New Publications & The Value of Prompts

So I've had a couple more pieces published. They aren't nearly as strange as some of the previous ones (and one of them is even shorter than my usual fare), but they're pretty quick reads.

"Puzzle Peace" can be read over at Crack the Spine. It's a digital issue, so you'll have to manually click through the issue to get to it, but it's near the front. You can read that one HERE.

"Sympathetic Magic" has been put up in the "Seven Deadly Sins" issue of Penduline Press's latest publication. You can read it HERE.

My friend Donna Laemmlen also has a piece up in that same issue called "Thank You for Everything," which is a fun piece. It can be read HERE.

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I took a trip to Napa this weekend to stay at my friend Surya and his wife. I find that spending too much time in San Francisco makes me feel claustrophobic, closed in. I feel like a rat simply going through the motions of riding the train into the city, going to work, clocking out at the end of the day, riding the train home, repeat ad nauseum, ad infinitum. There's plenty to do here, don't get me wrong, and it's an incredibly literary city, but I've somehow got this notion that being in San Francisco translates directly to "work" rather than "play."

I took the ferry across the bay (as I tend to do when not roadtripping up there with my friend Carla). One gets pretty fantastic views of Alcatraz and the Golden Gate Bridge when heading north up to Vallejo, the city due south of wine country. I normally get reading or writing done during the hour-long ride, but this time I simply listened to music and tried to ease into relax mode.

I haven't written anything new in months and, for a writer, this isn't a good thing. Not for lack of ideas really, but I've been so busy at my day job that I'm simply exhausted by the time I get home and by the time I find myself relaxed enough from the work day to focus on something, it's time for bed.

This isn't really a conducive schedule or frame of mind for good output. So after a weekend of swimming, literary and political discussions, and fantastic food at the Fremont Diner, we stood outside smoking and chatting. He gave me a single word prompt to get me writing. That word was "factory" and I ended up knowing exactly what I wanted to write about within seconds. Perfectly weird and perfectly sensible (sort of), I wrote a good three pages on my Novel Idea app on the boat ride home. It's a piece I'm hoping to return to this evening as I like its current skeletal structure. It needs fattening up of course (it's only a first draft after all), but I think it'll be a pretty good read when it's done. Here's an excerpt for the curious:

Eight factories exist, each with their own sub-wings based on physiology. This final one, the eighth, creates not only toes, but fingers, noses, ears, thick muscled tongues, strips of eyebrow and scalps of hair or non-hair, eyelids, and the complex eyeball (made by the eldest and most experienced of craftsmen). These are the final touches, the accoutrements that turn the Gepetto Corporation's fully fleshed ideas into partial-flesh realities.

Factory 8 is the last in a long line of factories built to create each separate body part. This one in particular is where the toes are made, built of discarded ligament, "bone" made of firm but pliable rubber, skin made of skin donated from those no longer living, topped with toenails made of blended shale (for strength) and abalone (for shine). 

Having said all this, should any of you readers out there want to toss a word or phrase my way to get some new writing out of me, feel free to leave it/them in the comments.


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