Yep, Consuela, it's Galveston. I was thinking specifically of the 1900 hurricane.

I love that island. I'm overdue for a visit, but if I don't get there before Memorial Day, I'll have to wait till fall. It's too overcrowded and expensive during the summer.

Serial to add, Nilly, I would LOVE to see a drabble from you. I've not the slightest doubt it would amaze and delight.

Thanks, Jesse and Astarte (and I wasn't fishing for anything, honest). If it were Hebrew, I could probably try - write long and then cut and prune, the way I do whenever I have to write something for, well, anything - but I don't think that I can, not yet, in English.

There are just too many levels of translation there for me - and I don't even mean the getting of the initial idea (which is a huge thing for me, in fact, but this is exactly the kind of thing this exercise is supposed to help overcoming, right?): from what I think (Hebrew), to how I want to say it (defaulted Hebrew), to how I can do that in a different way than a one that is already not natural for me, with actually thinking about the phrasing of stuff in a conscious level for it to help get the meaning across.

I still don't have enough English for that. Not yet.

Sunday Drive

Look over the edge of the narrow silver ribbon as you swing around the spiral, rocking as you curve, and curve. Look deep into red rocks, barred by sunlight, broken and scattered, down to the water, another silver ribbon a mile below, slipping through the rocks, around the trees made from faded green splatters and black lines. Everything moves, the ribbon of road, the water, the red rocks, spiralling inward with you, from the outside air above, down, into the red rocks going black, while the sun moves and scatters, goes red and gold before it slips below the horizon.

Oh, are you a write-long person? I'm going to be a write-long person in my next life. It's going to be great. Next time around, college will not be a process of looking at a two-page paper thinking "er, yeah, that's my point. I don't have eight more pages to say about that."

Drabbling is seriously the only situation in which I've ever wanted more room.

My drabble first drafts are all 75 words, I shit you not.

I hit 80 odd, say "Is this enough? No?" and then add 30 words and work down from there, pretty consistently.

I'm so terribly short form.

I'm ordinarily wordy-girl. But with these, I'm writing very short and terse. I hit word count and it's 88, 94 words, so I go back and change a sentence to read more smoothly. I sanded things a bit on the last one, and threw out three words. It gave me room for a whole other sentence.

Loving this. Loving Steph for suggesting it.

Oh, are you a write-long person?

Have you seen some of my posts in the "Firefly" thread? t /sheepish

er, yeah, that's my point. I don't have eight more pages to say about that.

Mine is more like "OK, that's all the blah-blah I could possibly think about. On completely unrelated topics, too. Now find some sort of point in there, make sure it's relevant, and write it".

No matter what my limit is, my first draft is short. My five-page papers always started at 3. For work now, I'll often have, say 300 words to write, and I almost always end up with 250.