From Gotham Writers Workshop:
Deadline: August 28, 2017, midnight Eastern Time
Check out more at https://www.writingclasses.com/contest/a-very-short-story-contest-2017):
Author: puffelly
Llamas humping
It’s really hard for me to write sex scenes. Either it sounds like a sex education textbook or full on Debbie does Dallas. This bag of Animal Crackers made my day.
Oh Walmart
It’s like WalMart knows the quickest way to my heart😆. DMX and notebooks, high five! 
Kitchslightely
Good day for writing. I got to help someone with a business plan which was awesome. Worked on a technical paper on best business practices in global health security.
Started plotting out a TED talk.
Wrote a speech for a guy I don’t know about a topic he doesn’t care about.
Tried to score a free Washington post on the metro to make some sweet black out poetry.
Thought I was gonna get taken down by a guard at the Pentagon because of said Washington Post recon/black out poetry efforts.
Revised a poem that is destined to win a pulitzer.
I even worked out three arms deals for Corrine(the main character in my novel), an issue she was having with condoms and how she meets her lover’s wife, Helena, for the first time. Not necessarily in that order.
Good times. Now I’m happy, but tired, typing with one eye open and just sitting here looking at my computer screen like, “what do you mean kitchslightely isn’t a word spellcheck?”
Yeah… it totally isn’t a word.
Ho bag?
I was sitting here trying to figure out why it’s taking Corrine like seventy five pages until she and Gregory “do the nasty” aka “become intimate” (for all you genteel types) for the first time. In her defense, Corrine is only twelve years old for 1/3 of those forty five pages and for another 1/3 of those pages, Gregory is dead so… but still seventy five pages?
Upon closer inspection, I found that it’s due to the novel’s three timeline structure. In reality it only takes only takes about twenty five pages for them to go from strangers to lovers. I then started thinking, does twenty five pages make you prudish or loose? I guess it depends. I’m also going to say that there are far many more things that give the reader a chance to decide where Corrine lies on scale of sexual morality/depravity. I also use the word ho bag to describe lots of people, male and female. Skank is another one. I’m taking those words back and it’s kind of great actually. I’m going to make the terms ho bag and skanky cool, like sunglasses at night cool.
All said, maybe seven five pages isn’t a crazy long time, it’s just that for where I sit, “the nasty” is what Corrine and Gregory do like 75% of the time. They would say, “hey, we do other stuff.” To that response, I give them the side eye.
In closing, here is a picture of a goose that was giving me the side eye when I tried to walk across the grass in Falls Church earlier today.
The real MVP
So, the main character in my novel, Corrine, is sitting in Rome. Newly returned from Somalia, she is sipping espresso celebrating her first major arms deal.
I’m sitting here in DC trying to figure out how these guns actually move on and off of the Continent.
Thank the stars for this sweet ass map that popped up conveniently on my newsfeed. Africa Center for Strategic Studies, you are the real MVP.
#pollen
Wanted to enjoy the first sunny day of the week sitting outside and writing. Mostly I just sat there watching pollen waft unapologetically from the trees into my sinus cavities.
Spoons, Forks, Sporks
So lately, I’ve been about all things poetry.
Why? Because I love poetry like I love Morrissey and I loooooove Morrissey.
My writing group (self identified “prose” people) is great and they read my poems provide awesome feedback, but admit sadly that they were not “poetry” people and unsure if there feedback had much value. On contrary, feedback coming from those “prose” people is valuable and in their defense, my poetry pieces are weird, little hybrids of poetry/flash fiction, so it’s hard for me to get my head around it also.
That’s when I realized maybe I should follow the suggestion to seek out more “poetry” people. I also realized that as far as my poems are concerned, what I really had was a spork. Not quite a spoon, not quite a fork, not suitable for eating soup, not suitable for eating meat, not quite poetry, not quite fiction.
After asking around for advice on social media for about a week, I was still at a dead end. I put the idea and the poetry aside for a couple of couple of days and pressed on with my novel. Last Sunday, my son asked if I could go on to the public library page and look for events for he and his brother to attend and I came across a cool, haiku workshop and a music making workshop for kids. Thrilled with the great finds at the DC library, I popped on over to see what the Arlington County library had to offer. There it was, under Events, “Poetry workshop.”
Well, let me tell you, my enthusiasm was difficult to contain. Not only would I get to meet the elusive, “poetry” people, I could do it a nice library that not only had a poetry workshop, but free parking and the book, “Learn Spanish in 100 days.” That’s a topic for another blog, but oh baby, I was excited!
The workshop itself was great! About ten participants, the youngest one eight, the oldest seventy four. All sorts of people, “poetry” people, with all sorts of poetry. I enjoyed listening to poetry being critiqued, the language of the whole experience is different that when critiquing prose, novels, short stories and such. Words like, “syntax” and “iambic” and “quatrain”, oh baby!
I learned so much. I went into the workshop blind, not knowing what to expect, I only wish I would have given them a better version of my work to critique. Somehow, I only thought we were reading our work, so I showed up with my half poem, half micro fiction, guessing I would just read it out loud like poetry. The “poetry” people were so kind. They gave me ways to make the pieces more poem like in their structures, which was very helpful. However, I still had a spork.
During the writer’s retreat I attended shortly after the poetry workshop, I met a nonfiction writer. After talking to her about my conundrum, I decided that my little monsters of poetry/flash fiction could actually go either way AND I am very prepared and capable of doing both.
The “prose” people have helped me to beef up the pieces with plump little words and make it more like the great short fiction they can become; the “poetry” people have helped me to slim it down, make in sparse and lyrical like the poems they could become equally.
Just proves that the life of a spork isn’t bad after all.
Tom/Jenny
If anyone out there was thinking of opening a mobile relationship counseling business, I’m here to tell you that there is a definitely a market. Aside from being a blog about prose, poetry and random shit I think about whilst trying to do those two things, it is also an adventure in the random shit that happens to me on a daily basis living in Washington, DC.
Case in point. Earlier today, this couple, Tom and Jenny, were in a full blown argument on the 16A bus to Annandale.
-Why did you decide to go this Costco Jenny? At 2:30!
-We could have just taken the car Tom.
-I needed to get there closer to 2:00 Jenny.
-Why does it matter Tom?
-You shouldn’t have just jumped on the bus?
-It’s like we didn’t even talk about this! We can buy bread and bagels at this Costco Tom!
-That is not reassuring Jenny.
Couple of things,
- Jenny and Tom, Costco’s not that damn serious. I actually hope they made it there without choking each other or the bus driver kicking them off in the middle of Columbia Pike. My bits and pieces of what occurred as written here are a thousand times milder than it actually was.
- They are going to still have bread and bagels when you get there. Doesn’t really matter if y’all are on the bus 2:30 bus.
- I’ve never actually gotten into a fight with a significant other over bread and bagels on a bus. I did get into a heated argument over a hotel with by buddy Steve in the back of a Hong Kong taxi.
- What was this argument really about, because it wasn’t Costco.
- Corrine (the arms dealer in my novel) and her man, Gregory (the assassin) have much different arguments.
Gregory- I forbid you to go to Mogadishu!
Corrine- And do my job?
Gregory- And meet with warlords!
Corrine- Like I said, do my job.
6. We have city rabbits on Columbia Pike. I’ll leave you with this nice picture of a little dude who was watching me as I got off the Tom/Jenny crazy bus and headed towards Henderson Hall. I can’t tell if s/he rabbit was taking a poop, I’m not schooled in rabbit habits.
Oh.Snap.
Currentlyin progress, the haiku-blackout poem-collage. The shizzle just got rizzle.
Shannon with the Plannon 