Passage from Mon Corps et Moi (My Body and I) (1925)
“But since God the Father wants nothing to do with me in His Paradise, the same as yesterday, I must go on using objects, earthly creatures. Today, however, I am not inclined to making advances.
Fortunately the other is here to save me.
The other feels that thinking has gone on too long.
I hear: It’s time to go home.
It’s true, dawn leads to love.
Let’s go.
At home I touch this body, as I have already had the honor to touch others, wishing only to rid myself of my most specific desires, without the hope of satisfying any, or the wish to prolong them.”
Hello everyone! It has been a while since I’ve posted a blog. I think we can all agree, that life has a way of pulling you in all sorts of directions.
As I have been planning for two (yeah… I think I’m crazy) feature films, I thankfully haven’t neglected my fiction writing. Recently, I went through a transformation in terms of creativity, planning, content, and the act of DOING.
Basically what I’ve realized, is instead of working tirelessly on one full length novel, I am starting to craft existing stories I’ve written, as well as new stories, into short story, novellette, and novella lengths (I am leaning more towards the novellette and novella lengths- see the note below for word counts). When I am finished, it will be published on Amazon for Kindle.
I’m not sure if anyone else has felt this way, but I find completing an entire manuscript of 70,000 – 80,000 words occasionally daunting (Stephen King talks about a 3 month timeline for a first draft, but is that always viable?). I am technically close with a few writing projects, but it just never seems to get finished, as I am torn between life tasks (hello animals), reading, and filmmaking.
This is me looking serious while holding my dog Caddy’s paw. In the lower right hand corner is Ulysses, by James Joyce. This was taken on Bloomsday.
Shorter stories will allow me to do the following: hyper focus on essentially one slice of the pie, hone my skills in a more economical way, craft stories around a genre/sub-genre that I feel passionately about (LGBTQ/YA/Romance), build a platform, and actually get something published out there for you all to read. The proof is in the results, right?
What’s your favorite short story, novellette, novella, and/or flash fiction? My absolute favorite novella is TheLover,by Marguerite Duras.
No, I am not going to abandon the full length novel. It is coming. For now, short stories are the way to go, at least for me.
What do you all think?
The link below will take you to inspiring site. Go ahead, click on it, read some posts, and then tell me what you think. Or better yet, do it yourself!
Is the novella (reading it electronically) the new wave of this age’s fiction? Could Finnegans Wake made as much of an impact as it did in 1939, if it were written today?
Oh, we all wish we could write Ulysses and Finnegans Wake.
Frank curled up beside the dismal tawny pellet dish so callously thrown in from star-days ago. The gangly worker’s tiny pimpled mouth morphed into something maniacal and creepy– a friendly grin, she surely thought– only when she convinced the sluggish bifocal donning fool who dragged his feet across shiny corporate laid tiles to buy on credit one more plastic toy mouse for his elder tabby Tim who sun bathed for a living (he hadn’t batted at a fake mouse in ages).
Otherwise, observed Frank, her floppy and dreary soul stunk more than his week old bedding. Had it been more than a week? He could not remember the individual star-days. She added gray layers to his detest for the Shadows.
Perhaps Layla left me for good. Frank fumed inside. Typical.
Layla hadn’t been to work for a few passing tearful moons. He counted with the few straggling pellets left each time the flaming stars passed through the blackened sky: three. His trust in a Shadow (he deemed her as Layla, not Shadow) had always stood unsteady like a small boat forever stuck at the tempestuous sea. All he cognitively knew of was this place: lying in a tiny jailed enclosure, passing delirious fools picked and plucked for pleasure and commerce, being gawked at like a creature at a circus side show (LOOK ya’ll! A Textile from a textile mill a he-a he-a he), and counting too many passing burned out stars since the time of pup-hood.
Prose autore, poet of the Modernist Era, womanizer, lifelong starving Bohemian artist in Greenwich Village, and deemed “too beat” by Ginsberg: Maxwell Bodenheim.
At this time of day – the time of sunrise – a stirring and rustling, a slew of bright sounds and chatter, popped from the hay-filled floor.
“Hay – pellets – hay – pellets – hay – pellets,” peeped one little voice, waking the others.
Another voice, this one groggy and irritated, implored, “keep it down, will you?”
A third piped in, “I don’t hear the shadow yet.”
“Augh! Will you keep it down already? Tying to sleep here,” said the grumpy voice, quite noticeably laced with the loss of sweet slumber.
Just as the first inhaled, ready to exclaim its sheer hunger to the world and those who would listen willingly and unwillingly, vibrating and rumbling sounds boomed from the outside of the barn. To the inhabitants, they felt as though their bodies rocked and floated with the barn, as if cushioned on clouds during a thunderstorm. They remained in blissful ignorance of whatever foreign object hummed so intently through their bodies.
Their stomachs rumbled together in unison, coinciding with the ruckus. All the inhabitants of the barn were now surely awake.
“I dream of pellets and hay,” said the first voice, who was imagining at that moment the overt sweet taste of Timothy hay hitting its taste buds. A series of chutting sounds emerged like a simmering pot of water. The inhabitants, who were chatting all at once, were unable to contain their anticipation.
The vibrating and rumbling quit.
“Food!” Said a rather excited fourth voice. The inhabitants agreed by wheeking. The wheeking roused the still quiet air into a party of high-pitched ecstatic shrieking, sudden and powerful like a dormant volcano surprising nature with an eruption.
What is here? This life. This God. Creation beauty inhabiting every living and non-living soul of this planet. Dirt, ducks, beings, water. I breathe deeply the oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide. I take steps beyond my land, beyond my world. Cautioned by those I know. Though my curiosity strikes against their warnings. I peer beyond the birch trees down the dirt path that turns into concrete.
Into a land it ventured of unspoken tragedies lip-locked horrors the life-barer warned of. Nymph of the Yonic forest, it wandered abound one morning five minutes past the jumping sun and rapturous pink-tangerine clouds.
Peace. It knew only of curious babes crawling through damp soil followed by dewy moss. It knew only of free walks of barer-hood, gliding deer not fearful of our presence. It knew only of the faces of those in the forest- not categorized. In fact, it had no name and accepted its biological features to reproduce young.
It acted upon any desire without repercussions and judgment, a temptress of nature.
It prayed to the grass, the ants, the flying birds, the running mammals. Suckling teat, provider of existence.
To those outside the Yonic forest, a mythological dream of un-realness could only describe. To it, this wandering nymph, the world outside the forest was the Underworld where Hades resided. It learned of a prescribed status outside the forest: Female. Woman. Girl. She. Her.
And with this new information, she looked upon the land stretching across mountains and seaside, soaking in buildings upon one another, individuals and moving objects amerced into one as a whole. A religion of consumerism. Religion of objects fascination with more.
I witnessed a fascination with sex, yet stigma attached to the act and body parts. I knew only of her sex as wholesome, and now I feel flushed. Embarrassed, ashamed even? Objectified.
Ruddy red cheeks perspiring palms and feet. Pursed lips and she walked toward the Tree of Knowledge and Good and Evil, the Tree of Life.
And there he was. I call him he because of his genitals. He called himself Adam. I expressed I had no name. He called me Eve. At that moment, a rushed desire to flee back to the Yonic forest ruptured throughout my body in tingles. I kept walking anyway.
