I gesture so much when I speak, people ask if I'm Italian.

With me it's OK because of the Jewish factor... Do you do it when you're holding cutlery, too? I've managed to learn that, when I'm eating, I should not gesture with my hands when I hold a knife (it's only taken me over than 20 years), but I still find people recoiling from me in a conversation near a dinner table and realize that I'm waving a fork at all directions. Usually then I stop talking, put it down, and start the sentence all over again.

if I start reading there, knowing me, it'll be too hard to stop at just this one, I'll want to know what y'all are writing, wander around and read more, and I simply can't afford the time, so I just don't let myself start.

Nilly, you can feel free to play here -- I posted what the challenge was. In fact, I'll post it here every Monday (which is when I'm going to post the new challenge in LJ).

By the way, thanks Steph, I really enjoyed this. I love this thread but I feel like I can't really participate since all the writing I've done for the past few years is just for school.

For Nilly's reading pleasure:

She could tell from his look that he was about to say something serious, and she wondered if there was anything she could do to stop it. Anything he said at this point would- dammit. He was already beginning to speak before she could attempt to lighten the mood.

"I know we've always been friends, and never talked about anything more, but..."

He was still talking, but all she could do was wish that time would stop so she could weigh her options. Or maybe disappear.

Love?!? Did he say love? Rejecting him would mean that she would lose him and the only stability she'd had during the crazy past few years. Telling him she loved him would be a lie. Either way, things were going to change.

She knew what to say. She sighed before beginning to speak.

Okay, I posted too.

You can't really tell what they're talking about from two tables away. He looks hurt, she scornful. The passing traffic drowns out their voices.

He holds the cup close to his face. There's a lull after the light changes and you hear him say, "You said you were leaving for good, this time."

She snorts once, her dark lipstick unflattering in the sun. A shadow flashes across the table for a moment and is gone. "He's a jerk."

The waiter brings them more coffee. She drinks as if she's thirsty, but only picks at the muffin. He's barely touched his cappucino. One receipt flutters away; she tucks the other into her pocket.

You think he looks broken; the jacket hanging on the back of his chair is stained. She's dressed too lightly, a green tank top showing toned arms, her eyes unseen behind small sunglasses.

Someone jostles your table and your chai wobbles. When you look up from rescuing it, he's gone. But she remains, chattering still on her cellphone.

Both of those are damned good. 'suela, is that really only 100 words? It's nice and dense, if so.

you can feel free to play here

Thanks, Teppy, I didn't express myself well (which is exactly the problem, I think) - I would probably not participate for the sad sad lack of any inkling of imagination or enough good English, not due to the technical stuff.

I really love reading, though. Thanks, you guys.

Turned out to be 170, Deb. I cheated.

100 is... damned short. And it's hard for me to be the least bit subtle in that amount of space.

Drabbles are hard. Good training for learning to edit, but hard.

'suela, even at 170, it's nice and dense.

Damn, I love drabbles. I have no issue at all with the length; I like packed prose (which I think may explain my dislike for most epics). But yes indeed, always the issue of doing the word count on the perfect drabble, and finding it's 103 words instead of 100. The discipline starts with which three words gets cut.

One of the things I find about doing them is that it turns my eye toward the unnecessary. John Lennon once said about writing lyrics, which had to feed a metre, that he hated using "nothing" like "just" - he refused whenever possible to write a line like "I feel just fine", because "just" added nothing to the song, and was so obviously filler.

So I trim out the pronouns first, when getting them down to length; if I start a sentence with "Mary", and Mary is clearly the only person in that sentence, I can lose "she" before any future verbs.

It has a nice tautening effect on the writing style. Excess flab, begone!

In other news, I am excited. I have a new book burbling around in my brain. Does anyone here know the Roger Zelazny short in which he postulates (but never specifies or elaborates) on the idea of vampires not being at the top of the food chain? His idea was that something fed off them, and that this other something therefore had a vested interest in keeping vamps alive.

My brain went down a side trail and now there's a book burbling in there. Dark stuff, with an ethical pandora's box as the subtext.

I think I may have to find the time and energy and write the damned thing.

Damn, I love drabbles.

I had my writing class last night, which is split up -- timewise -- into an hour for the whole class (~18 women) and an hour or so for our small groups (4-5 women). In the small groups, people tend to read something they want focused feedback on, because you have 10-15 minutes that "belongs" to you.

However, there's no rule that one must read during "her" small group time.

So what I did last night during my allotted 10 minutes was ask the other women in my group to write for 5 minutes on the "two people sitting opposite each other at a table" prompt, and then to share what they wrote. (I did it, too, of course.)

They really liked it, which was a relief. And resulted in some good writing.

It's a little different than a 100-word drabble, because it was constrained by time, rather than word count, but the idea is the same.