Vacation

Oh. I'm on vacation this week. See you in September!

B5: Bottle

The bottle lay on its side, creeked-lined with black powder, in the small shelter provided by a high city curb.

A5: Afterthought

What is 26 x 5?
130 times I've posted a sentence, or a question, or an idea based on that first alphabet exercise from earlier this year. I've actually been blogging daily for almost eight months. Go me.

So it's not an afterthought, but it does offer an opportunity to reflect. Am I gaining what I need to by writing this blog? Is my connection to fiction - tenuous, anxiety-ridden - kept afloat by writing these sentences?

Or are they allowing me to avoid the real, hard work of writing actual story every day?

Afterthought: Muriel felt like an afterthought most days. And most days she relished the fact that her status was her own choice.

Z4: Zebra

It was one of those "loft-style" buildings near downtown, with 20 foot ceilings, exposed air ducts; in the lobby, she nearly faltered before stepping on a giant faux-zebra rug sprawled across the lobby floor.

Y4: Yen

Muriel had a yen for rutabaga.

(Opening to her chapter 3 or 4, when she meets Chigger?)

Y, Z!

We're near the end of another (a 4th) round of the alphabet, and I'm going to stick with this approach. Writing sentences that will/could/might apply to the novel project I'm otherwise not really working on. It's keeping me thinking about Dewey, Muriel, Chigger and Sloane, and that's good enough for me.

X4: Xerxes

Well, it's not as if the novel is set post "300" with Gerard Butler, so I probably shouldn't assume a gay boy would want a body like Xerxes, so....

He strode toward her, an Alexander or Xerxes with legspan a thousand miles long, and didn't stop until she could feel his breath on her eyelashes and cheeks.

V4: Valentine's Day

"I have nothing to say about Valentine's Day," Muriel said, trying to make her eyes into hot boulders blinding in the sun.

T4: Tortilla

Their father fingered the edge of his first tortilla like he was peering under a junker's hood.

S4:Snowplow

Chigger walked past the garage, where a million useless things catcalled from their shiny, brightly lit perches. His eyes cruised the offerings: pristine rakes in three sizes, green riding mower and leaf blower rustling in the corner, a footstool leaning against two ladders, a gray metal workbench surmounted by a wall of perfectly hung tools. There was a snow plow dozing in the other corner, a snow plow in Seattle. All that, and room for four cars. These people made him sick.

R4: Resonate

It didn't resonate. As her mother lit up with the family's "one big trip" to the Grand Canyon, and how "Sloaney" was afriad of the donkeys," Sloane knew she was supposed to swoon. Toward this memory, sun-shot, familial, rustically warm. But it meant nothing. That trip, she'd been obsessed with a boy named Jared who was staying in the neighboring tent. She'd spent a week twinging every time they neared the campsite, sunburned, her nails bit to the quick.

Q4: Quickly

Quickly, he shoved the pink tongues of his dress shirt bottom back into his jeans, flushing from his cheeks into the roots of his fuzzy hair.

P4: Post

What comes to mind is Lionel Shriver's "The Post-Birthday World," which, though it took me a while, I loved.

"Post" could be so many things - a quick trip to the X office, the occurence of a fight x-grocery shop. What will Muriel, Sloane, Dewey, Warren, Chigger and ? do "post"?

Post-riots, Seattle was - briefly - a quieter, smaller town.

O4: Obstruct

She didn't want to obstruct things, but sometimes it felt like progress was actually something that moved us, all of us, backwards instead of helping to simply make life work. Muriel flushed. She was pretty sure the "all of us" that lived in Africa or Appalachia wouldn't necessarily agree.

N4: Necessary

"Is it really necessary to belittle us, Dad?" Sloane jammed the tablecloth into the washer, knowing Muriel would have preferred she soak it in the backyard tub. "I mean, does it make you feel better somehow?"

M4: Mating

For all that Dewey's body spun wildly, careeningly electric, he was also disgusted with himself at his core; as his parents would say, what he was doing was sex, not romance - mating in place of making love.

L4: List

Before I write my sentence, I should recognize that despite the tumult of life lately, this blog has kept me connected to writing, and to fiction, in a real and gratifying way.

Even better, this latest iteration, the 4th round of my 50 words per letter exercise, is holding some of my "I'll never write again" fears at bay. Every day it pulls my mind back toward Muriel and Dewey and Chigger, and now their new counterparts Sloane and... well, I don't know if either Warren or Cole will survive.

Today's list, then, could be a number of things:

Muriel listed the ingredients slowly, watching the boys and girls eyes widen and waiting for the giggling to start.

Dewey kept a list in his pocket, of all the things he'd now never be able to do.

Sloane knew the list by heart: bachelor's degree, medical school, residency, intern.

And who else?

Warren listed all the ways he'd failed.

OK, ok, I skipped Friday. But 4 sentences on a Saturday is a pretty good deal.