Sometimes I've had the lightning bolt thing. But that's not usually what it's like. (And I fully admit to being a little nuts. I'm obsessed with a city I've only seen on television. That's a little...off the hook. But the writing isn't the crazy part.

I'm obsessed with a city I've only seen on television.

that is completely normal - I love the same city.

Well, you've lived there. I haven't even seen it personally. I'm prepared to stipulate(check me out, getting my Pearlman on, with or without a parking garage!) that that's a little bizarre. But then, Dempsy and Gannon aren't even *real*(Which totally bowled over my geography-flunking ass, I don't mind telling you.) Maybe it's a writer thing.

dcp-Thanks so much for the link to Acland Brierty…explained, I think I'm in love.

And along the lines of the search for great writing, I'm x-posting this in Bitches:

I've got a request for the lovers of language among us...

I've written a workplace communication workshop...Avoid the Evils of Email!...which is all about increasing productivity and reducing misunderstandings through more effective email communication.

One of my points is about using the right words for the right message vs. generic terms that don't communicate one's actual meaning.

So, I'm looking for snippets (1-3 sentences) of your favorite evocative literature. Examples that stand alone and have left you thinking, "Heh. That was clever/cool/effective."

It matters not where the snippet comes from and I'd be happy to receive them here or via my profile addy.

[tenting fingers in anticipation] I can't wait to see what this brainiac crowd comes up with!

Okey dokey! I have to get a 25K word middle school book together for my agent. I don't write fiction, and haven't written for children. So I'm freaking out, waaaayyyyyy out of my comfort zone, and have no idea what I'm doing. Wheeeeeee!!!

Yay!!!!! Do you need research help? There's a colony of flying foxes at the Sydney Royal Botanic Gardens [link] , which is in downtown Sydney. When we saw them in the daytime, they were sleeping upside down, but would wake up and mutter at people who came to look at them. Of course, Billytea is really the answer.

Oooh, research help is always lovely!

I love those bats. I'm naming two after my niece and nephew, and they will be providing the Dorothy-in-Oz (heh) ephinany to my Sam to settle down somewhere and start his own family, instead of searching for an adoptive one.

I'm just so excited about your new project, Allyson. And please stop saying you're not a fiction writer. Basically, you write about people, and since you're purportedly telling the truth, you have restrictions about what you can write about these people.

All fiction is is writing about people without those restrictions. And although Sam is a bat, he's really a little boy. Although SGA is set in another galaxy, they're really talking about present society here on earth. They just have a little scope in the storytelling. You'll get the hang of fiction, it really isn't that different.

Bonny, one of my very favorite snippets ever is the second paragraph of Alice Hoffman's Practical Magic. Even though I don't think the lines were written into the script of the movie made from the book, my mental ear always hears them in Stockard Channing's voice:

Inside the house there were no clocks and no mirrors and three locks on each and every door. Mice lived under the floorboards and in the walls and often could be found in the dresser drawers, where they ate the embroidered tablecloths, as well as the lacy edges of the linen placemats. Fifteen different sorts of wood had been used for the window seats and the mantels, including golden oak, silver ash, and a peculiarly fragrant cherrywood that gave off the scent of ripe fruit even in the dead of winter, when every tree outside was nothing more than a leafless black stick.

I think that second sentence may be my favorite ever written, anywhere, in anything. If you put aside the meaning of the words and simply let the sound flow over and around you, the rhythm is compelling, amazing, beautiful. If you absorb what the words are saying, the visual, tactile, and scent impressions are dizzyingly rich, and then the sentence slows in cadence, each word falling with a certain weight, and the impressions feel chillier and finally cold and bleak--"ripe fruit even in the dead of winter, when every tree outside was nothing.more.than.a. leafless. black. stick."

And every time I try to quote that sentence, I substitute the words "lifeless dead stick", because that's the meaning I take from it. But "leafless black stick" is so much more visual, I think.

So that's my favorite, because it's so evocative for me, and those are the things and feelings it evokes.

Was that what you wanted?

I actually have Practical Magic on my shelf Beverly...and I love that passage. Thank you for pointing it out.

"ripe fruit even in the dead of winter, when every tree outside was nothing.more.than.a. leafless. black. stick."

Expertly evocative. And probably differently evocative for each reader. My dead of winter may vary from anyone else's...me being left coast raised.

Huh. Another interesting point for the workshop.

Double thanks!

snippets (1-3 sentences) of your favorite evocative literature.

What comes to mind is:

"In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort."

I can still remember when I first heard that. I was eight, sick in bed, and Dad started reading this book to me.... It was the first time I can remember that a story unfolded in my mind like a movie. The second-growth North Carolina jungle in back of our house was my playground, and I knew exactly what "a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell" was like, and also "a dry, bare, sandy hole" (except he left out the stringy roots).