The cat was doing some slick moves, I had to admit, some kind of soft-shoe dance with his tail adding a shimmy no human would ever be able to match. He ended with that ridiculous top hat rolling down his arm, popping off his paw, and coming right at me. I caught it reflexively, and… Read More Odd Prompts: Catch
Have you ever seen a dying rose? The stem – the neck of the rose – collapses and even while the rose looks fresh, it slumps until it’s only facing the earth and never the sky any longer. The first rule of depressionland is to never talk about the depression. It’s not that you can’t… Read More Odd Prompts: Broken Rules
This is an exercise. Literally, I am doing the warming-up my fingers by typing stream of consciousness into the blog composition window. There’s no obligation to read any further, and there’s no topic. What it is, is tricking my brain into production mode. The human psyche is a strange and capricious thing. I can’t force… Read More Wordless Monday
“Shouldn’t it be a suit?” “What?” He looked up from the wet surface of the dock to meet the other man’s eyes. “Jimmy?” James Pietswach, Jimmy to all and sundry, was hanging over the rail and looking down at the man on the floating dock. “A suit. With, you know, arms and legs. At least… Read More Odd Prompts: Deep Dive
This weekend I talked with Peter Grant (of Bayou Renaissance Man) about the blogging. I’m struggling, as my regular readers will have noticed, to stay with a routine here. Some of it, as I told Peter, is that I’m not sure what topics to address. I know I don’t want to do politics. Years ago,… Read More Pick a topic
A snippet from the ongoing WIP. I’m only putting the bits with the prompt responses up here, as I am not entirely sure what this thing is going to be, or where it will be published when complete. *** “I don’t know what you have against Dmitri.” Branch didn’t speak until we were in the… Read More Odd Prompts: What Train?
So the Little Man and I have been going to the gym. Living in a city, my usual resort of walking and hiking for exercise is just not an option – much to my deep frustration, but that’s a topic for another post when I’m not doing this – and the kid really needed some… Read More Warming Up
Sometimes pulling words out of my head is as hard as pulling teeth. I sit here for long, silent moments before I finally get the fingers into motion and make words come out. And even then, it might only be in an exercise like this, where the brain feels fuzzy and empty, like a warm… Read More Blind Writing