“I’m not creative, like you,” she said. “I’m an editor. I guide things. I don’t pump things out quickly like you or Karyn, but I do what I can.”
I ponder the differences between what the ignorant perceive as vanity, and the wise perceive as knowing what you are good at.
Which I am guilty of is the real question.
~*~
Based on a real conversation, and Lance’s blog mention of “You’re So Vain” by Carly Simon. (One of my favorite inspirations.)
More to follow soon.
“In our first apartment, we watched the rain. I held him when he was sick.”
She took his black peacoat last. “I remember, and he does, too.”
I, mistress, fought the rebellion, but lost the war.
~*~
36 word challenge for Week 60
Of Trifextra was a fun morning for me. I had to use three words: rain, remember, rebellion, to tell a compelling tale in 36 words exactly.
I like it when affair stories come out on the OTHER side. Of course I’d rather not have them happen at all but we authors tend to take some sort of sick sadistic pleasure in making our characters suffer. I’m sure there’s a psychological analysis in there somewhere.
My first full-length short story, a scfi tale relevant to today entitled “The Newcomers”, is out to two magazine contests. I hope to win both, as one was an abridged audio version for The Missouri Review’s annual Prose Audio contest and one was for the Ohio Review’s fiction contest.
Wish me luck! I hear back in April so I will let everyone know.
Also back in the studio this week for some serious work. Serious. Like traditional, old school overnight musician work. It’s going to be awesome!
“I’m up all night in the studio/and you’re up early on your ranch/you’ll be brushing out a brood Mare’s tale/while the sun is ascending and I’ll just be/getting home from my reel to reel/there’s no comprehending…”
~Joni Mitchell, “Coyote”
Love you all, dear readers, and glad to be back.
~ Julia Mae
I used to think that children were like butterflies. They’d stay inside a cocoon you would shelter and watch until they would finally break free. You’d catch a glimpse of them floating by as young adults and then they would vanish into their own little world. Mysterious. Hard to fathom.
But as a teacher I came to understand children were not always sweet little things.
I found I had to wrap myself and my heart up tight with an Ace bandage in order to maintain control over my students. Had to feign cheerfulness or sternness as required. There wasn’t room for too much getting close. And yet somehow the children seemed to creep in anyway.
There was one I felt an affinity with, an odd thirteen year old that started with me when she was only eleven. I couldn’t say why, but she had become a sort of rock in my life. A reliable part every Tuesday evening, and she would make me laugh with her silly stories and wild opinions.
This week, she came into the room in tears.
“Whoa, whoa, what happened?” I asked, thinking it was just another fight with her mother.
She told me.
A local boy had just committed suicide over the weekend. He was happy. He was popular. “Everyone liked him,” my student said, scuffing her neon sneakers on the floor of the studio. “He was in high school but we were all still friends with him. A good friend of mine, she’s kinda overweight and gets bullied a lot. She says she’s feeling suicidal too.”
“What?” my hands slammed on the piano keys, startling her. It seemed out of the blue.
“We go to talk to the counselor and stuff. But she’s out this week. My friend said that the boy – Chris was his name – he was the only one that ever told her she was beautiful everyday. She doesn’t know what she’ll do without him.”
I started trembling.
“Okay, we can’t let this go,” I said in a stronger voice than I felt. “Sweetie, you need to take her to get help. Do you talk to her?”
She nodded.
“Will you talk to her tonight?”
She nodded again.
“You tell her from me: I used to be suicidal too. When I was her age, actually. But I got help, and I am much better for it now. Often it’s a mental imbalance – a hormonal imbalance. Did you know that?”
She shook her head, her eyes filling with tears again.
“Okay, well, sometimes a doctor will put you on herbal medication or harder medication and it straightens you out. I’m not saying that will happen to your friend but it might. She needs to go to therapy so they can talk about changing the way she thinks. Changing her thoughts from negative ones to positive ones. That’s what the therapy does. But you can’t let this go. This is important – her telling you that was her cry for help.”
I didn’t want to see another incident, I thought. Not another suicide so close to three accidental deaths the week before at the same school. I would not let this happen.
My student piped up. “At lunch today this random girl we didn’t even know said something about her dad and about maybe her not eating so much.”
“Geez… did you punch her?”
She laughed and I held a hand out. “I don’t advocate violence, but seriously, what did you do?”
“Me and my other friends went over to her table and said, ‘Hey, why the heck would you say that to her? Maybe you shouldn’t eat so much!” That was more like my strong student.
“Yeah, those bullies? That girl? You tell your friend they are just doing it for power. They just look for a weak link in the system. If it wasn’t her, it would be someone else.”
“Yeah, I told her even if she just like, yells in their faces or something, but doesn’t cry and take them seriously, that was fine.”
“Good.” I wrote down a number on paper and folded it up very small. I held it out to my student.
“You tell her,” I said as she clutched that piece of paper like a lifeline, “you tell your friend that her place in the world is so important that a complete stranger is willing to talk to her if she needs the help. You tell her.”
“I will,” my student said.
In those two words, she looked every bit the fragile thirteen year old she was.
I gave her a hug and sent her home, feeling that maybe I went too far, but hoping her friend would get help.
I saw myself as a thirteen year old, lonely and begging for help. Maybe that’s what had made me react so emotionally. I saw myself in that girl and wanted to stop her from having to go through all the bad things that I experienced in life.
I felt terrible. I cried and tossed and turned all night.
I had never been thrown into such a serious situation before. I had never dealt with it. What would another teacher do? What would anyone do? In this day and age, something as simple as offering your help could be interpreted in negative and damaging ways.
What a shame this world had come to that.
I looked to my family for advice and my cousin told me I had gone too far, that I should have just told her to get help and that was all. I overstepped my bounds, she said.
I didn’t know if I had. I fretted about that. I fretted about the girl. Was she all right? Was my student handling things okay?
The next day, mid lessons as I sat distracted with a piano student, her mother stopped by the studio. I went out to talk to her in a free moment.
“Did she talk to you?” I asked her. She said her daughter hadn’t. She was there for another reason. I sat her down and explained everything that happened.
“Did I go to far?” I asked. “Is it okay I said all the things I did?”
“You know her really well,” her mother said. “She’s tough.”
“Because I know going into detail about those things… I just thought to myself: another adult would just say: go get your friend help, and wouldn’t explain why. I wanted her to know why.”
“And you absolutely did the right thing. Thank you. I really appreciate what you did for my daughter,” she told me. “Her friend is going to get help, I promise you.”
“I just did what I felt was right.”
“And you were.”
That night I sat writing on my computer and my mother came in, knocking on the door. “You know,” she said, “you might have saved a little girl’s life.”
“Maybe I did,” I said. “Even if she isn’t suicidal, it’s a cry for help for something. I just did what I had to.”
I wondered, thinking to past heroes in history, if this is how they felt. Satisfied they did a good job, but not really feeling they did anything special. I hadn’t. I hadn’t. I just didn’t want to see a little girl hurt.
Such gossamer threads hold our lives together. Fragile, like a butterfly’s wing. We don’t see how they connect or help until one of them breaks and we all fall.
If we watch one another for the signs, maybe we can prevent that.
I cried again and my mother hugged me like I was just a child myself.
“You’re a good person,” my mother whispered. “That’s why you care so much.”
She was right.
Maybe caring was all it took to make the difference.
The Ace bandage around my heart had started to unravel, but I found that I didn’t mind.
~*~
So this is entirely nonfiction. This just happened.
This was written for Write at the Merge 3, which gave the prompt of the two words: “gossamer” and “Affinity”. And also, for the Scriptic prompt exchange this week, Eric Storch gave me this prompt: The Ace bandage had become unraveled, but I didn’t mind.
I gave Andrea this prompt: The eyes are not the windows of the soul, they are the doors. Beware what may enter them. (A quote from “Doctor Who” but please don’t feel you need to write about him. Just a little inspiration!)
But in all seriousness:
If you notice anyone you love acting strangely, suddenly giving away old things, leaving a job, breaking up with or divorcing a significant other without much warning, keep an eye on them. Talk to them. Find out why they are doing these things on a whim.
The boy who committed suicide this past week was a popular child, and no one suspected anything was wrong. However, he did end a long relationship the week before he died, and he took the time to write letters to all the people he loved, (which definitely took planning,) which were found upon his death.
I believe that education about mental illness and depression are key to preventing teen death. I didn’t learn specifics about these things until high school, but I had already felt depressed and suicidal at the age of 13. It was only because a friend told on me to my parents that I am alive today.
People will tell you that the world is a much more progressive place than it used to be, that mental illness is no longer a stigma.
This is a lie.
I have faced bullying, misunderstandings, and I am fairly certain (but unfortunately have no proof) that the real reason my last job ended suddenly was because my boss found out I was seeing a therapist. While I only have a very mild case of depression that is now under control thanks to therapy, changing the way I think and a daily regimen of St. John’s Wort, there are hundreds of others afraid to get the treatment they need because they are scared what people will think of them.
We need to start educating our children younger, and not wait for a young life to snuff itself out before having that serious talk. By then, it’s too late. The damage is done.
I fully advocate teaching children about these things from a young age. Make them see that mental illness is not a sign of a bad person. Good people can have major problems. And some come out the other side – mostly – fine. I advocate a community where students, teachers, friends and families all communicate with one another. If I had not reached out to my student’s mother as well as my student, perhaps nothing would have changed. But I felt open enough to approach her anyway and do the right thing.
Say what you will. I am not a mental health professional. I would never say I could counsel a child. But I have been through the experience myself and I know what that little girl now faces.
I wasn’t sure at first if I should have said all I did to my student.
Now? I know I made the right choice.
Would you?
~jms
Past and Pending
~*~
I took the river road until I reached the end
I wrote those words into my song “Lullaby”, but I had never actually taken River Road all the way up. When Meagan called me looking for an adventure, I thought about the words again.
“Let’s go as far North as we can today,” I said.
“We could make Easton and back before sunset,” she said.
My best friend for about thirteen years, Meg was the one with wanderlust. It was the bug she had given me: a virus I didn’t mind catching. Now I had the desire to get out and leave, find new paths and journeys. This was the gift of Meagan’s friendship.
“Okay. Let’s go.”
The air was cold that day. We were glad to be in a car as we drove past the Delaware river and half-frozen lakes. There were waterfalls as we passed rocky hillsides. Actual waterfalls. I hadn’t seen the like since Colorado and stared out the window in awe. It was truly magical.
We talked about travel, geography and the Jersey Devil while munching on sourdough pretzels.
“Sometimes,” she told me as she turned the wheel, “while driving through the Barrens, I used to look for the Devil. Watching for shadows against the stars. Because those are the woods where Legends could still be alive.”
This was our friendship. Topics meandering and lovely all the while. We were poets and writers and liked to lose ourselves in “lines dissecting love” and life and other things.
The Shins’ Past and Pending was on right after a John Doyle reel. Eclectic music, but it fit our personalities. I didn’t listen to the words, but the sound made me think of all our road trips together. And while we’ve never taken a really long one, they are all memorable.
Once, we ended up at Seaside Heights during a cold spell in March, walking down the deserted boardwalk. You never know with us.
This trip, I got a sandwich from a supermarket deli, and the hunger trumped the odd taste of the food. “You never know,” she said, eyeing my sandwich dubiously. “These places the food could go either way.”
We were off again down the road, sometimes listening to music in silence, which we have always been wont to do.
I missed her when she was away at grad school. She is like family to me, the big sister I’ve never had.
As icicles dripped off of cliffs of “hills-not-mountains” around us, I wished.
“I wish it could always be like this,” I whispered to myself. I hope the years and miles never change our camaraderie.
We round a stone wall, laughing at a strange mural as we enter Easton and prepare to journey homeward.
the strange mural of Easton. Canal Poseidon? Triton? We could not figure it out.
Days like this precious moment of friendship are mile markers on the path of my memory. And in the dark times, I travel them over and over again.
Days like this, past and pending, are all that matter.
~*~
Write on Edge has begun a new and fancy challenge. This time, it was 500 words or less, the song Past and Pending by The Shins, and the word: “WISH”. I immediately wanted to write for it. It took me some time to be inspired because I couldn’t decide if I wanted to take the song at face value or not.
My final decision on it was what you just read. 
Meagan is truly my best friend. She has a wonderful poetry blog, which I encourage you to visit.
I’ve been driving myself nuts all morning trying to find the term one of the ancient writers used for the form of love – I want to say either Socrates or Plato spoke of this form of platonic/friendship love – between two members of the same sex and said it was completely different from the love shared between a man and a woman.
This love was not romantic or sexual, but it was the strongest form of love, that only true friends could share, and it was rare. If anyone can remember the name of this, or what it’s called, I would appreciate you leaving a comment. I Google searched and checked my college textbooks but had no luck finding the term!!
Anyway, the mysterious missing word for this love was going to be the title, but instead it became Past and Pending, haha
Thanks, as always, for reading.
jms
I am on the edge.
2012 is about thirty seconds from being over, and 2013 is coming at me fast.
I am standing on the back porch of my parent’s house, watching someone else’s firework. Bright flashes of multicolored lights that I barely see as I dwell in my own head.
I am wondering: why do we sever ourselves from the past but then dwell on it?
Why can’t we forget?
Old ghosts seem to be coming back to haunt me tonight.
Someone starts singing Auld Lang Syne drunkenly across the street.
I haven’t taken my medication… I don’t know if that’s why I can’t stop obsessing, or if I’m just melancholy.
It’s not the way I want to start the new year. I don’t want to be here. I was supposed to be in downtown Philadelphia with some friends. But a friend got sick and the party was cancelled too late to make other plans. And now…
Now I watch the false golden starlight of fireworks under a cloudy sky.
Maybe that’s why this night has felt rough, my mind recalling new years from before and how shitty they seemed in hindsight. The parts not with my friends. The parts with other men, other places. The years in school, miserable, feeling so alone.
God, I hated that feeling. I shiver.
At least you’re not spending it over a toilet, I remind myself. Those years are long gone.
My mother counts down out loud beside me.
The arms of my lover feel strong as they come around me. He shelters me from the cold of the night.
“Why didn’t you wear your jacket outside?” he asks me as he nuzzles my hair. “You don’t want to get sick again.”
I don’t want to get sick again, I think. I want to be well.
So be well, I tell myself. You idiot.
“HAPPY NEW YEAR!” My mother screeches, dancing around on the balls of her feet. She blows the noisemaker retrieved from storage.
His arms vanish as he dials his own mother, ever a sweetheart, ever thinking of others.
Well, I don’t need his arms to feel secure.
I’ll wrap myself up in the blanket of this night and remind myself that it’s a new year.
I take a deep breath and join my mom, whooping at my neighbors.
I’m tired of being on the edge of anger, of hate, of pain. This guilty post-school graduation misery, feeling trapped and sad.
This year, it’s going to be different.
He rejoins me, giving me a passionate midnight-and-two-minute kiss. Then he stands beside me, laughing at my mother’s antics as she dances in her slippers, in the snow.
The three of us welcome 2013 as illegal fireworks light the sky above us and I resolve to put the past where it belongs:
in the past.
Happy New Year.
~*~
For the Scriptic prompt exchange this week, Michael gave me this prompt: I’m on the edge.
I gave David Wiley at
http://scholarlyscribe.wordpress.com
this prompt: A short drama set in a locale that is exotic to you.
I was experimenting with a new tense today, which I’m not sure I like, but I tried, anyway.
This New Year’s was not happy for me at first. While the above account was a bit fictionalized, it was based on some reality. I have been spending a while feeling melancholy and miserable. I hated my college career so much (the experience, not the friends I made) that I sort of forgot the good things I learned from it. It’s been two freakin’ years. It’s time I get over it and move on. I don’t know why my OCD decided to dwell on that the other night, but it did. But a little before midnight, I sort of just stopped myself and gave into the celebratory spirit.
So I hope this year you all are happy. I wish you the promise of love, the joy of the friends around you, and all the best things in the world. Happy 2013, dear readers.
love,
jms
Nate and I on my actual New Year’s Eve.
Resolutions and a Write on Edge challenge to follow!
~*~
Lights!
I swear the year just started.
Barely
Had the chance to breathe.
How
To finish all the shopping?
Now,
Get out the door, let’s leave!
(Listen! Carols!)
Resulting drama
Christmas Eve?
Irreplaceable.
~*~
This short prose/poem written in response to Trifecta, asking us to reflect in 33 words or less on the holiday season.
Christmas always comes as a surprise to my family somehow, and there is always a lot of stress and yelling, and yet I consider my family to be one of the most festive and in the spirit. We have decor up right after Thanksgiving on good years. This is not one, but the drama is lovely somehow.
Speaking of:
Happy holidays to one and all. I will post this weekend about my family’s Polish American Christmas traditions and I hope you will share yours as well!
But first, a post on the flu.
“Pass the salt,” you say
Head buried in a screen.
I obey, but feel somehow
Your work is but a door between.
Your dinner nearly done,
The dawning thought: I deemed
I’d seen this somewhere else before.
And then-
An Anticipation!
Of what our future might become.
The endless hours dragging on.
The night begun it seemed
Till fears had won.
And that is what’s in store.
Dour and sulking, I
Did ponder this soliloquy:
Do futures make themselves or are
they birthed on rocks of self-defeat?
“Enough,” I say, “I will not see
this history repeat.
So shut the screen and eat with me.
Let work be done now, dear and come!
Put away the Mac,
that horrid fiend,
that splits in two
all that we do
and turns my mood to darkest black.”
With that, my thoughts wipe clean.
You obey, but feel somehow
You’re not sure what you’ve seen
But wonder who’s at fault today.
~*~
I just went crazy with this. It’s sort of prose poetry in answer to Trifecta’s weekly challenge: the third definition of the word “anticipation.”
I am not sure what happened here, but I liked it. Done almost entirely as stream of consciousness with minor edits.
A soliloquy is a monologue in a show, spoken regardless of what else is going on around them. Or, a character speaking their thoughts. Which is pretty much what this is allllll about.
~jms
x
She had waited all day to get a chance to talk to her old college friend.
Her stockings were slipping in a most irritating way under her slacks by the afternoon. She shuffled at her guard post, trying to fix them without being too obvious.
“You dancing or what?” Charles popped through the doorway from his assigned room. He rubbed his smooth shaved head.
“I’m trying to fix my stockings!” Anita said. “And I need to show you something. Here.” She pulled out a pamphlet from her blazer pocket.
“What’s this?”
She shook the brochure until he took it. “This is the dilemma I’ve been telling you about.”
“This looks nice,” he said, flipping through the brochure. “Sprawling grounds and fountains. Two acre parkland. They take the residents for a stroll every day, weather permitting.” He handed it back to her. “Sounds great. What’s the problem?”
“The problem is, I don’t know if absolute chaos is a good enough reason to send my mama to a place like this!”
Charles gave a deep belly laugh. “Oh, your mama is going to love it there.”
“I just feel so bad, you know?” Anita leaned in. “I promised her I would always take care of her. But lately, it’s,” she sighed, leaning back on the wall, “really hard.”
“Has she been worse than when we talked last week?”
Anita frowned. “I’m worried about my grand babies. She’s started yelling at them because she don’t know who they are. They’re only two. They don’t understand. And I don’t know how much longer our electronics are going to hold out. She fried a third coffee machine yesterday.”
“Ouch.” Charles chuckled. “You do love your coffee.”
“But…” Anita folded the pamphlet up, holding it in her hands. “That’s not a good enough reason to do it. The biggest reason is, she keeps trying to drive somewhere. She don’t have a license anymore. Not after her last accident. But she always finds our keys and tries to drive. She’s not herself.”
“My father got the same way in the end, you know.” Charles stroked his chin. “Stopped eating because he didn’t know my wife and thought she’d come to poison him.”
“Mm. That’s awful.”
“He also took things apart. It was when he started trying to fix the gas stove we knew he had to go somewhere else. He was becoming a danger to himself and the rest of the house.”
Anita shook her head. “It’s so hard seeing parents go like that. They’re the ones taught us everything. Now we have to do our best to keep them happy and safe until they move on. I just don’t feel right taking her from the house…”
“But you know you done all you can for her. Don’t feel like you’re giving up. Everything’s gonna work out, you’ll see.” Charles smiled.
Anita shrugged and tucked the pamphlet away in her blazer as the sound of patrons in the next room over floated in.
“I’d like to think I’m a good daughter. And that I made my mama proud. She’s still my mother, no matter where she is.”
She eyed the Pollack on the wall next to them and shook her head. “Mama used to be an artist. But if she starts painting like that, I’m gonna be sure her mind is gone.”
“It’s not that bad,” Charles said.
Anita tilted her head to the side, giving him a look. “You joking?”
“It’s like life,” Charles explained. “Sometimes you have to find the beauty in the chaos.”
The patrons were entering the room behind. “Whoop, gotta get back to my post,” Charles said, slipping through the doorway. “See you around, Anita.”
“See you.”
Anita folded her arms behind her back and stared at the painting.
She found that this time she didn’t mind it so much. She liked the shade of brown Pollack used.
“Oh!” Anita clucked her tongue. “You just had to go and ruin it for me, didn’t you, Charlie?” she muttered.
She turned away from the beautiful chaos and stood tall.
The patrons came into the room.
~*~
I wrote this for Write on Edge’s weekly prompt, Red Writing Hood. This week’s was a 500 word limit, and the prompt was the picture on this page.
I am not a fan of Jackson Pollack, so Iatched onto the guards. It’s kind of a sin to say it because everyone I know likes Pollack’s work. But for me it is just chaos, so to try and appreciate it I have to really search for the beauty.
And I guess that’s what I wanted to do with this story, was force my character to see the beauty in her own chaos.
My grandfather has dementia and it only gets worse with age. Fortunately, if there can be a fortunately here, it seems to be a slow process.
But he no longer recalls much of his past. He’s a brave man, because though I am sure he doesn’t remember any of us grand kids, we call him Dziadzi (grandfather) to remind him who we are, and he always says: “oh how are you? Great to see you!” And though he weekly takes apart household objects and turns the heat all the way up, we still love him.
And he is in his 90s, still living at home with my grandmother, who is also in her 90s, and cares for him and my mentally handicapped aunt. Pretty neat. I hope the day never comes we have to put him in a nursing home, but if it does, I hope my family understands they aren’t failing him, that sometimes it is really for the best.
Love you all, thanks for all the support and follows lately.
A big yay to R.B. Wood for Episode 26 of the Word Count Podcast. If you guys trek over there you’ll find 5 wonderful stories by some great authors (including my good friend Eden Baylee,) and 1 song, (mine).
“Lullaby” is the name of my song and that version of the recording is completely exclusive to that ‘cast. Enjoy!
Cheers and hope your December is lovely for you thus far,
~jms
The city was hers.
Felicia wrapped her toga tighter around her thin frame and sneered down at her subjects.
She towered above them.
“You have turned from the old ways,” she boomed, her voice like thunder as it echoed. “Now, you shall pay!”
They screamed and ran. But they could not escape.
She pounded a car to scrap metal underfoot. She kicked over a building like it was nothing. If there were still people inside, all the better. She ground her heels on the frame.
To crush a tall building into powder… That was power.
The heathens would all suffer. They had forgotten their goddess. Today they could share in her pain.
A man tripped nearby. She smiled as she stomped towards him.
It was Tony. That no good, lying son-of-a-bitch.
He pleaded in a tinny voice. She couldn’t even hear him.
“Oh,” she mocked him, “you should’ve asked for forgiveness a long time ago.”
She bent over until she could make eye contact. “But it’s too late now!”
He ran. She straightened up. She raised her foot high–
“Cut! That’s a wrap, people!”
Felicia stepped away from the tiny plastic figurines and sighed.
“Coffee?” She asked an assistant. He ran to get it for her.
His smile was sweet when he handed it over.
Huh. He seems nice, she thought.
The director ran towards her.
“Felicia, honey, that was so inspired! Where do you get that passion from? I really believed you were a vicious killer out for revenge!”
He folded his arms, knocking the plastic nametag that read: Tony.
She gave him her sexiest smile over the rim of her plastic cup. “Oh, you know. Around.”
~*~
Trifecta’s prompt for this week was “crush”. As in grind into powder.
I had a blast with this one. I think we have all wished at some point we could get revenge on someone…
Felicia’s is, well, it’s certainly special.
Hope you enjoyed!
~jms
prompt: “My philosophy is that if you don’t feel like what you’re creating is the best work you’ve ever done, it’s time to throw in the towel.” -Bernie Taupin
~*~
I was on the tenth rewrite of the song.
(Counting the lyric change in the first week.)
Whatever. I was jacked up on lattes and pressing the keys too fast.
Latte #3.
“We rolling?” I asked the engineer I couldn’t see.
“Yeah, start whenever.” My headset crackled.
The song still wasn’t right.
But I was tired and the album was already overdue.
I recalled Nate’s advice: “Hey, perfectionist, remember? Sometimes you have to let go or it will never be done.”
I could do this.
“Take six.”
I’d be damned if I drank another latte.
~*~
I’m working on storytelling through brevity.
Velvet Verbosity’s 100 word prompt for this week was: “whatever”. Love that site.
For the Scriptic.org prompt exchange this week, Michael at
http://michaelwebb.us
gave me this prompt: “My philosophy is that if you don’t feel like what you’re creating is the best work you’ve ever done, it’s time to throw in the towel.” -Bernie Taupin
I gave SAM at
http://frommywriteside.wordpress.com
this prompt: “He laughed at the sign. Was it his answer? Or was it just another chapter in the endless story of his bad luck?” Use the words or don’t, but take the theme in 1500 or less.
~**~
Any artist worth their salt is a perfectionist, and they will never be happy with their work.
It will never be “the best you’ve ever done”, although often it is better than the last thing we wrote because we learn with time and grow.
But the phrasing irked me!! It took me forever to come up with my response just because I disagreed with it to the core of my being.
Then I thought about it:
I never give up. I don’t think any of you should either. Sure, try to be the best you can be but also, give yourself a break and know it’s good enough, sometimes. But just because you have one day of bad art, you should throw in the towel?
I hope not!!!
But sometimes we do need to back away from the microphone or put down the pen and take a breather. Thins happen better when we aren’t freaking out over it.
I hope that’s what Mr. Taupin meant! Although I don’t think so.
What do you guys think?
Stay tuned for podcast updates.
-jms
P.S. Going into the studio again next week for one of my singles! Very excited about this one. May have dub step, but it may also just be electro club. We will see.
It’s a one-of-a-kind track on my album. Doing it just because I love listening to electro and figured hey, why not write one of my own?? (It feels so badass to drive to dub…)
P.P.S. I love you guys! Thanks for all the support, subscriptions and follows lately!
