Category: Ten Minute Free Writes

Ice

November 8th, 2015

I am ready for winter. Glittering palaces of ice where waterfalls once flowed. Crystal ornaments in trees, where dew drops froze. A smooth flat of ice on puddles and ponds — skating rinks for the right sized feet.

One of my favorite books is The Snow Child. Much of my love for that book is for the delicate descriptions of winter, snow, and ice. The Snow Child is set in interior Alaska, and the author Eowyn Ivey makes me want to disappear into her shimmering snowscape.

Unlike most fantasy, where the villain occupies any icy peak and threatens to kill with cold — as if eternal winter were a more exacting hell than eternal fire — The Snow Child is stunning in its portrayal of the tundra beauty. Beryl glaciers. Glowing blue spires of ice. White snow with berries like rubies poking through. Ivey’s prose sparkles like snow in moonlight.

Here in Blacksburg, the ice is like silver. I don’t remember many wet storms during our winters in Minnesota — it was too cold for much besides dry powdery snow — but Appalachia knows how to throw an ice storm. Limbs droop under the weight of shining crusts, leaves drip with streams of water frozen mid-drop, roofs and roods glisten with sheets of slick black ice, and when the sun comes up, the whole world glitters as if encrusted in diamonds.

Ice can be treacherous — when the power goes out and you don’t have a backup heat source, or when you have to drive somewhere and you fear for your life — but if you remove those annoyances, if you bundle up and take a walk out in the frozen, silent world, ice can be one of life’s great glories.

For the month of November, I will be participating in NaBloPoMo and plan to publish every day of the month. Usually, I will publish a 10-minute free write, initiated by a prompt from my prompt box. Minimal editing. No story. Just thoughts spilling onto the page. Follow along with the tag #NovemberDaily.
The tension between sentences

November 5th, 2015

A single crowded sentence means giving up all the possible relations among shorter sentences — the friction, the tension, the static electricity that builds up between them.

— from Several Short Sentences About Writing by Verlyn Klinkenborg

I love Hemingway for his sentences. I did not know this is why I love him. I would read his books and be unable to explain my ~~infatuation~~ admiration. “His writing is lean,” I’d say. “It is tight. The words are simple but the implications are complex.”

“He says so much with so few words.”

There is story happening behind his words. And I don’t know how he does it.

The sentence I quoted above, from Klinkenborg’s small, concise book, gives a clue. When I practiced writing as a craft, my group once wrote pieces using only simple sentences: no conjunctions, no clauses. When we read our practice aloud, our works sounded like Hemingway. Lean. Simple. Direct.

The lack of transitions, the absence of explanations, the periods without ands or buts — these vacancies create tension. They credit the reader with the intelligence to make leaps in the spaces between the words, in the gaps between the end of one sentence and the beginning of the next.

My homework tonight is to study the simple sentence. Next write, I will use them.

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For the month of November, I will be participating in NaBloPoMo and plan to publish every day of the month. Usually, I will publish a 10-minute free write, initiated by a prompt from my prompt box. Minimal editing. No story. Just thoughts spilling onto the page. Follow along with the tag #NovemberDaily.
Salt

November 3rd, 2015

Salt on my lips when I sweat. A crust of salt on my skin when I swim, SCUBA dive, snorkel. Salt makes my eyelashes stick together, and my skin feel dry and tight, and when I open my mouth underwater, I taste the brine. Salt water stings the inner membranes of my nose if too much goes in it, drawing water to my eyes.

Salt is earth. It is flavor. It is crystal. It is crust.

Salt is foundation.

Salt is strong and vital, sold and earthy. And we eat it. We eat earth. And we want more. “Worth his salt.” Doesn’t that come from back in the days when salt was more valuable than gold?

I love thinking about consumables being precious. Not because they were rare, but because food was valued. Saffron. Spices. Salt. Do we value food anymore? Most of it is so cheap I feel like we don’t. Of course, that’s the McDonald’s aspect of food I’m talking about. Fine dining still exists, thank heavens.

But Salt. I like it on my skin. I like it in the sea. I like it in the air so I can smell it. I like it in my sweets to balance the sugar. I like pouring it into bowls, coarse sea salt especially, though Kosher will do.

There has been a gourmet salt thing recently — whole shops dedicated to pink, white, black salts. I wonder if the flavor differences are that noticeable? Or maybe it’s not just flavor but aftertaste, or compatibility with other flavors, or structure, or aesthetic. I’ve never tried a specialty salt. All of our salts are white: baking salt, fine and iodized and in a cylindrical canister; Kosher salt in a heavy box with a spout; coarse sea salt, also in a canister, though smaller and with one of those annoying plastic dispensers on top where you spin the lid to create different openings.

For the month of November, I will be participating in NaBloPoMo and plan to publish every day of the month. Usually, I will publish a 10-minute free write, initiated by a prompt from my prompt box. Minimal editing. No story. Just thoughts spilling onto the page. Follow along with the tag #NovemberDaily.
Morning was quiet. And then it was not.

November 1st, 2015

It is 6:30 AM. It used to be that our house was silent this time of day. I’d get up and write while everyone else slept. I’d make coffee. Listen to the house creak. Listen to my pen scratch across the page in the quiet.

Now, our son, my husband, and myself are all up at 6 AM. We bump into each other in the kitchen while our son sleepwalks through toasting his waffles and packing his lunch, while I try to unload the dishwasher and make coffee, while my husband makes his tea and pours his cereal. Instead of silence I hear silverware clanking, toaster beeping, kettle whistling, refrigerator squeaking, our son singing to the kittens, the kittens meowing, and the trample of kitten feet as they race down the hardwood hall and slam into walls.

6 AM is not a quiet time anymore. Today I sat down in our cozy living room chair to write, but with all the activity, I knew I’d not be able to concentrate.

For the first time since me moved into our new house, for the first time since I painted my key lime ~~studio~~ office, I am writing in a room of my own. Until today, the café table in my office served as a horizontal surface for accumulating detritis: cords, keyboards, headphones, ipod, bills that need to be paid.

Today I cleared it.

I sit now at my clean, round table. I hear the hum of the basement dehumidifier, the muted sounds of chairs scraping upstairs, the rattle of the spring in my pen. On my table are a Krispy Kreme candle, a book of matches, a cup of ice water, my prompt box, timer, and composition book, and my wrist as it swiffs across paper and smooth red wood.

For the month of November, I will be participating in NaBloPoMo and plan to publish every day of the month. Usually, I will publish a 10-minute free write, initiated by a prompt from my prompt box. Minimal editing. No story. Just thoughts spilling onto the page. Follow along with the tag #NovemberDaily.
Firewood

September 1st, 2015
It’s that time of year. Time to scope the outside of the house. Find a flat area to build a stand. Time to poke around, asking for whispered tips on whose is best-seasoned — I’ve heard folks are secretive about sources around here.

It’s time to think about firewood.

When we moved from Florida to Minnesota, I made a wish board for everything I wanted to find in a home. On the board, I wrote things like walking distance to the kids’ school, safe neighborhood, a place for a garden, and the thing I wanted most? A fireplace. The house we found had all of those things.

I loved our fireplace. Each fall we bought half a cord of wood. We stacked it under an eave, on a red brick patio, up against the house next to the kitchen door. The eave mostly protected it from getting buried by snow, and in winter I’d build fires in the afternoon when the kids came home from school. We’d drink hot cocoa and listen to wood pop, and we’d pull the bean bag next to the hearth and we’d read books and play Sorry!

I can’t wait to do that again. When we first moved to Virginia, we lived in a townhouse without a fireplace. In fall and winter, on my walks and runs through the hills, I’d smell chimney smoke in the cold air. I’d watch white puffs rise from the valley. I could smell the wood burning, and I imagined rocking chairs, blanket wrapped laps, quiet broken only by snapping, popping, and the soft turning of a novel’s pages. I ached for a fireplace every time I smelled chimney smoke. When it came time to buy a house, due to timing, pricing, and the small size of our town, our options were very limited. I feared we would not find a house with a fireplace.

But we did. And last night, as we worked on our September budget, I was thrilled to add in:
- Fireplace stand
- Fireplace tools
- Firewood
I can’t wait for our first fire.

Photo credit: Ben Dwyer of scruffian.com. Full image available here.
Library

August 25th, 2015

I suppose I should write about warm wooden tables and dark interiors, walls lined with heavy shelves that stretch from floor to ceiling, cozy nooks to hide and read in, quiet, peace, the endless options for learning or for escaping into a fictitious world.

I do love all those things about libraries. These new modern libraries with shiny white walls, giant atriums, minimalist archictecture and bright Ikea-inspired decor — they don’t speak to me. They don’t make me want to stay and cozy up. They feel cold and sterile, and they are noisy. I want warmth and muffled sound from a library.

But that’s not really what I want to write about. Library means something different to me now. Library doesn’t mean a place I drive to so that I can browse and check out books. Library means the suite of books stored on my nook. It means lightweight, easy to hold, no-car-needed access to any literature I could ever want. It means instant gratification when I finish a book and don’t yet have another. It means nonfiction during the day and fiction at night, without having to carry more than one book. It means I can carry Lonesome Dove and Gone With the Wind, and Pillars of the Earth, and they weigh ounces instead of pounds. It means readable without having to turn a light on, so I can read in bed without keeping my husband up.

To me, library now means portable. Library means the collection of books I carry in my purse.

Thank you to sapel2013 for the prompt “library.”

Category: Ten Minute Free Writes

Ice

The tension between sentences

Salt

Morning was quiet. And then it was not.

Firewood

Library