None The Less
There’s nothing left in you
for me.
the vaporous possibility
a veil pulled away to reveal
all this nothing
Both birds tucked in bush
empty hands
beak pecked and talon scratched
pale against green leaves
and frothed feathers
There’s nothing left in me
for you.
I am a morbid shadow
the girl we once knew
paper thin
soul and words faded
to a time of never-was
bleached by sun
tattered by storm
Blank
and you
none
the
less
for it.
Hello writers and readers. I hope you all enjoyed a long weekend and had some time to yourselves for writing or exploring your creativity. I have been balancing the new school schedule as well as social engagements, old-dog vet appointments, and enrichment programs for my kiddos. I’ve been logging extra miles in preparation for the Colorado Ragnar Relay and juggling the details of 12 individuals coordinating 36 hours of their lives together.
What I haven’t been doing is writing.
Or editing.
Or even brainstorming.
It doesn’t bode well for a blogger who touts being a writer to not write. So what does one do, when life around her seems to sap every moment? She prioritizes and shakes off some of the unimportant to feed her soul. After all, that’s what I’m always preaching to you fine people to do, right? I can’t very well tell you how to walk the road while I muck around in the ditch.
So I’m back to the computer this week, setting up some goals for the year. My 40th trip around the sun should have something monumental yes? Besides my body falling apart and gravity being especially cruel on all my jiggly bits? I need something uplifting to balance it all out. So I’m making lists and culling the overgrown herd of obligatory adulting.
We all get overwhelmed and distracted with life and let our time to write, or to paint, or knit or whatever it is that feeds our bigger brain get kicked off the schedule. My hope is that we understand how empty that missing piece leaves us and work to fill it back in again.
As this is my case, I will only be contributing to this blog four times a month (2 blog posts, 2 VerseDays) in an effort to put more of my time towards my novels and the new Poetry Anthology coming out in the Spring.
I’m not sure who will miss my weekly thought purges, but rest assured, I will still be darkening your door, just a smidge less.
Please feel free to send me your poetry or flash fiction, I’ve extended the deadline to December 31st for inclusion into the poetry anthology, “No Small Things”. Even if you’ve contributed before, I’d love to hear more. Thanks for your time and consideration!
Until next week, go work on your stuff! I want to know your time isn’t being wasted and that we’re all doing well by ourselves and our passions. Reach out to me, if you do have a spare moment, and let me know what you’ll be doing to prioritize your creativity in the next few months!
Love ya,
Sarah
I’m not sure where this came from. Maybe it was my old high-school track coach telling me that if I quit, I’d never finish anything in life. (Hey, Mr. S and Mr. R…turns out I CAN actually finish something, including two marathons, half a dozen halfs and six relays, give or take).
Maybe it was the instructor who berated me for “letting” my daughter quit, saying that I was teaching her to give up when things got tough.
To those instructors, I offer this:
A child who knows how to pursue their own happiness, that knows their own heart and can let go of situations that are abusive or dangerous and move on to something better is a child who will surpass us all, because they’ve learned that other’s expectations are not as important as their own mental health and physical safety.
Let’s do one better and become this kind of person in our own lives, starting today.
Let’s be the parents that recognize happiness isn’t measured in instagram likes and crappy plastic trophies.
Enjoy…or get uncomfortable. Either way.
Perfect
Born into arms which penetrate hearts
Inject the belief
we were meant for greater things, pal.
Capable of great feats,
(greater than that loser Tommy two doors down)
Set expectation high and don’t ever
Ever
Ever
Settle for less.
Aim for the stars kid, and you’ll at least hit the moon.
So we aim, eyes glancing back to expectant faces
Waiting for the brag worthy photo to be posted later
Thinking
They’ll surely love me then.
By the measure of counted likes and tiny hearts floating
to the top of screens they rarely look up from.
We will excel. We will be better.
We will hurtle faster into adulthood,
And pound on depression’s door with a signed note,
Tug along our anxieties to the bus stops and soccer practices.
Bite nails, inhale, drink it down,
and give the captain of the football team
whatever he asks for.
We’ll aim for the stars
hurtle our broken bones and burst ligaments once more
like they’ve pulled a catapult’s lever to expunge us again and again
If it only would mean
They would love us.
Maybe when we get on the Varsity team,
Maybe after our third ACL replacement before graduation.
Maybe after the fourth ivy-league school accepts.
Maybe when we’ve lost enough fat to crown the top of the pyramid
In tiny skirts designed to make it all our fault.
Watch our faces fall every day
As we are shoveled into cars and
Paraded down sidelines,
Dressed in tutu’s and reminded not to eat too much
Sent to the psychologist because
‘she just can’t focus’ in a force-fed day
Gorged on Latin and dance, soccer and flute,
Math club, robotics, and the triple threat; tap.
Future problem solver
Can’t even solve her own problems
Pop a pill, darling, it will help you get our dreams.
Never really understanding that the only real problem,
Is the one that tucks us into bed,
Sighing, resigned, that maybe tomorrow will be better.
The ones that feed us breakfast and
Don’t search the backpack for the needles,
Because “he’s born with natural talent”
Twisted Sister could have taught you something
Darling perfects
about their trite and jaded ideas
screaming you are not enough
Just as you are,
Just ask you like.
You will excel,
Like they never did.
You will severe their noose of tough love
Drop it in your sweaty gym bag,
burn it with your test score report and tap shoes.
Do not let them force you
to relive their spent dreams.
Be all. Be nothing.
Land lightly in the space between…
The space that is you.
Hello my little writer friends. It’s not often I jump of the creative train to offer you some solid advice on the science of writing, but I thought I’d give your philosophical pathways a break. Hopefully, unlike your sophomore English teacher, this won’t put you to sleep.
I’m a creative; a bit of a butterfly girl if you will, and my concern and study of the correct comma or punctuation usage is akin to my concern and study of the HOA Regulations. And while my garden grows amuck and wild like fairies planted it, it also makes for some unsightly overgrowth.
Some forms of writing can take more license. Poetry is a perfect example of this. There is also a funky new emergence of non-traditional work coming out of some literary journals that plays with time, space, language and form like Shyamalan played with screenwriting. So for those forms not all the rules will apply.
For the rest of us, who’s audience doesn’t want the jolt of unexpected grammar holes, it’s important that we keep up on the latest grammatical trends in the business.
“Wait! Grammar trends? But grammar doesn’t change! I memorized all of those rules from Mr. Cloyd, I KNOW how to use proper form!”
I hate to be the one to break it to you, but we’re friends and I have only your best interests at heart, so here it goes.
Some grammatical rules always apply. I had started a list but it was getting too long so I’m doing a total cop out and referring you to the ignanamous Daniel Scocco and his blog: Grammar 101.
Even with this base, writers and editors have started to understand the importance of language as a living being. As time and modes of communication change and flow, so do the ways in which writers share their stories. I’m not here to judge whether or not the Oxford Comma is valid (totally valid), I’m here to let you know that writing well and clearly without the distraction of poor sentence structure remains your goal.
I tend to think of changes in grammar as happening like a Paris fashion show. All of these bigwig editors get together at giant conferences and spend hours drooling over the next newest trends in the industry. Whether it be hyphenation changes or comma usage, there’s always something that top-selling writers (oof, was I supposed to hyphen that?) or literary savants are playing with that make it more acceptable (even standard) for the rest of us to do as well.
Sometimes these changes are a direct result of what’s happening in the English language in it’s spoken form. After all, your modern-day hero isn’t going to yell out, “I shan’t do it!” or “Have you a moment?”. Jane Austen didn’t have the word “bromance” to describe Mr. Darcy’s and Mr. Bingly’s long standing friendship. We are experiencing a trend towards more passive voice as well as a heavier usage of the progressive form of verbs (‘they speak’ vs. ‘they are speaking’).
The changes I most want you to pay attention to are those that the industry is accepting as standard. Such as the single-space after a period vs. double space (as Chicago crooned, it’s a hard habit to break).
Lucky for us, in this world of mobile grammar, tools have arisen to help. Grammar checking software is like having an on call editor, standing by as you write to alert you of any mishaps. They’re getting reasonable in price and better with each year. Most are updated to reflect industry standards. Check out Grammarly, WhiteSmoke, ProWritingAid, Ginger Online, and LanguageTool just to name a few.
If you aren’t ready to download something yet, here are a few more resources that I’ve bookmarked on my own laptop.
The Blue Book of Grammar and Punctuation
I know it’s a vast, ever-changing sea out there, but stay strong little writer.
You ought not worry.
Hello after a much needed hiatus, I hope that the last few weeks have been grand for you all. I was on a little vacation and decided to allow my normal schedule to soften a bit in all aspects of my life. Writing fell by the wayside, I slept in and skipped out on the morning miles. I just let myself be.
Those are the times that do us strangely good. Now, granted, you can’t stay in that kind of state if you hope to advance your work in progress or be prepared for that fastly-approaching relay race (yikes, maybe I should have ran a little more…) But the respite is an important part of any successful endeavor. I don’t actually know if that’s scientifically proven, but I do know about burnout and I know the only way to avoid it is to rest once in a while.
Plus, life is short…we should pause to enjoy it occasionally instead of hurrying ourselves into the grave.
One of the best things resting can do, is reorient yourself to the quietness inside. When the demands of the world are so loud and the shoulds, and have-tos, and oughts are always at the forefront we often forget what it is we really want. We forget to check in and see if what we’re doing is really what we need to be doing. What we want to be doing. Does it serve our happiness? Or someone else’s?
I’m not sure if it’s viable for you, but I encourage you as a writer, a parent, an athlete, or whatever label you’ve had slapped on your ass, to step back once in a while. Even if it’s just taking a ‘mental health’ day from work to change up your routine. Purposefully don’t do what you always do. Refuse. Resist. Sit quietly with the only person that’s really in control of your situation (no not the toddler, I know it feels that way, but…)
Reacquaint yourself with you.
It can be kind of harrowing. The quiet removal of all you ‘live for’ in a day has the effect of taking a car seat out of the back of your car after a year. You might see a lot of trash and rotting debris beneath all that was so ‘necessary’ (quotes are for effect of the comparison…car seats are TOTALLY NECESSARY). The clear space of you that’s been neglected for a long time. Sometimes that space has been neglected for so long that it, itself, has become rotted and unstable. And with that can come the clarity of why everything that rests on it, all the things you do in a day, feel like they’ll topple over at any second.
A neglected core is unstable ground for building a life.
It can be scary to find that what you once clung to so fiercely is not really what you want deep down. You can’t heal that wound until you clean it all out, study it, and treat it. Life leaves us scars in this way. Places we’ve been, people we’ve loved, that no longer make sense to the path that’s at the true core of our center. They may even throw our center completely off for other areas of our lives. So cull the herd. Start from the bottom and build new dreams, new goals, that fulfill what you need today, not five-ten-twenty years ago.
Don’t forget human, you’re meant to change over the years.
Get deep. Get dark. Get to know yourself again, then work your way up.
Hey there kids.
It’s been a whirlwind on my end of things the last few weeks and I’m trying to catch my brain up to my heart in a lot of respects. So this one feels…tepid. Like unsatisfying tap water…too warm to be refreshing, too cold to be comforting.
We all have our days.
Missfit
She doesn’t go
In the lines they drew,
She slithers out
Spills over edge.
She doesn’t fit
In labeled boxes and
Carefully thought out plans
She escapes over walls
And flies the coop
She doesn’t match the furniture
Or compliment the wall paper
She doesn’t shrink to fit the space
Or diminish into corners.
She is not refined in fixture
Not the gray of peripheral
She is ill-placed and jarring
Color splashed on white walls
She lacks pattern and structure.
She misfits this world,
Careens past the bullseye,
To shoot wild
Flies across the sky
In dodging weaving trails
Floating butterfly
Stinging bee
She is uncontained
And worrisome.
All right, friends and neighbors, the homework I assigned last week is only due for me. You can send me your 0-1000 word story/poem from the prompt: “Write about something you left behind by accident and/or Write about something you left behind on purpose” anytime between now and September 1st.
Remember, you not only get featured on the blog, you get a free set of my steamy romance novels signed by me and braggin’ rights. So get me those entries, send them to the contact info on this site.
In the spirit of being a good example, I’m including not only a flash fiction piece but also a poem. Because prompts are expandable, remember I said that. Be creative. Hell, you know what? If you have a photo that you feel might fit with this prompt, send that in too! I’d love to see it…In fact, today’s photo was a result of said inspiration.
Get out there, get writing. Here’s my homework (you’re welcome to print it out and grab a red pen but you can’t send it back…)
Hyde Park
I left your scarf on a park bench
The sun came out
It was too warm
I pulled at it, slipped it down one side of my neck,
Set it beside my tea
And went back to the newspaper
The orb blazed brighter
Dropping my mind
into a haze of preoccupation
I tossed my cup in the bin
Tucked the paper under my arm
Fled the barrage of summer
And came home
Without your memory
hanging around my throat
That’s how you finally forget,
I suppose
Letting go happens when you’re least expecting
In the heat of a Tuesday afternoon,
On a bench in Hyde park
With a mind full of other things
Besides the tender hands that first placed it
In a sodden field,
blanketed with rain
The sun came out
It was too warm
I left you on a park bench.
Part The Second: The flashing fiction bit…
Diamond Trees Don’t Root Like Potatoes
So finely honed was the veiled disappointment in her face that I didn’t even need to look to know it was there.
“I’m sorry,” I shrugged over the potato peeler and the growing pile of gritty brown scraps beneath it.
“I just can’t believe you lost it!” her pitch rose and startled me.
My mom’s passive aggressiveness was legendary. She didn’t wield a battle-axe; she used a scalpel. She didn’t say outright what she meant; she kept the grudge seething for decades. That’s how the poison worked in our family. The curse of material prestige, the “what we owned” owning us. The things handed down like shackles being snapped into place.
“I said I was sorry,” I muttered. “It was an accident.”
In the way digging a hole and burying something akin to nuclear waste beneath an old billboard welcoming folks to Beautiful Bonnie Bay, Minnesota was an accident. Oops, I tripped and fell into a purposeful purge. Maybe a black little tree of greed would grow up from the seed. The idea was both ridiculous and frightening.
“She told me not to leave it to you until you were older! I should have held on to it,” she wiped the sweat from her forehead, and resumed her agitated pacing from pot to oven.
“No, you shouldn’t have,” I whispered.
“What?” Pacing stopped. “What did you say?”
Her new direct approach was something I attributed to the magic of the hated object lying beneath three feet of dirt and unable to inflict its venom. It could’ve been that she was just really…really pissed. That was okay, because at least she was being honest.
“I said,” I turned wielding the starchy peeler like an accusing finger. “That you shouldn’t hold on to it. To any of it, Mom.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“She spent years holding all these ‘treasures’ over your head, just like her mother did to her and probably hers before…making sure you stayed in line if you wanted to inherit–”
“That’s not true!” she shouted.
“She poisoned you!” I blurted out into the room still ringing with the echo of her voice. “She poisoned you into believing all those things were your worth! That they were her love. And you had to earn them, and that she could take them away just like that!” The snap of my fingers startled her like a coma patient waking.
“I don’t… know what–” she sputtered and took hold of the counter with fingers clenching.
“You deserved loved from her. You deserved better! You are worth so much more than a broach, or a set of dishes, or a closetful of linens. And you’ll always have my love, no matter what you give me, even if it’s just the time you spend yelling at me over a piece of cut rock. I’ll love you! ‘N you never have to buy it, or earn it. It’s just there.”
It would have been customary for one or both of us to turn away or huff off to a different room where we’d place the grudge dutifully on our shoulders. But she came to stand beside me, facing out into the kitchen and catching her breath, slowing into calm.
I picked up the half-naked potato and finished his delicate undressing so he could join his skinny-dipping friends in the pot.
Mom sighed while her eyes closed out the room and her mind reread every cursive note attached to every object filling the boxes in the attic.
I leaned the warmth of my hip against hers and listened to the jangle of sharp metal over thick skin. Finding the white tenderness, separate from all the dirt, gave me appreciation for the rugged beauty of rooted things, and the glimmer of hope for a barren ground above the broach’s final resting place.
Oh, you’re in for it now.
Listen, sometimes I get down to the dirt of it all and give you the best writing advice I’ve got and all you have to do is sit back and absorb my witty information dumps.
But I’ve got a case of summer boredom and am itching for something different. Something a little more…interactive. So, today, instead of me expunging on the benefits of plot arcs and character development, or raking you through the coals of The Chicago Manual of Style, we’re gonna play.
I say “play”. You might say homework.
Pota-toe. Potaah-toe.
Here’s the rules. I’m going to give you a writing prompt. You send me your 200-1000 word result. It can be fiction, nonfiction, prose or in poetry form, written in chocolate pudding, or Latin (or in Latin, in chocolate pudding)…the possibilities are all before you.
I’ll choose a winner, send you a set of my signed novels, and feature your story on the blog with all the bragging rights that come along with it. Cool?
And because, I’d never ask you to do something that I wouldn’t do myself, I’ll be featuring my ‘homework’ on next week’s regular Tuesday blog.
So…you see, writers that suffer together…give each other awkward, virtual high fives afterwards? Drink heavily and question the purpose of their existence? I vote the first one.
Because I’m feeling generous, I’ll even give you two options to choose from.
Here’s your homework:
Write about something/one that got left behind by accident.
or
Write about something/one that got left behind on purpose.
On your marks….get set…
Knowing
This is for the endless breath
This is for the heat and the trigger.
This is for the light within
And the power; contained.
The swirling will-o’-the-wisps
of color and hope
That drive like engines in
Thumping
Thrumming
powerstroke diadems.
This is for the me that
Centers
The call of the universe and
ties to the settling of the earth
And all I am
Balanced Between
The goddess infinite and
The root of birth and blood.
This is for the knowing.
I live in a veritable menagerie of animal and child chaos. Now, we’re down by one basset just this last year and it’s been more quiet without our Bailey girl, but her brother still manages a good ugly face when the cat garners more attention than he thinks she should. Yet she keeps insisting that he enjoys her arching-cat rub beneath his saggy jowls, calico tail flicking into his cataract plagued eyes.
He secretly does.
Until he sees us watching.
Then he’s all bark and tiny overbite snaps at the air above her.
“Knock it off, I don’t like it. I don’t like you.”
But we know better.
It got me thinking about conflict and what makes it work in our novels and stories.
We all know the basics of conflict as it pertains to our writing. That it needs to be between our main character and some other source (i.e. a person, technology, the weather, the government, their past etc.). That it drives the character to escape, succeed, fail, run (to or from) all important story climax points that keep the reader engaged.
But when I think of this kind of conflict, I think about writing romance.
Ok, look away and or stop reading if you think this has nothing to do with your historical fiction on the Prussian War…but I’ve only got a few more words left and it may give you a little insight.
Sometimes the conflict comes in the not wanting to want what we want. It comes when two characters rub each other the wrong way, precisely because it’s kind of the right way and they both hate admitting it. Two characters (leads in your story, no matter what their gender or sexual orientation) who get riled up by the other are usually, in some way, riled up about how much they don’t hate them despite knowing they should.
One of the best examples of this is Kat’s final speech in 10 Things I Hate About You. (I GET that its from a teenage snippy version of ‘Taming The Shrew’ but bear with me because that movie is actually quite brilliant and the principal is a romance novelist who spends a great deal of the movie looking for synonyms to the word “penis”).
It is a play on the beloved Shakespearean 141st Sonnet, beginning with “In faith, I do not love thee with mine eyes…” and underscores this principle of why not wanting to love someone can be the most powerful motivator of behavior and conflict.
“I hate the way you talk to me
And the way you cut your hair
I hate the way you drive my car
I hate it when you stareI hate your big dumb combat boots
And the way you read my mind
I hate you so much that it makes me sick
It even makes me rhymeI hate the way you’re always right
I hate it when you lie
I hate it when you make me laugh
Even worse when you make me cryI hate the way you’re not around
And the fact that you didn’t call
But mostly I hate the way I don’t hate you
Not even close, not even a little bit, not even at all.”
It’s in the breaching of walls, the naked vulnerability, and the human exposition that binds us as readers to the character, and makes us fall just as hard as they do.
You may not have swooning shirtless people with wind machines in the background, mussing their perfectly golden locks, while they embrace ecstatically, but I bet that you have a character that you want your reader to root for. And that means creating conflict that resonates with the deeper tendrils of human emotion hidden beneath the layers of caustic comebacks and snide remarks.
Your conflict doesn’t have to drive your character into the arms of their reluctant beloved, it just has to drive them into the hungry hands of your readers.
Happy Writing!
Sarah Reichert Author 