Please enjoy this poem entitled, “Shitty handwriting: not a real poem because it’s my actual situation right now, pt. 1”
No matter if the girl met the love of her life or if he stabbed someone in the neck.
No one can read my next three chapters,
cause I can’t type the next three chapters,
cause I can’t read what I wrote,
cause I have shitty handwriting.
And I wrote in pencil.
The end.
Just goes in pencil for days
At Blerdcon 17, there was a neat class on brainstorming warm ups when drawing or making comics.
In the activity, you had to pick a word from four different bags. One bag of adjectives, a bag of inanimate objects, a bag of living beings and a bag of colors. Once you had your words, you had to draw a picture.
Has anyone ever tried anything like this for writing? I thought it would be a neat activity for a writing group. The results would definitely be as exciting as the art that folks created.
Here is my attempt at art, Hamburger Sleepy Shark and Yellow Strong Spider. Hence, the reason why I’m a writer.
This is what happens when my husband tries to talk to me whilst I’m writing.
Husband: You remember Adam Lambert? He just released a song called “Two Fux.”
Me: Oh like two guys at the same time? Cause Corrine does that you know, two guys. She’s such a crack ho. She’s not really a crack ho. I love her so much!
Happy 4th of July beautiful people! Hope your holiday weekend is full of writing about the characters you love, even if you occasionally refer to them as a crack ho.
There was that time when I said I was going to submit poems for the Narrative Magazine poetry contest.
I wrote five poems and while caught up in the rhapsody of putting down poetry like Kendrick Lamar puts down rhymes, I was like, “hells yeah baby, I got this!”
Five USAID meetings, a little-bit-forced of collaboration with the State Department, Ebola, coordinating the US response to flooding in South America and two major global healthcare meetings later, I’m just trying to move family half way across the country and work on my novel without having a nervous breakdown.
Suddenly those poems that seemed so great four weeks ago seemed not so great. I felt less like Kendrick Lamar and more like Shalamar –no real relation between the two, I used it because it rhymed. If anyone can think of a fitting word that rhymes with Lamar, leave it in the comments ;).
I woke up this morning to news that my friend and fabulous writer, Faye’s story, “End Tines”, was published in Still (http://www.stilljournal.net/margaretfaye-jones-cnf2017.php.)
Yay for Faye because she was published, yay for me cause her win re-ignited my motivation to enter the Narrative contest.
So today, I got my shit together and got brave enough to take another look at the poems I plan on submitting. So yeah, that is totally still happening. Got a sweet poem? You should submit too. Check out the contest in detail here, good luck! http://www.narrativemagazine.com/node/367342
I was in the middle of revising a dinner scene when I stopped and said out loud, “oh hells to the no Corrine’s not eating an avocado! Avocados are expensive!”
Then I remembered,
a. It’s fiction so the cost of those avocados is not mine to bear.
b. Corrine can afford to just eat avocados all willy nilly.
c. That’s what I imagine Arms Dealers do. Just have crazy avocado parties for all their friends.
d. An actual Arms dealer reading this novel may beg to differ with the above.
Why are avocados so expensive though?
Dear World Wide Interweb,
Please stop sending me ads about granite floor medallions and inlays. I am not actually the type of clientele you seek oh makers of elaborate mosaic flooring. I do like to eat the foie gras, but do not be fooled.
I was merely doing research for novel in which my main character walks into her lover’s house for the first time and says, “wow, this place is part Rockefeller, part Scarface. Who lives here, a drug dealer?”
Thank you and as soon as this book gets a sweet movie deal, I will definitely seek out.
Sincerely,
Not rich and not a drug dealer
Last Thursday I was in Norfolk, VA for work. While I was at dinner, I was at dinner and someone left $100 for me to pay for my bill at dinner to thank me for service. At first, I was like, wow! The person went on and I never even saw their face.
The next day was downright crap and I was like, “that $100 must have come as a miracle, to the crappy day that ensued following day.”
Today, I’d been up for four hours trying to knock out a brief for a man I never met to present to 300 people on a topic he knows nothing about. I decided to take a break and I was on my way to the gym with an hour to spare before it closed.
Whilst walking and listening to Kaytranada, two very frantic, lost ladies flagged me down while there were running across the street. Their phone was about to die. They were looking for an address in Northeast DC; they were in Arlington. For anyone not familiar with DC, that’s on completely opposite sides of the river.
I hopped in the car, took them back to my house and plugged up their phone so it could charge while they went to have lunch. I ran to the gym, had 30 minutes to knock a shitty set of bench presses and the gym closed.
When I returned from the gym I asked, “did the ladies come back to get their phone?” My husband said yes, but when he picked it up to hand it to them, the phone slipped from the case and shattered. He felt really bad and after basically begging them to take payment to get it repaired, they reluctantly accepted and he gave him the remaining $60 that I had from the $100 that was given to me by a kind stranger.
He felt bad, they felt bad, but I feel like I’m the one who really loss here 😞😆.
In the first draft of my novel, I literally have a section called, “something, I don’t what it is yet, will happen here for 10-12 pages.” 
🙌#winningatwriting
Check out this awesome article by Margot Singer if you feel me.
http://www.jewishbookcouncil.org/_blog/The_ProsenPeople/post/the-failed-drafts-behind-the-novel/
The Pentagon needs to no shit change there rules on no photographs at the metro station. Not a day goes by where there isn’t some sort of drama. I mean so much good material for my stand up routine. Wasted. The DC metro has a higher than normal rate of “interesting” people in general and when you mix all that craziness with the Pentagon people, comedy gold.
I mean if you ever want to see some beat down looking people, just watch people who work at the Pentagon walk into and out of the Pentagon. Add those peeps to the homeless man standing in the middle of the 16A bus giving everyone a lesson on the life of John Brown at the top of their lungs and there you go, Pentagon metro station.
Life inside the Pentagon is not all doom though. It can be rough yes, but I guess it’s also fascinating. I have been going to the Pentagon at least once a day for a year and let me tell you. If I have to go any place in the building other than the one office I normally visit, I get lost. Nevertheless, I am always star struck when I run into someone like the Secretary of Defense or a high ranking military officer with so much bling bling on his collar, I’m like, “oh, my eyes!”
Corrine (the main character in my novel) is a military kid and her dad, whom she refers to as not dad, but the “Colonel”, is an Army officer. For the majority of the novel, he works at the Pentagon and now that I spend about fifty percent of my work life at the Pentagon, I totally understand how beat he is at the end of the day and has absolutely zero time for her shenanigans. I totally get it.
I actually feel a little bad for the Colonel. Having to deal with Corrine and deal with the Pentagon, I’m very surprised that he hasn’t asked to written as a an alcoholic.
Happy writing peeps!
Shannon with the Plannon 