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.

Steph, that idea is completely brilliant - never thought of it as an active, do-it-now idea for a group.

Deb - the new book idea sounds excellent! Write it!
(no pressure, says the woman whose book has languished half-finished on her computer hard-drive for three years).

Steph, that idea is completely brilliant - never thought of it as an active, do-it-now idea for a group.

We do fast-writes in class all the time -- just as part of the larger group, not in our small groups. But, like I said, There's nothing that says we can't, and it was in the forefront of my mind because of the new drabble community.

Kristin, I'm currently writing the proposal for it in email, and about to send off to my agent.

Teppy, you need to get away from your crazy job and teach or run courses on this stuff.

Teppy, you need to get away from your crazy job and teach or run courses on this stuff.

I'd like to start a version of my school in some other location. That involves a long (expensive) accreditation process *if* I want to stay affiliated with my current school, which I very much would want to.

As I have neither the time nor the money to get accredited, nor the desire to become a renegade writing school despot, I'm content to create LJ communities and order my small group around.

Damn. I'd sorta like to see you as a renegade writing school despot; I'd come stand by the door and hold a whip, and smile menacingly at the students.

I'd take that class, I think. At least you wouldn't torture me with dialogue that was all in complete sentences.Yeah, I sat in that group thinking "Maybe I do have a knack for that, after all," which was good for my vanity, but not especially instructive. It'll be nice when I write Pembleton again...tap into that "yeah, I'm a genius. So?" thing.