Headlights - 100 words

Headlights in the mirror. Who could it be? Anybody, literally anybody.

Well, anybody with a driver's license. Or maybe they don't have a license. Total outlaw scenario. Screw society. Steal a car and hunt down your next victim on the lonely highway. Find some sucker on a lonely late-night journey. Run him off the road. No witnesses. Take his miserable life. Steal his soul and sell it to the highest bidder.

The headlights turn onto a side road. The mirror is empty again. I find myself missing my psychotic road demon. I hope he's OK.

Next rest area twenty-seven miles.

Smiley Watson - 100 words

Smiley Watson picks up the ringing phone. "Al, I can't talk now." Smiley says, glancing at the three thugs standing over him.

Smiley listens.

"I did look into it. There's nothing there."

Smiley listens.

"Because I'm just a stringer. I'm not a detective like Alexander Pope with a fancy office on top of the Landry building. If there's no story, there's no story." Smiley hangs up.

The center thug puts two hundred dollar bills on the desk and the three of them leave.

Smiley takes the bills thinking that spending a couple weeks in Springfield might be a good idea.

Fruit and Memory - 100 Words

The field is full of fruit. It's picking time. Fred wires the big speakers in the trees so the workers can listen to their music. The accordions remind him of the polkas he learned back in dancing school. Dusty Thursday nights where he learned which girls you could touch and where.

It wasn't till he was in his 20's that he learned that his gropings were not a secret to his parents and that this was their goal. Apparently they were worried that their poetry-loving little boy was headed down the wrong sexual path. Fred Smiles. They were so wrong.

100 Words- Roman Numerals

Norman started normal. Gwen did not. Roman numerals were the undoing of them both. Norman by way of a mistake at a Superbowl party where he mistook an L for an I and was the subject of so much ridicule that he never chanced speaking out loud again. Gwen on the other hand was traumatized by a misaligned sun dial.

They met one day at a support group for unsupportable neuroses. They found each other among the folding metal chairs and Styrofoam cups and lived silently ever after in a cute little house with no clocks or periodic sporting events.

Quiet - 100 words

Sunset over the fishing boats. Where have all the sea lions gone? It's so quiet you can hear the sheets slapping the masts in the breeze. No seagulls. No otters. A distant fog horn. No fog here.

The fishermen pack their things away weary and uneasy. They don't talk much and seem guilty when they do. The beauty of the quiet had been broken. They have sinned.

The sun is now down. The men gone. The breeze has retired for the night. Even the ocean is unsettlingly still. As if the world has ground to gentle halt. Time to sleep.

Some story arcs are flat

Not all story arcs reach for the stars.

Some story arcs are gently rolling hills and plateaus. Now I just have to get the inner critics to agree.

Here's what led me to this train of thought; I was meditating and a worry cloud drifted in. My new novel is forming well but didn't seem to be going anywhere. There was no big story climax on the horizon. Then I realized that's OK. I've read and enjoyed many novels that had no car crashes or explosions.

Now that I've gotten over that for my current novel, I realize that was the problem with the recently abandoned novel as well. I was forcing all the characters into an artificial drama that even I couldn't make sense of. I will however finish the current project before I go back to the other one.

The current novel is the story of a woman's life. My attempts at plotting have concentrating on some big and explosive way for her to die at the end, but that just doesn't fit the character or the message I think she is trying to send. Now I realize that she must die quietly and oldly to make her life complete. She is a survivor, so she must survive as long as humanly possible.

I attribute the desire the need for explosions and car chases to an inner critic I call The Manly Man. He thinks I have far too feminine an outlook on life. He's one of those go big or go home kind of characters, but since he lives in my head he's already home.

He is usually quieted by a vigorous bike ride and watching a Shakira video or two, but as I've managed lately to calm most of my other inner critics he's gotten pushier. I think he enjoys the increased attention.

Writing is a salad of tears, fears and beers

Fortunately I hate salad. Doesn’t make sense? Of course it doesn’t.

I sit here at the keyboard dealing with a huge ego and debilitated self-esteem. By definition those two should be mutually exclusive but in practice they are separate entities. What it boils down to is that I feel I should be a great writer, but don’t believe that I am. As every teacher I ever had would say, “I’m not living up to my potential.”

The worst thing is that it’s no longer mass-production educators looking at standardized tests defining my potential, it’s me. You always think you outgrow these sorts of things but you don’t. For your entire childhood the phrase is hammered into your head. It gets pretty stuck down in there.

So now I’m the one setting the target of potential and I pretty much suck at it. The worst thing is that I know that I have unrealistic expectations but can’t seem to lower the bar. On the other hand I have this fear that if I lower the bar too much I’ll become a veg.

It’s weird because at work, when I have such, I’m an expert at cutting big problems down to achievable chunks. However when it comes to real life, and especially my writing projects, I can never get past the enormity of a project.

As I work on my new novel I try to concentrate on the scene, but I find myself using the current scene to set up the next scene that I haven’t started yet. That’s not fair to the current scene at all. Dare I say, I’m not letting it live up to its potential.

So what’s my point? Actually I just realized that I’m having this bitch session to shield my new characters from all this negativity. I guess I’m afraid of hammering negative attitudes into their impressionable little personalities. I don’t want them to suffer as I do.