Wednesday Words: Drama

I have a Wednesday night writing group. We do prompts, and drabbles, and it’s a good time. Everyone comes out with something so different! They’re short snippets – the drabbles are only supposed to be 100 words, a warm-up for the later prompt. I’m trying to remember to post my favourites as I go. This is the first time I came up with three in the fifteen minutes… and yes, I have fallen behind on this, I plan to pick it up again! So many things have been set aside while I try to juggle the absurdity that is my life, but… I like sharing these. I want to keep doing that.

Drama 1

“All that drama.” The wave of a hand, dismissive. “Throw out the drama.”

You wonder how to throw away the heartbreak, the pain, the anger, the injustice; you wonder how not to throw yourself out at the same time.

You ask how it could have been avoided. Everyone’s full of ideas, until you lay it on the line.

It’s the line that’s important. Which side of it are you on?

Because whether what’s happening is a deep personal trauma or simply pointless drama always depends on which side of that emotional line you’re on.

Drama 2

He’s quiet.

From the wings, he watches the cast take their final bow. It’s closing night – someone drags him on stage, introduces him as the playwright, and between the stage lights and the applause, there’s a war between terror and exultation.

There are no small feelings. He’s quiet on the outside. The rest of it, he shapes. Every time an actor nails the delivery – even better than he imagined – every time an audience member sniffles, he thinks this is so much bigger than he imagined.

He imagines vastness.

And when he imagines drama, he is borne aloft by it.

Drama 3

I have a big voice. If I’m warmed up, if I’m living inside the notes, I can hammer volume, fullness, vibrato, liquid fire in my lungs. I don’t need the microphone.

I need the drama.

I can pour myself into the lyrics, I can leap intervals with precision and delight, as though I’m flying. Nothing feels like this, nothing.

But I can’t do it without the drama.

I can’t do the wordless cry. I need the words to launch me.

I can hit the stratosphere, if I have the drama.

Otherwise, I just drift, in a lost, precise, ambivalent note.

I have a Wednesday night writing group. We do prompts, and drabbles, and it’s a good time. Everyone comes out with something so different! They’re short snippets – the drabbles are only supposed to be 100 words, a warm-up for the later prompt. I’m trying to remember to post my favourites as I go. This is the first time I came up with three in the fifteen minutes… and yes, I have fallen behind on this, I plan to pick it up again! So many things have been set aside while I try to juggle the absurdity that is my life, but… I like sharing these. I want to keep doing that.

Wednesday Words: Messages

I have a Wednesday night writing group. We do prompts, and drabbles, and it’s a good time. Everyone comes out with something so different! They’re short snippets – the drabbles are only supposed to be 100 words, a warm-up for the later prompt. I’m trying to remember to post my favourites as I go.

But this particular drabble prompt – Messages – hit something hard in my heart, and I didn’t try to keep it to 100 words.

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He sends her a message, and two miles away, her mobile chimes.

He wants to talk. He knows she’s busy. He’s worried, is all. When she’s got time.

She’s looking through the telescope, and ignoring her phone. Not because of him. She lost a friend, recently. She doesn’t know why. She asked, several times.

No answer.

No message. That, in itself, is a message, but it hurts, and it’s frightening. Now every delay from every message could be the beginning of a new message, a message of absence and silence.

She watches the stars. She thinks about radio signals, travelling through space.

It would take so long to get a message out there.

You wouldn’t know when to stop hoping, she thinks. People used to write letters, before the internet, the telephones, the telegrams. Letters, carried by ships at sea, or tiny reports on bloody homing pigeons.

What news from the front? she thinks, focused on a distant star. Who knows? Keep an eye out for pigeons. Or the postman. Or radio waves.

Now, you don’t know when to expect it, or when to stop expecting it.

You don’t know when the silence is safe.

She has her headphones on. The music helps. Songs have messages, have meaning. You can consider those at your own pace. They only go one way, and you aren’t expected to answer, or know the right thing to say.

The music fills her head. She doesn’t hear her phone chime, another friend, sending another message, to let her know that he’s thinking of her, and he hopes she’s okay.

She is okay, in this moment. She doesn’t expect messages from the stars. Their silence has no weight.

They just burn. That is all they have to do.

It’s Been Two Years

I can’t upload audio files directly to WordPress without getting a paid account, and I’m far enough behind on my blogging plans that a paid account seems like a poor investment at this point.

So here’s a link to the tumblr, if you’re interested in my musical catharsis.

https://www.tumblr.com/doctor-fancy-pants/719732023921606656/two-years-since-the-storm-tuesday-4pm

Wednesday Words: Good Skin

I have a Wednesday night writing group. We do prompts, and drabbles, and it’s a good time. Everyone comes out with something so different! They’re short snippets – the drabbles are only supposed to be 100 words (eventually I got there!), a warm-up for the later prompt. I’m trying to remember to post my favourites as I go.

The First Dragon had died. Dragons do not stop growing, and he carried eons within him. He became more weathered, slower in his thoughts and words. Every thought was a deep, slow thought, because with so much memory, and so much wisdom, a thought had to travel a long way.

Eventually he passed from the world, as all things must. He felt relief, for who could follow him through such thoughts? He had been lonely.

Dragons also do not decay. The inkwyrms, those who prepared the dead, who recorded the words, deeds and songs of the dragons who died, took up their needles and their drills. He had outgrown his scales, and that was fortunate. There was a lot of ground to cover, and prying up scales takes time.

Underneath, he was just soft enough for them to begin their work.

They would record each of those long, slow thoughts on this good skin.

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Post-Drabble Thoughts: do dragons only start out as fire elementals, and end as stone elementals? That is how planets are born: they begin as fire, and end as stone, with their history buried in their skin.

(yes, I’m taking some artistic liberties with astrophysics. Hush.)

For those who have the bandwidth, who want to understand, who are curious, who care

I have stories to tell and blog posts to write – there’s been a lot going on and my brain is basically fried, I’m in “put one foot in front of the other” mode right now.

This turned up in my inbox, and I wanted to share it. On every platform I have, however minuscule that impact may be, so it’s on my Twitter feed, it’s on my Facebook profile, it’s on my Discord server, and of course: here as well. It’s written by someone I am honoured and delighted to know, and it’s their words that matter here, not mine.

I also shared in on Tumblr, so here are the sentences I dumped into the tags (as is tradition on tumblr).

Basic fucking human dignity should not be up for fucking debate.

I want us to be better than this.

I want my trans friends to be safe in their own skin.

When bigotry wins, we all fucking lose.

Here’s the link again:

https://www.somethingforcate.net/2023/04/13/this-is-why-we-march/

Wednesday Words: Good Things Can Come From Mistakes

I have a Wednesday night writing group. We do prompts, and drabbles, and it’s a good time. Everyone comes out with something so different! They’re short snippets – the drabbles are only supposed to be 100 words (eventually I got there!), a warm-up for the later prompt. I’ve decided to post my favourites, because why not? This one was more recent, and I got two in the time limit that I liked.

Mistakes #1

Cell division is a glorious microscopic ballet.

A dancer’s silhouette is revealed from an artful smoke machine; so too does our genetic material coalesce from the organised chaos of the nucleus into chromosomes.

Diligently, they twin themselves, then separate, pulled to opposite ends of the stage; and then the stage itself splits in two, and you don’t see that shit in Swan Lake.

But the most miraculous part of all this is how much it gets fucked up and you still end up with a human being at the end of it.

Only now you’ve got red hair. You’re welcome.

Mistake #2

A weed is any plant that grows where you don’t want it to grow. It’s a context-specific term. A mistake is to do something when you intended something else.

An error is a computer telling you to go fuck yourself, because you’re speaking gibberish (as far as the computer is concerned).

What do you get when you combine these things?

Well, I got a sarcastic cyborg plant person, and after 50 magical years of marriage, I don’t regret a single thing.

Coda: I posted this on tumblr as well – I always do – and on tumblr the devil is not so much in the details as scattered liberally through the tags and I went on a journey with this one. Indulge me as I cross the streams!

#every living organism is a filthy mutant and we really don’t say that often enough
#mutation is the raw material of evolution
#most mutations either do nothing or render the developing organism nonviable
#some mutations do multiple things and it’s real weird strap in
#the mc1r gene is expressed in the skin and there’s a version that codes for red hair and increased melanoma risk dammit but guess what
#that same mutation is expressed in the brain and affects pain perceptions and analgesic response
#more tolerant of many kinds of pain
#more sensitive to hot/cold pain
#varying levels of resistances to local analgesics
#seriously my dentist has to give me like 3x the amount and she tried to trick me just to confirm
#so this is what I mean when I say mutation is the raw material of evolution and all of it is a mistake in some aspect of cell replication
#this means that you are a good thing that came from many many mistakes
#feel proud
#I’m not sure how this plays into the sarcastic cyborg plant person but I am picturing a steampunk triffid rolling its eyes

Wednesday Words: Apocalypse Edition

I have a Wednesday night writing group. We do prompts, and drabbles, and it’s a good time. Everyone comes out with something so different! They’re short snippets – the drabbles are only supposed to be 100 words (eventually I got there!), a warm-up for the later prompt. I’ve decided to post my favourites, because why not? The theme for this particular Wednesday was Apocalypse, and the prompt for the drabble was “Sunshine, Lollipops and Rainbows Everywhere.”

Sunshine, Lollipops and Rainbows Everywhere

At the end of the rainbow, there’s a pot of gold.

At the end of the world, there’s a rainbow.

We sit in the ruins, the radiation rising around us, a haze of inevitable death. I sip my tea. The sun is low in the sky. In the distance, a forest is barely visible – a surviving forest, without the withered and blasted trees that surround us.

My companion leans over and turns off the Geiger counter, and picks up his guitar. He plays. I sing. For now, that is enough.

At the end of the rainbow, there is a forest.

Wednesday Words: A Dash of Magic

I have a Wednesday night writing group. We do prompts, and drabbles, and it’s a good time. Everyone comes out with something so different! They’re short snippets – the drabbles are only supposed to be 100 words (eventually I got there!), a warm-up for the later prompt. I’ve decided to post my favourites, because why not? This is one of my favourites.

PS yes I know it is not Wednesday anywhere right now, I have dropped the ball on this for a couple weeks, so enjoy the Friday edition! I will go schedule a couple more Wednesdays now…

A Dash of Magic

An ordinary night. An ordinary hill. An ordinary girl. Her ordinary dog.

An ordinary breeze hushes through ordinary leaves.

An ordinary planet spins fast enough to hold together, but its ordinary rotation cannot be felt.

The ivory light from an ordinary moon over an ordinary horizon, glittering silver fire from ordinary stars. Ordinary galaxies wheel overhead. In that blackness lies an ordinary vastness, an ordinary void, containing ordinary gravitational masses that bend light.

Ordinary fingers curl to scratch a canine ear, marvel at ordinary silken fur.

Ordinary brown eyes half-close in pleasure.

There is nothing ordinary about any of this.

Wednesday Words: Destination

I have a Wednesday night writing group. We do prompts, and drabbles, and it’s a good time. Everyone comes out with something so different! They’re short snippets – the drabbles are only supposed to be 100 words (eventually I got there!), a warm-up for the later prompt. I’ve decided to post my favourites, because why not? This one was more recent, and I got two in the time limit that I liked.

Destination #1

The destination is the same, always. It’s only the starting point that’s different.

How far off-shore?

How far from the equator?

How far from the punishing swell of the Southern Ocean?

How far from the agricultural run-off? How far from the thoughtless discards of humanity? How far from the bleaching heat? How far from all the tourists?

(the other tourists. My own hypocrisy burns me.)

Can I find a place where the destination is still here?

I know it when I get there. It’s always the same.

My breath deepens. My heart slows.

The destination is always, always down.

Destination #2

The new recruits are always anxious. They seem lost. The zero-gravity halls fill them with apprehension. They worked hard to get here, and they’re fierce. They’re determined.

But we were born with heavy bones, with muscles that work to push us upwards.

When we get to space, evolution is done. We’ve reached the top.

I tell them, Earth was the centre. You had a destination. That destination was the same, no matter where on Earth you came from. What was it?

It takes them a moment.

Up.

Well, I say. That’s still your destination. How can you be lost?

ADHD and Other Letters: Wait Your Turn

“Can I come over to your house?”

My mum gave an embarrassed laugh, and explained to her seven year old daughter that it wasn’t polite for me to invite myself over to my friend’s house (friend and friend’s mum were right there).

I blinked. “But why?”

I don’t recall that my mum gave an explanation. I think she simply said “it’s bad manners”, and that was the end of the matter. I was simultaneously frustrated and mortified:

…the former because I still didn’t understand “manners” or how to figure them out from first principles, and how the fuck¹ did everyone else seem to know this shit?

…the latter because oh god I have made The Big Faux Pas again.²

To be fair, I don’t recall that my friend – also seven – was particularly offended by my request.

And to be even more fair, I think explaining to a seven year old that hosting a visitor is actually a bit of work, and sometimes requires people to arrange their house and their plans on your behalf, and that inviting yourself over to their house is basically asking them to do you a favour, and you may not have given them a polite way to say no, because we’ve built a culture where refusing a visit without some sort of socially acceptable excuse is in itself considered rude, because that could lead to hurt feelings-

Look, all that shit is a minefield. I don’t claim to understand it properly even now, and I’ve made quite the informal study of these puzzling social mores.

I absolutely understand the part about hurt feelings, because while I’m extremely blunt on one hand and have a personality like a sledgehammer, I am also very sensitive and can be deeply fragile, because of a combination of emotional dysregulation, rejection sensitivity, and a whole buncha trauma.

Eventually, Mum said, “You have to wait to be asked.”

Oh. But what if they don’t ask?

…the rest is silence, I suppose.