Flash Fiction Chronicles

 Ray and I were vacationing in New Mexico. We drove up to Taos for a couple days and started to wander about the town, to find out what was worth looking at. When Ray and I went on a trip I always clarified with Ray that we weren’t really having a vacation, we were having a blunder. Blunders are fun, because you wind up in places you never expected to be. I really pissed him off by insisting that we didn’t have a plan or even reservations. Man, I must have been intolerable.

On January 26th, I sat down and wrote 1,000 words for the first time in something like two months. (There has been a staggering lack of writing at my house lately.) It was a first person narrative that began with:

“I’m no hero, all right? Let’s get that straight up front.”

As of today, 15 days later, I have an entirely outlined and characterized novel plan. This is how I did it.

_____________

The initial narrative took several days to get out of my system, so I went with it, following the narrator right into the middle of his current situation. I would revise the beginning to reflect things I was learning as I wrote the continuation. I shoved “show don’t tell” under my chair and let him tell me about each of his companions, until I felt like I knew them all. (I did all of the preliminary writing in a simple text-edit program so I could easily bounce back and forth between Bianca (my main computer) and Cheese (my baby hackbook).) I took the file with me everywhere for a few days, and worked on it in all of my spare time.

For several days after that, I characterized. (Maker bless the StoryMill for giving me one place to keep track of everything) I made an entry for each character, then jotted ideas and asked questions and bounced from one character to the others as I learned how they all interacted with each other, and why. The characters told me their stories, and I took notes.

Then came the outline, which was a relatively simple matter of piecing together all the quilt-square-stories my characters had told me into one ‘big picture’ of a story. The only challenge this time was puzzling out the right order in which to tell four separate stories until they could unite into one.

With the piecing came more learning, and some of the stories shifted or grew or became less important. I made notes along the way in each of the character’s records … going so far as to use strikethrough text for older ideas instead of deleting them outright, so I could see what I had scrapped in case I needed it again. I determined how many key events occurred during the scope of the tale.

At this point came the numbers – I need the numbers, they act as a boundaries to keep me from going on and on and on like some reincarnation of a famously verbose author (who shall remain nameless even though the fact that he is still being published after his demise is something of an annoyance to me, being that one printing run of his book could theoretically wipe out an entire rainforest in Bolivia.)

Anyway. I picked 65,000 as a starting point for my first draft (not too short, but with room to grow later when things require more explanation and detail.) I determined that the story could best be told in 10 chapters. Behold, each chapter now has a temporary goal of 6,500 words.

I created the 10 chapters, and named them to give myself a reminder of what happens in each one. From the chapter overviews, I determined the scenes – what events occur in what order to convey the story of the bigger picture? Sometimes there were two scenes, sometimes there were four. I entered them into the program as well, giving them names that helped me remember what happens within them, and assigning them to the appropriate chapter. I applied the numbers again, to give myself a framework for how many words each scene in each chapter should have.

At this point, I took an afternoon and made scene notes … one scene at a time, I made the notation: “In which …” and described the action that would be taking place in that scene when I wrote it. This is my map, the road marker I look back on when I am tempted to tangent in a wonderfully written side-story which is completely irrelevant and that I would only have to cut later.

Yesterday I was back to characterizing, since a few of them had come forward while I was making scene notes and requested some changes, or suggested some motivational aids. That was when I got to the nitty-gritty – the physical appearance, the life goal/motivation, the internal agendas, etc.

I also started the list of the things I need — as I encounter something in my descriptions that is incomplete, I make a note of it and keep going, so as not to slow myself down on the details that don’t really matter and can be dealt with later. Currently this list is begging for a world map, names for towns and countries and Inns, and a real name for a guy I am referring to as “Nameless Guy” in every section of notes – before “Nameless Guy” sticks and I have to name him that – keep an eye out for a guy named Inconnu or some form thereof. It’s french for “nameless”. (Thank you Babel Fish!)

I should be starting the actual writing today or tomorrow.

And that’s how it happened.

The problem I am having, however, is the guilt. I have this terrible feeling that working on a long piece, a novel-length work, is nothing but selfish indulgence. Only short pieces are going to make it out into the world and keep my name in the pond … so how can I justify taking the time to write something no one will ever read because the publishing world is a dank, scary place and I don’t have a map or a sherpa? *sigh*

(previously published at Blogging in the Dark)

There used to be a girl who bled her emotions, ideas, thoughts and dreams into books.

She bled them and resurrected them. Again and again, until reality blurred and she no longer recognised humans of flesh and blood but saw and sought out characters from, often brittle and silver fish infested pages; slices of paper that reeked deliciously of other peoples visions.

She was a frivolous fool. At her best she was fey. The number of times she tumbled into an undignified heap for having mistaken a callow character for something from her beloved books were countless! The number of times she woke up to find herself impaled by an irate teacher who demanded to know why she was grinning or looking weepy for no reason occurred too often to be entertaining to her schoolmates.

Behind her back they called her names. She didn’t  care. She had found Hemingway,  a man who had died just before her birth and fallen in love. She didn’t understand that. Death could not be a barrier. To her, he was alive, pulsating-ly alive, like a sea god come to her room in the moonlight.

It was a strange love. And it began with The Old Man and the Sea.  Becoming progressively obsessive with each book that she read.  After her fourth reading of that novella, and the devouring of volumes of Hemingway out of which some struck her more forcefully – Snows of Kilimanjaro, Torrents of Spring, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Islands in the Stream, A Farewell to Arms, To Have and Have Not…she even went ahead and read two of his nonfiction books – Death in the Afternoon and A Moveable Feast.

After that she was no longer able to differentiate between the books. In her heart they had become one churning sea of people and situations with the narratives often intertwining and getting tangled up like spools of embroidery thread stuffed into a very small container. The spools would stay stuffed and become like one motley homogeneous mass. In later years, she felt the lump in her brain every time her muse flicked his tongue over it. It was not an unpleasant sensation; quite the contrary.

During those young years, the confusion in her head didn’t stop her from reading. Nor did it diminish her love. Hemingway often visited her in the middle of a basketball game or a maths class. Suddenly everything would become liquid celadon; her aura turning somewhat witless. She would doodle in her maths exercises book instead of writing the sums. She would snatch the ball out of her own team mates hands and toss it to the other side without thinking. She vaguely comprehended the inappropriateness of her behaviour and tried to hide them with lame smart alecky remarks that convinced no one and did nothing for her reputation.

It was not that she only read Hemingway. There were many authors who gripped her, heart, mind and soul, intensely, madly. In that sense she was not a faithful lover. But she remained loyal to Earnest Miller Hemingway in the way the Devadasis remained loyal to their Temple Gods. There were strong and lasting relationships born of her readings of other authors. But Hemingway’s bearded face always hovered over the rim of her horizon. She could never visualize any writer the way she could conjure up an image of Hemingway instantly.

Years passed and for a time the struggle of existence forbade any deep reading. She read in snatches and bits. A phase came after she married and had children when she was reading only nursery rhymes and fables and Dr. Spock. The spectre of a smiling eyed white bearded Sea God rarely rose to haunt her. By this time she had married a smooth cheeked man with a dimple on his chin, whose only exposure to hunting had been a sparrow that he had killed as a twelve year old with his air gun and had been sick for days with the horror of that knowledge. He was a good man who was never jealous of her books.

One day this good man who was her husband decided to bring home the latest book by Hemingway, even though he had been dead for more than three decades. That was another magic about Hemingway. His books continued to spring up long after he died. No wonder she never truly believed him dead in the first place. Her husband wanted to give her a birthday present that would make her eyes light up the way diamonds are supposed to light up a woman’s eyes. He went out and bought True at First Light. She was delighted and started to read straightaway.

Halfway down the book she put it down. The liquid celadon feeling receded leaving a chalky taste in her palate. An emptiness washed over her in the afternoon light. Her husband saw the shadows and felt a little annoyed that he couldn’t please her after all.

It took her some weeks. During which time she went back again and again to the book, only to put it down again. For several years she did not open another Hemingway book; she did not reread any. When at at last she went back to reading Hemingway, she began again with The Old Man and the Sea.  And this time, she did not lose herself. She went out to sea with Santiago and returned, carrying his wounds in her heart but without being possessed of either Santiago or Hemingway.

(Taken from an earlier post in Writers & Writerisms)

Rumjhum Biswas is still living in Chennai, India, but in another part where there were no mosquitoes until the rains came and all the incy wincy spiders were washed away. No she isn’t implying that spiders eat mosquitoes, but if they did she’d become a millionaire by breeding spiders and selling them all over the world, instead of being another poor writer who gets to answer the door and the phone because she is at home and that means she has a cushy life! She has a blog to prove that it’s not: http://rumjhumkbiswas.wordpress.com. You can also find her at times at Flash Fiction Chronicles.

It was like this for weeks, no months, on end. This disquiet of something not there. This feeling of disruption… Even as my daily routine continued, a heart that paced length to length in its serrated Boney cage…

Old relationships are hard to break; harder still to fall in love again, when you have loved that other so much, so long. But I knew I had to move on, had to love again, truly, with all my heart again. Otherwise the writing would not come. That thought killed me every night. So I began the process even before the first night of stepping in. I jerked my heart, almost squeezing it in my fist every time it turned back for another last look.

I don’t blame my heart, especially now that it has grown quite old and quite tame – there was a time when I reveled in every movement – an odd thing in a wife and mother, a woman most of all, for aren’t women supposed to be the rooted ones?

I loved it every time we moved, each time taking our home with us, dismantled and packed into neat cardboard boxes transported by truck or ship. This time too was no different. Except that we moved from one steep end of the city to another steeper extreme. This time we were closer to the sea, more away from the hub, among broader quieter avenues and cul-de-sacs, roads and lanes that were and still are strangers to me.

It’s magical that a single city can be so different in its different parts and yet be the same city, like a confluence where the waters of disparate rivers meet. But, I had grown to love my old locality and home of four years. Despite the obvious beauty of this new place, I have not yet been able to claim it for my own. As yet. I needed to own it first; the writing would not happen otherwise.
I needed to sit at a particular angle, where the sun slanted in just so. So my computer was turned around and around again; and yes the husband was exasperated. And I am still in the process of finding my G-spot of writing, so to speak.

My blog lay neglected. My implicit commitments to writers were not honoured. Drafts of poems remained in paper napkin scraps and margins of magazines. Stories raged in my head and died before they could be consecrated to paper. It did not help that for the most part, the past year had been emotionally unbearably noisy and jagged – a bad thing for my writing self anyway. Very bad. But now a new year has already begun. Now I am disciplining my heart to love again, and love true, like before…

It helps that the moon when it’s plump and full, hangs just above the Gul Mohar tree outside my terrace (and in this house I have two – one above running the length and breadth of our apartment and the other smaller but more reachable beyond my hall) shedding elfin light upon us. There are parrots and squirrels here too. And a gang of monkeys that seem to be more decently behaved than those in my children’s school. Most homes own a dog or two; I watch them and sometimes get to make friends with them. The dog I once rescued and owned briefly, but will love eternally, lives about five hundred metres away. I saw him recently and came away glad for him.

Yes. The bricks are falling into place, softly. The fire hasn’t yet warmed my hearth, but it is lit now. I can feel my heart expanding, ready to embrace this new environment. This year I hope my muse will rain. This year I hope to finally fall in love with my new surroundings, make a new beginning, deeply and meaningfully.

Adapted from a post at  Writers & Writerisms by Rumjhum Biswas.

Rumjhum Biswas is still living in Chennai, India, but in another part where there were no mosquitoes until the rains came and all the incy wincy spiders were washed away. No she isn’t implying that spiders eat mosquitoes, but if they did she’d become a millionaire by breeding spiders and selling them all over the world, instead of being another poor writer who gets to answer the door and the phone because she is at home and that means she has a cushy life! She has a blog, Writers & Writerisms, to prove that it’s not. You can also find her at times right here at Flash Fiction Chronicles.

Never shy about giving people the benefit of her opinion (whether it was asked for or not) my old gran was always telling someone their ‘but’ was too big.

On the face of it, that seems a little rude, even for my old gran, but she wasn’t talking about pants’ sizes. She was referring to those built-in excuses we like to keep handy, in case our sub-conscious starts prompting us to chase our dreams.

“But I’m too young/too old.”

“But he/she’s out of my league.”

“But people might laugh at me.” [Not a problem if your dream is to do standup comedy]

Writers’ buts.

Writers too, have built-in ‘buts’ as it were:

“I’d love to write, but I just don’t have the time.”

“I’d love to write, but I don’t know anything about grammar.”

“I’d love to write, but there’s no writing group where I live.”

If you ask me, none of those ‘buts’ matter. They’re all just a way of avoiding the real problem, the biggest ‘but’ of them all:

“But I might fail.”

The fear of failure can stop a person from even trying. Have you ever almost pitched a story to a high-paying magazine, almost sat down to write a novel, or almost entered a writing contest? If so, then join the club. I imagine just about every writer has had that experience at some point or other.

I’ll bet there are thousands of great (or potentially great) storytellers out there who’ll never get published. I suspect for most, it’s because they let their ‘but’ get between themselves and the chance of success. You’ve probably met some of them.

Be wary of such people. Many of them carry a virus, Excusitis, a mental affliction which can kill writing dreams by causing the person suffering from it to doubt themselves and their ability. Symptoms include excessive use of the phrases like ‘I wanted to be a writer, but…’, ‘I’ve always thought I had a book in me, but…’, ‘I love writing, but…’

While not always contagious, many sufferers become bitter, unable to wish other folks success in endeavors which they themselves once dreamed of pursuing. Instead of support they offer mockery, instead of encouragement they try to plant seeds of doubt in your head.

Avoid these people at all costs or risk becoming infected yourself.

So what’s the difference between writers who go on to achieve their writing dream and those who don’t?
I don’t believe it’s talent – though it would be naïve to think that talent isn’t a vital part of the equation.

It certainly isn’t luck – that’s just a silly excuse used by folks who think there’s an easy path to success.

I believe the difference is simple.

Successful writers refuse to allow their ‘buts’ to get in the way. They see a ‘but’ as an obstacle which must be overcome rather than an excuse to quit… at least that’s what I’m hoping.

Me, I’m nearer fifty than forty; between leaving school at sixteen (with a poor academic record) and my 42nd birthday, I’d never written a word of fiction. Believe me, I could come up with a dozen more great excuses. The point is who cares? I figure all those things will just make my ‘How I done it’ story a little more interesting if and when I become successful as a writer.

How about you?

What ‘buts’ have you put behind you as you chase your writing dream?

This post was originally published at http://jongibbs.livejournal.com/68015.html. 

Jon Gibbs is an active member of both The Garden State Horror Writers and The Monmouth Creative Writing Group .  His story “Wild West Justice” will appear in The Best of Every Day Fiction Two coming out this month. He can usually be found hunched over the laptop in his kitchen. One day he hopes to figure out how to switch it on. 

When in college, I was required for a humanities course to read Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, her collection of essays about women and writing. At the time, my goal was simply to finish the book before the test, and so years later, I haven’t retained much of what she wrote. The one thing that has stuck with me is her thesis:

“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”

Her room is not so much an actual place as it is a metaphor for privacy. Stephen King gives similar advice in On Writing, although he doesn’t limit it to just the ladies and is more literal on the room part. He says to be a writer, you must have a room, and the room must have a door, and you must have the determination to shut the door.

That all sounded fine, but I didn’t take it seriously. I work in a newsroom, where at any given time, five conversations are going on near my desk, in addition to reporters on the phone, the police scanner, a football game on the television and the never-ending clicks of fingers on keyboards. Peace and quiet is for sissies, I thought.

That changed 18 months ago when I decided to write fiction in earnest.

To start with, I needed a computer, and the only one at my house was in the family room. The kids mostly used it for playing games and surfing the Internet, so the first difficulty I encountered was getting any time on it at all. And when I did, I had to deal with the myriad distractions that come with writing in the same room with three kids, my husband, the dog, and the television. I love my family and enjoy spending time with them, but family time and writing time mix about as well as oil and water. I kept trying to make it work though. I persevered for months amid the family room circus. Then the computer crashed. Permanently.

So I started writing at the office instead. At times, when there were no articles to edit and my colleagues were checking e-mail or posting on Facebook, I was pounding away at my latest short story. The approach was only marginally doable. It narrowed my writing time to five minutes here, ten minutes there. It was like setting a faucet to drip and trying to fill a glass.

Then at Christmas came a godsend: I received a generous amount of money, and there was no question in my mind what to spend it on. I researched the options for a few days and bought my first laptop.

Now every night after I get home from work, I take my laptop to my bedroom and close the door. I shut out the television shows and movies, video games, music, the dog who thinks he’s attention-starved, family members who want to talk about their day, the toddler who wants to “help” me hit the keys, the rumbling dishwasher and the tumbling clothes dryer. I shut it all out, and I write. I turn on the metaphorical faucet full blast and watch the words spill out on the screen. It’s beautiful.

In 1929, Virginia Woolf said a writer needs a room of her own.

Eight-one years later, here is my room: It’s a screen 14” wide, backed up by 3 GB of memory and a decent word-processing program, and I can take it with me anywhere. Along with my imagination, a thick skin, and a whole lot of determination, it’s all this woman needs to be a writer.

This piece originally appeared Jan. 2 on Jennifer’s blog.

Jennifer Campbell-Hicks lives in Arvada, Colorado, where she tries to find time to write in between her two full-time jobs as a journalist and mother of three. Her short story “Cowboy Jake and the Moon Men” will be appearing in the upcoming issue of Science Fiction Trails.

One of the important things a writer needs to understand is how people react to varying situations.

The best way to do this, most of the time, is to sit by quietly and watch. But once in awhile, it’s fun to jump in and participate. If you’ve never done this, as an experiment, try it.

Find an elevator system that gets lots of use. Wait for a car full of people, get in and then stand in the front of the car, with your back to the doors.

Watch how nervous the other passengers get. Most of them won’t even realize why they are upset, but I guarantee you will see the symptoms. Lots of eye movement. Shoulder and arm twitches. Foot shuffling.

Now turn it up a notch. Stare at someone. Better yet, look from person to person, studying them. You might get a verbal reaction on this one, from a polite “May I help you?” to an aggressive “What are you looking at?”

Ramp it up some more. Spout nonsense. Don’t talk directly to anyone, just talk. Loudly. People will be jumping off the elevator at the next opportunity, even if it isn’t their floor.

You are violating elevator etiquette. Move to the back. Face forward. Don’t look at anyone else. Don’t talk, unless it’s to someone you know, and then speak in hushed tones.

Unless you have never been on an elevator in your life, you know the rules as well as I do, but consider this. When did you learn them? Who taught them to you? Only the Shadow knows for sure, but there is a science devoted to the study of such things.

It’s called Proxemics and it examines how people perceive and use space, alone or in groups, particularly tight spaces such as an elevator.

It may not be polite to break those unwritten rules, but it is fun. And examining the way people react to such situations, filing their antics away for later use, can make you a better writer.

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K.C. Ball lives in Seattle, a stone’s throw from Puget Sound. She is an night writer, who works through the wee hours because there are so few interruptions and because that is when all the good ideas pop up.

One of her SF stories, Flotsam, was recently purchased by Analog. Other short fiction has appeared in various online and print publications, including Flash Fiction Online, Every Day Fiction, Boston Literary Magazine, Big Pulp, A Thousand Faces and Murky Depths.

K.C.’s flash fiction stories have been included in the Best of Every Day Fiction 2008 and the Best of Every Day Fiction Two anthologies and her story, Coward’s Steel, won third place in the 1st Quarter 2009 Writers of the Future competition. It will appear in the Writers of the Future XXVI anthology in August 2010.

K.C. is editor of 10Flash Quarterly, an online magazine featuring genre flash fiction, and she blogs about writing at A Moving Line.

I would like to register a complaint. No, it’s not about this parrot what I purchased a half hour ago, he’s obviously just pining for the fjords. My complaint is about a lie.

Writing, according to what I was told growing up, is not a team sport. It requires only imagination, talent, and a willingness to practice and continue learning. I was given visions of an ivory tower somewhere, full of inspiration, where a writer could create masterpiece after masterpiece, uninterrupted by the concerns of “real” life. There would be no tests of strength or speed or agility, no performances, and certainly no public speaking. A writer was as invisible as the idea he/she cajoled out of the ether and set to blossoming on paper, which meant said writer did not need to be pretty or thin or athletic or sociable. A writer was judged on the characters he/she created, and their story – and not on how personable said writer was or wasn’t.

I believed it, with every fiber of my not-pretty not-thin not-athletic not-sociable being. I bought the whole sales pitch, and signed right up. I invested everything I had into that lie. It only took thirty years for me to figure out the painful truth, and don’t I feel dumb for not catching on sooner? A lot of time can be saved by reading the fine print.

The Ivory Tower Committee never said anything about a writer needing to have a “platform.” Not only does the writer have to craft the work and painstakingly shape it into the best representation of his/her vision, he/she must also be a public presence with a carefully cultivated fan base / network to have the best chance at publication. That was NOT in the brochure. No one said anything about Facebook or Twitter or being a teacher or a public speaker.

I am reading things now about needing a “niche,” a “body of expertise,” and an “ongoing relationship with a target audience.” (A Platform Boot Camp, article by Christina Katz, found in Writer’s Digest: Writer’s Yearbook 2010.) What fresh hell is this? I didn’t sign up for that – I would have remembered. (I would also have signed up for something like animal husbandry or forensic handwriting analysis instead of writing.)

I dug through my files, and scrounged up the deed for that Ivory Tower I bought when I was seven. Oh, oh cute, I signed it in crayon. And there is was, down at the very bottom, in letters so tiny they might have been mistaken for a decorative line: *life depicted applies to unpublished writers only.*

Of course. I can have my ivory tower, but I can’t expect anyone to know my name if I never step out the door. I can hide away and write masterpiece after masterpiece, but the stories are just going to sit in the corner and gather dust if I don’t send them into the world – that’s why I became a writer in the first place, because I wanted to share my stories – but without contacts and relationships, where will I send them?

Fair or not, in today’s industry almost no one in the book publishing business is willing to take a chance on a name no one has heard of, the name of some grown-up kid with a deed to an ivory tower and a head full of stories and a heart full of fear. Agents or publishers want much, much more than a story to sell.

So now I must set still more time aside to research and build my presence, to add to my embarrassingly small list of credentials. I’m too invested in the writing to back down now, the only thing I can do is step down out of my Ivory Tower and step up to the challenge of self-marketing and self-promotion. Which I dread.

(Writing in a Vacuum was previously posted at Blogging in the Dark on November 25th, 2009.)

In his post “Make in Fun” (on Wednesday 11th November ’09) Alexander Burns wrote “To that end, I’ve determined that a writer has learned most of what they need to know about storytelling by the age of 10 or so. After that, all that’s left is to learn how to make it good.” I totally agree. What’s more it reminded me of something that I do from time to time – Eavesdrop! On my kids, and especially my daughter who will turn twelve this month!

I know it is a sneaky habit. I’m a bad mom. Sorry! But I can’t help it. The stuff they talk about, the books they read, the things they do, and more importantly write and so often the stories they tell themselves or to each other is so interesting. So inspiring too. For my writing I mean.

You see, kids have these absolutely wide open windows in their minds. Information, ideas, imaginary things keep flying in and out all the time. They have this absolutely fresh way of looking at everyday, mundane things. They keep “discovering” the world around them. If you sneak around the kids, your imagination is sure to get fired up.

I loved it when my daughter and son too, were younger and talked to themselves when they either drew pictures or played with their toys. The stories they told themselves were entertaining, though not always, actually almost never, logical. Probably that’s why they were so entertaining in the first place. I did not plagiarize their stories (it seriously didn’t occur to me at that time, and now I wonder if I did miss an opportunity, since my kids wouldn’t sue me for that, would they? ). I wish I had recorded some of that prattle, though. Sigh. Nevertheless, eavesdropping on their imaginary voyages and adventures did inspire me and often liberated me from my adult constraints of fact and form.

Anything is possible in a child’s inner world. Nothing is improbable!

Not even lemon yellow polka dotted purple ice cream
Served in a jelly belly bowl with a slice of moon beam!

Some of the stuff they think of and say actually provide fodder for us adult writers. Like the time I found my daughter, then around nine years old, looking thoughtfully at the artificially created turquoise waters of a swimming pool. After sometime she muttered, “Rapture of the deep is what happens to sailors when they are drowning; they don’t want to come up.” I stood still. She had connected something ordinary with something extra-ordinary and seemingly unrelated to the present. She skipped away to do something else and I found myself seeing a vast stretch of turquoise water all around me and feeling an immense sense of ecstasy wash over me. My daughter had just opened up a new dimension, another portal before me. The first draft of my poem “Rapture of the Deep” was born then and there; the poem was later published in A Little Poetry. Another time, on a rainy evening, I heard her advise a frog that was staring at her from its perch on a low railing, almost eye level with her, that “he was better off as a frog!” She was around six then and far more fond of birds and animals than Barbie dolls and princesses. My Story “Return of the Frog Prince” almost hopped off my head and was published a couple of years later in the Lily Literary Review!

It’s not always that a poem or a story takes shape every time I eavesdrop on my kids, or any kids for that matter. But their artless words and wide open hearts are not merely joyous to behold, like a rainbow seen in the crystal light after a shower, with the scent of renewed life all around you, they have a potent magic in them. I think the magic is really the cleansing quality that they have, something that makes you shed, at least want to shed, your inhibitions and adult complexes. The effect is wonderfully refreshing. And I think that is good for writers.

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Rumjhum Biswas has been writing poetry almost since she learned to read and write. It was her way of getting back at the world. Now a plump, bespectacled and hopefully respectable mom of two and wife of one she continues to write poetry and also fiction, because while poets remain poor some fiction writers do get rich and that gives her hope. Her publications and mutterings are here: http://rumjhumkbiswas.wordpress.com/ She also jabbers from time to time at Flash Fiction Chronicles.