Simonverse, I might have been somebody’s baby mama or jailed a couple times by now, a veteran of a war secretly declared and mostly lost.

I don’t really understand the battles I fight out there, either.