Quick note!

I write most of these on a word document before I copy/paste them here, and somehow in the transition the fonts have gone completely wild.

The thing about Alice was that she was singularly talented in hindsight. Life, for Alice, was a trial. She would wax poetic about that thing that happened last year, and how much better things had been that one time that wasn’t now, despite the fact that she had been miserable about them then too. It seemed that for Alice the absolute zenith of her life had occurred at birth, and everything that followed had been a bitter disappointment. I don’t mean to imply that Alice hadn’t been dealt a fairly rough hand, she had, the woman looked like an angry bassett hound and had limbs so doughy, paper white, and deeply lined with varicose veins that they likened a road map. In short, she wasn’t attractive, far from it, and she deeply resented the universe and the powers that be for it. They had done this to her, and she would exact retribution by being powerfully unpleasant.

There's nothing quite as bleak as this. A table full of middle-aged men with pockmarked noses, cheeks rosy with drinks, and too-loud laughs. They've forgotten their inside voices and their tact. They're swapping dirty jokes and inwardly remembering how long it's been since their wives last let them touch them. Tables nearby glance at them, embarrassed, talking in hushed tones and shaking their heads. Tomorrow they'll go back to their desks with headaches and bloated bellies but tonight they feel like kings, like comedians, reckless and foolhardy and everything they used to be but somehow lost along the way.

He’d poured a little white mountain of table salt into his palm, and was brandishing it like it was a new discovery or a prize he’d won.
“Taste it. Go ahead, try it. S’nothing like it.”
I couldn’t help but wonder how long it’d been since he’d last washed that hand, and where it had been in the meantime. Little tracks of dirt had worked their way into the calloused cracks and under the too-long nails. A careful dab, and,
“Yeah. Good stuff. Salty.”
“No, no. Really taste it. It’s potassium salt, it’s different. I’m telling you, man.”
He was something like 1/20th Native American, but he played it up for all it was worth. He made dream catchers in his spare time, for God’s sake. He whittled little creatures out of the stunted trees in his backyard and used the splinters to pick his teeth. He was as passionate about Jesus as he was about alcohol, which in the end would probably buy him a ticket to meet the guy a little faster.

Gooooooal

I want to make you laugh, I want to surprise you, I want to make you angry, I want to make you think. I know I have the words, but it's hard to pin them down.

I'm trying to figure out what it is I want to say, and how I want to say it. I'm constantly battling with my own self-consciousness and the voice in my head shouting, "DEAR GOD, THAT'S PRETENTIOUS". I am a little white girl from the suburbs. I feel unqualified to tackle any great subjects, and anything I took from my own life would feel too twee and insignificant to subject anyone to, but I'm going to try to make an effort to write something every day, no matter how self-indulgent or uninspired or just simply bad it may be. So this blog is my experiment. Anyone who cares to follow it, and I don't flatter myself that that would be many people, bear with me and excuse a little clumsiness.

Run! Don't walk! From the following:

I've been reading excerpts of people's writing that they post on various message boards (I don't sleep at night. This is the kind of thing I do.) and I've picked up on three very clear warning signs of really, really bad writing.

1. Including the word "mother" anywhere within the first paragraph. Particularly if said mother seems to be dead or inexplicably missing. I've never heard anyone refer to their mom in casual conversation as mother, and if they did I get the feeling it would usually not be followed by an onslaught of cryptic allusions.
Examples: "Mother always said..." or "Mother would have loved the..." followed by anything. Anything at all. The more absurd the better.

2. Mentioning the narrator's eye color. This is usually used in conjunction with very colorful similes, and makes its way into the first sentence.
Examples: "As I sipped the milkshake, my piercing amber eyes glimmered like a tiger in the black of night."

3. Excessive adverb love, especially after dialogue.
"Does this look like a morgue?" Brenda challenged sassily
"Why do you think we gave you goody bags?" He cheerfully bubbled
"You should know by now I'm allergic!" she spat

The alarm continued its unrelenting bleat as she groped for the switch. Last week’s laundry, this week’s laundry, and tomorrow’s clothes, which had been fraternizing on the floor beneath her bed, tripped her as she stumbled her way towards the door. It didn’t matter, no one saw it. The mirror in the bathroom revealed that her hair had staged a coup overnight, and the makeup she’d been too lazy to remove had also artfully rearranged itself. Maybe that was glamorous. Maybe she looked like Courtney Love’s sad deranged cousin. Whatever.