Thursday, February 10, 2011

Oh, Excellent!

Roi, I'm glad I'm not the only one using this forum to post those so-important warmups. I'm convinced that doing a bit of freewriting every day keeps our writing muscles supple and ready to leap into a story whenever an alluring idea saunters by. I'm enjoying your posts tremendously.

As for me, I'm having a 4 day weekend and I couldn't be happier about it. I have things to do most of the evenings but it still feels as if I have a vast expanse of days before me. (Gah! I just averted a catastrophic delete of most of what I'd written here. Does your computer do that? If I leave the mouse arrow up in the text sometimes it highlights it all and if I don't notice it, just deletes it. This time I managed to save it just in time. Why does it do that????)

February 9--Edward Steichen, Melpomene-Landon Rives. Ella hated the doorway. Tucked down an alley from the street it was in shadow even on the sunniest days. The alley collected windblown trash and bums slept behind the bins. Sometimes cats mated there, their yowling sounding like lost souls. The door itself was forbidding. The green paint was cracked and peeling, the iron knob felt scabrous in the hand, and the knocker made gargoyles look friendly, but Ella needed the job and Lefkowitz paid well for her silence. He detailed one of the men to escort her to the bus stop in the evenings. She wished for one in the morning too. She stood at the line where the dark of the alley began peering at the door wondering what she'd see or smell before she got there. Some days it took all her determination to take the first step from the light into the dark.

And that fills up the notebook I started in late September. It's so nice to get to the end of the pages and feel the weight of a few months' work.
--Barbara

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