Tag: fiction

Sometimes, all I need is the air that I breathe…

~ Meg ~ 36 Comments

Inspire:  breathe in

Inspire:  fill someone with the urge or ability to do or feel something, especially to do something creative

Writers look for inspiration everywhere.  In some of my previous posts I’ve mentioned finding inspiration in music, in art, and in my own personal life experiences.  Having your senses stimulated this way, often fires your creative process.  There’s another way, though…

Like the rest of you, my life is busy and my mind can be a very noisy and messy place.  It can get to the point where it feels like I can’t catch my breath.  Maybe even like I’m under water.  When that happens, it’s time to take a break and find some quiet time.  For me, that means getting outside, no matter the weather.  Walking the country roads past the crumbling old walls that line the pastures, I let my mind wander.  There’s a fallen down barn on the dirt road about a mile away.  The red-tailed hawks perch on the half-rotted beams and watch for field mice and rabbits in the tall grass.  The wind sighing, the birds singing, the chatter of the squirrels is the only music to my ears.  Cross the creek, rushing with last night’s rain.  The smell of damp leaves, the early spring mud, all loamy and decayed.

Breathe it in deeply.  Inspire…

Maybe you live in the city and can’t get out into nature that easily.   Go out and walk the sidewalks, enjoy the sunshine, the hum of traffic, the jostle of people hurrying to their destinations.  Spend an hour, if you have it, without your phone.  Ignore the texts, e-mails and alerts for a while.  They’ll be there when you get back.  Find a park, sprawl on a bench, listen to the buzz of conversations going on around you, the laughter of children playing.  Let it be like white noise, vague and mesmerizing.

Inspire…

Now go home and write something beautiful.

The Chess Game

~ Meg ~ 52 Comments

A ten sentence short story… I also think this one should be expanded before adding it to the collection. Some history between these old friends… 

Every day Abraham Stein set up the chess board in the park. The game was always in progress, but Abraham never accepted offers to play. Every day he sat for an hour, staring at the board, not making a move. At the end of the hour, he would slide all the chess pieces back into the box, fold the board and walk the five blocks back to his apartment at Temple Beth Israel Retirement Home.

The ladies of Temple Beth Israel wondered about Abraham Stein, trying always to dissuade Abraham from his routine. As he walked each day to his appointment in the park, he would shoo them away with a wave of his hand.

One day, after some weeks had gone by, a man in a wheelchair was wheeled by his nurse to the place opposite Abraham in the park. Abraham smiled, without looking up from the board and said, “It’s about time you showed up.”

Saul Rosenberg snorted and said, “I missed you, too, you old meshuggener.”

Abraham pointed to the board and said, “It’s your move.”

“They want me to NaNoWriMo… I say, no, no, no.”

~ Meg ~ 13 Comments

Today, being the first day of November, is also day one of National Novel Writing Month. For the last several weeks, my email box has been filling with correspondence from the local Bucks County NaNo group, the national organization and other assorted promotional advertisers for the event. I’m not buying into the hype this year.

Last year, I participated in order to kick start the fifth book in my novel series. I’d written a few hundred words, had the basic plot outlined but hadn’t made any progress beyond that in months. I managed to come close to the 50,000 word goal by the end of November but the story was far from finished. In fact, here I am one year later, still working on it. It never took me this long to publish the previous four books. So much for NaNoWriMo.

Nevertheless, I am going to use the month as a deadline for the revising and editing of the book. I am giving myself 30 days to make the changes to the story, proof the grammar and dialogue, read aloud for awkward sentence structure and double check for timeline inconsistencies. Then it goes to my editor for final approval before loading to Amazon and CreatSpace for publishing, hopefully before the holiday season.

That clears my desk for 2017. Bring on the new year and a new start to another novel! Brace yourselves for more WWI history posts.

By the way, the first of November and it’s still green in Bucks County… Weird.