Tag Archives: inspiration

08.29.18
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Oh, Is That What That Was

I jumped up from the table
And ran into the woods.
You watched me go and sighed,
Then turned back to your food.

You know I get like this
When I’m chasing after faeries.
I’ll explain when I get back
Why—no—which spirit grabbed me.

I think we can all agree that bolting from the picnic table to capture this shot before I lost that light (it lasted another four minutes) was the right thing to do. My husband, after many years of my nonsense, just assumes I have my reasons and waits to see the photo/words/interpretive dance I’ve come up with. Sometimes it doesn’t pan out, and I just sit back down and we pretend nothing has happened.

08.18.18
by

Go Suspend Yourself

fairy

Some like their entertainment
Containing only verified facts.
They quibble and they parse
When they should just relax.

I don’t like mistakes,
But bend truth with intention?
Your factual faux-pas
Is not even worth a mention.

So when the cat starts barking
And the dog climbs a tree,
It’s up to us to acknowledge
Your artistic liberty.

We watched “The Greatest Showman” last night, and man, does that not follow P.T. Barnum’s actual life. You know what? I DO NOT CARE. It’s a fabulous musical and I think captures a spirit he would have liked. A+, will wear the soundtrack out.

I like to be swept away. I like to believe in dragons and castaways and space full of life. I don’t like mistakes that take me out of the story (errors about finance and accounting do that every time), but if you need the main character to have purple skin and meet Robert Frost–you get down with your bad self. If someone does not have the imagination to follow you, well, they weren’t your audience, were they?

PS. The more perceptive among you may have spotted the subtle Photoshopping I did on that picture of my daughter. If you were fooled, well, I salute your receptiveness to the magic in the world.

10.16.17
by

Receipt of Ideas

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Just write it down
No matter where
Card, receipts
Bleed it there

Capture that chaos
Before it’s gone
Scrawl investments
You may later draw on

When it bursts
Don’t edit, censor
The whirlwind creates
Sense comes after

I have little bits of words scrawled in the margins of everything in our house.  Some of it is probably disturbing for my husband, given the horror stories I write.  I’ve learned that I have to write down ideas.  If I think of a particularly poignant sentence construction, a clever rhyme, a novel that will surely both disturb and entertain–I write all that down.  If I don’t, I won’t remember it.

It’s a bit of young writer’s conceit that if an idea is worth pursuing, you’ll remember it.  Sorting your ideas this way is like having your toddler sort the mail.  You will absolutely get some mail.  The odds that it will be the boring looking electric bill are pretty slim, though, and you might need that.

I write it all down.  Some of it is nonsense.  Some of it I can hardly read.  Some of it turns into amazing stories or phrases or entire poems.  I fill notebooks.  It’s my hoard of possible treasure.

Note:  By “weekly,” I meant pretty much every week, not EVERY week, and by “Sunday” I meant around Sunday.  Last week I was finishing the last rewrite of The Tiny Giant and my head was wrapped up in that, as it should have been.  Have a great week.