. Spinning .

I like the new GEICO commercial, where the little kid gets hung up in the basketball hoop. It’s an irony that will go over the heads of many who will chuckle perhaps, completely missing the heavier story that underlies it.

The young couple stands in front of a nice suburban home, and tell us something to the effect that their 401k wasn’t going to be enough to send their 5 year-old son through college, so they “taught him to dunk.” In the background, the little boy slam-dunks a basket and hangs there. “Scholarship!” the mother proudly beams.

And while everyone watches and giggles, no one realizes the import of not the advertised message-a GEICO savings plan–but of the ease with which one can get access to an education by learning to bounce a ball. Easier than saving money or earning a scholarship based on intelligence and knowledge. Yep, college ain’t for smarties. College is for those who can play games.

While I’m taking part in another summer’s 100 Days Project, I’ve really been writing a story a day since January 1st and have passed the halfway mark a few days ago. Everything that started here was transferred to the Talespinning site at the end of May.

Several changes have occurred in the process. Starting out, I wrote a story as influenced by Carianne Mack Garside’s artwork. Her own commitment to produce a piece daily was affected by her baby’s growth and curiosity and resulting need for extra attention so I continued on my own. Inspiration came out of thin air. When the 100 Days Project came up at the end of May, I decided to once more hook up with the group, and so it goes. Even with this project, we’ll be hitting another halfway mark of 50 days of daily work this weekend.

It’s amazing how many ideas and storylines a writer can find, either spurred by the creativity of others or just by life itself. Someone made a comment on one of my stories to the effect that he found it surprising that I could develop some many different characters, a new one each day. I laughed and responded that perhaps it is the writer’s version of multiple personality disorder.

Meanwhile, because I have been reading the other participant’s work, as well as those of fellow writers on Fictionaut and new literary publications as they come out, I haven’t kept up on my novel reading, nor my hypertext and new media learnings (last posting at Hypercompendia was on the Morpheus software!) so these two weblogs have been sort of stagnant for a while except when something interesting (at least to me!) happens and I’ll post to the Reality category.

Gardening, framing, reading, and writing; this will be my summer.

Thought I’d outgrown naivete. Thought wisdom and patience had been acquired. Didn’t believe I could still be surprised.

While attempting to convert from COBRA coverage to an individual health insurance policy, I called to get a quote. $6000 a month, the girl said. I was outraged, even found it amusing before I figured yeah, she’s made a mistake. So I called back the next morning and spoke with someone else who quoted me, yes, $6000 a month.

I laughed. No, really. I asked her, “Weren’t you afraid to get back on the phone and tell me this?” She said it did seem a bit high. Plus, the coverage wasn’t as good as what we had and had a higher deductible. “That’s $72,000 a year,” I said. “Do you make $72,000 a year? And would you pay that for insurance?” which to me, is like “protection” money, not even a guaranteed service (in that it may not be used, as The Company truly hopes and prays).

All set to armor up and swing a magic sword of self-righteousness, I wondered why my husband didn’t seem surprised. Nor, aside from a few, many others. Then it dawned on me: While CIGNA is required by contract and law to not discriminate against me and my spouse by refusing coverage, it’s well within their methods to simply quote some exorbitant price tag. This, folks, is what I didn’t think they were capable of doing, even as I raged against the fee. Though of course, the laws being the laws, loopholes for worms are always included. They can pass a thousand-page bill that besides guidelines and earmarks and all kinds of goodies thrown in, don’t actually solve the problems at all.

There are other options, but I really should have started digging into this six months ago, not realizing quite how complicated it all gets. Group insurance to group insurance is one thing, but if you go to an individual policy, then try to get into a group, the HIPAA doesn’t cover you and you can be discriminated against legally for existing conditions.

Somehow, I’m not thrilled with paying taxes that will pay insurance for others, while I myself may need to do without.

And now, with a new perception of myself as less than Joan d’Arc taking on injustice, I find I must do further battle with the powers of government. Our property tax bill on a 33 year-old car went up 350% because of a new valuation.

You know, we’re all hurting, but somehow, I just wouldn’t think of screwing somebody else so they can hurt too and believe it would make me feel better.

And the garbage pickup isn’t worth it.

I believe I’ll be moving on to the Insurance industry.

Okay, so the new official garbage can was delivered within an hour of the pickup of the old by our regular drivers for twenty years (Hi guys!). Here it is:

It’s the Big Green Monster in the middle. On the right is Old Faithful, our dedicated garbage container for all these many years. Though garbage pickup is every Tuesday, there are times when I let it go for two weeks because it’s not full. It’s practically never more than half full on a weekly basis. (I don’t waste food or anything else.) Upon occasion I have a black plastic trash bag from the shop, maybe once a month. The small pails to the left? They’re our recycling buckets. I fill one up once a month; they pickup every other week. This will be replaced by a receptacle the same size as the new trash container, only it’ll be blue.

It’s true I’m resistive to change until I’m convinced it’s for the best. This move was touted as being the best, and I’m sure in many ways, for many residents it is. I don’t see how my elderly-with-bad-knees neighbor is going to get this thing down to the curb. I also don’t believe that one of the reasons was to enhance the beauty of the town but suspect that like much else, it was to level the field, to make us all the same, which is too close to those futuristic movies and TV shows I watched as a child.

And what about jobs? These will be picked up via a mechanical arm. That’s why they have to all be consistent. Meaning one guy per truck loses his job.

Enough about me; I’m waiting to see what my husband says when he can’t get the car into the garage.

Nothing like seeing all the little sprouts stick their heads out and make you feel like Mother Nature herself:

With the amount of short story reading and writing I’ve done over the past couple years, I think I’ve detected some patterns in the new trends of what’s relative in contemporary writing.

There are audiences of all types, we all like different genres, styles, eras, etc. But as a writer wanting to be published in the current short story/flash market, it’s always necessary to keep up with the current trends. You can buck them, decide that nowhere among the many groups of literary journals does your work fit, or you can try to adapt your style by learning what’s currently “in.”

One thing I’ve noticed is that the market is more youth-oriented, and this is likely because many of the established print and online lit journals are affiliated with the MFA programs or at least the English Departments of universities. Then there is a whole group of students who graduated or are in the process thereof, who have found out how relatively easy and cheap it is to run a magazine online. Easy, that is, because most will command a group of volunteer readers. Cheap, because even a free blog can serve as an official venue.

What I’ve seen in many of the “younger” style of writing, the early twenty to twenty-eight or so group, is that there is still a lot of narcissism, or leftover angst. Stories are typically in the first person POV and about inner conflicts or sex. Lotsa sex, only it’s called fucking because that’s what you couldn’t write in high school.

There are still plenty of journals devoted to more story-oriented, more experienced writing styles that are geared toward the reader whose world includes a much broader spectrum of love, relationships, sex, friendship, troubles, jobs, world security, etc.

I suppose what I’m saying is that now, more than ever, it is imperative to READ any literary publications to which you plan to submit. Luckily, this doesn’t mean a yearly subscription to a thousand magazines. The online publications are pretty much free to the public to read. The print journals, for the most part, include a few sample stories that can be read online. This, I think, is all good news for the writer.

Today marks the one hundred fiftieth story I’ve written as part of my commitment to write daily since January 1st of this year. It also coincides with Day 10 of the 100 Day Project for this summer of 2011.

I’ll be taking down the pages here that mark the first 140 days of the 365/365, since all have been transferred into monthly posts at Talespinning to accommodate the 100 Days setup.

It’s quite a learning process, to find a story to write every day, to change narrative voice and writing style, to investigate techniques and language and genres. Some of these pieces have already been picked up and published elsewhere; most will never move beyond the pages of my weblog. There are those I feel really good having written, and those that even with the famous editorial eye, just aren’t pleasing even to their own “mother.”

Check out the 100 Days Project–there are so many fine artists and writers and crafters and photographers there that you’re sure to find something each day to make the summer special.

Think I’ve discovered a way to add a feed to each single page here, something I’ve sought for a couple of years.

The Pages feature works well for me most of the time. I have two separate weblogs for literature/reality and for new media and really didn’t feel the necessity of starting up yet another database for the writing. When I first started with Typepad back in 2003, I was starting all kinds of weblogs and then deleting them. The Pages feature here kept everything more organized it seemed and called for a lot less maintenance. The other good thing was that since many of the Pages were for original stories, I could protect them from both Google and outside reference since many literary journals insist on absolutely no form of publication acceptable, weblogs included, and Password Protect worked for me, allowing me to give out the password to those who requested it.

But a Feed could be useful in some ways and I’ll be looking into it soon.

I was going to tweet this, or put a brief comment on Facebook, since I use those for my random thoughts, but somehow I know that I’ll just invite argument when all I want to do is, well, lay down an idea. And, well, I seem to be in a crowd of one in my way of thinking.

The opening of the floodgates along the Mississippi in order to save New Orleans from more damage brings up ethical questions about who to save and who to let swim. It’s been brought up as a rich versus poor controversy, but everything lately is being laid at the feet of the rich versus poor as a point to blame. For me, it’s the individual versus the masses, or in this case, the lesser will be sacrificed for the majority of the populace.

And it all comes back to this: The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas (Ursula LeGuin).

Why don’t they just face the fact of life that New Orleans is in a bad place. Particularly if you believe in global warming, what’s the sense of rebuilding it over and over again–in the same place? Move it inland a bit, why don’t you? Yes, expensive, but it’d be a lot more secure and it wouldn’t be at the sacrifice of all those little towns along the river that wouldn’t be in peril if they just left the damn river alone. They’ve spent a lot of money building a flood gate system to protect New Orleans and I’ll betcha all of Louisiana, including those folks who are unfortunately at risk to lose their homes though they might’ve been wise enough to build far enough inland paid for that system with their tax dollars.

And for me, it all comes back to Omelas. When I read that story a few years back, I never knew how much it would explain my views on life. I’d've saved the child.

This morning I finally finished up the story to submit for non-fiction. It was one I had written as part of my last year’s participation in a fiction project. In the final editing for this submission, I tweaked language, fleshed it out, and changed the tense.

Yes, that’s about all I had to do to turn fiction into an honest non-fiction.

With the ruckus caused by James Frey’s A Million Tiny Pieces being passed off as reality, I find this amusing. The thing is, Frey knew the difference between right and wrong, real and made-up, since he’d done the opposite of what I’ve just done. He claimed his novel was his personal experience, and only switched it to non-fiction, memoir, when he couldn’t shop it successfully. In the Oprah interview on yesterday (and continuing today, I believe) he claims he wasn’t thinking at all about genre, was inspired to just sit down and write something totally different, and didn’t have the writing class experience behind him to guide his decisions. I call him a big fat liar.

But was I just as guilty when calling true events fiction? I don’t think so. It’s not a mortal sin anyway; perhaps venial and ten Hail Marys will clear the air.

The thing is, ALL fiction is truth. All must have some basis in fact, all must be born from an egg before it flies away on its own. You can’t write about aliens coming in from Mars on their spaceships and landing on Earth if you don’t know about planets, space travel, and flight. Then you’re freed from the constrictions of knowledge to color them green.

UPDATE: A link to an article on the truth of personal experience in flash fiction at Flash Fiction Chronicles by Thomas Kearnes.

About a month ago I was asked to submit a non-fiction piece by a great editor who kindly had published my work in the first issue of his magazine last year. I don’t write a lot of non-fiction. On the other hand, all fiction comes from experience of reality.

I don’t know if it’s the privacy factor, but I know that the things in my life that are most interesting are the ones that I’m not of the mind to own up to. Some of these events have been crayoned and restructured and found their way into any number of short stories I’ve written. I just can’t seem to open up quite that much knowing that people I know are reading it as truth if it’s labeled non-fiction. So I’ve been stuck here all month with ideas and no story.

Then it dawned on me that it didn’t have to be about me at all. I don’t even need to be in the story. With a deep sigh, I opened Pages and set up the font, typed my name and “Word Count:” on top and settled in to write.

Who and what would I write about? Again, the “non-fiction” designation prevents anything from being written that is without the knowledge or permission of the characters we’re dealing with in the story. Even without naming names, it’s a bit awkward to again find those stories that are different, fresh, new, and told honestly but sensitively.

Now that would be easier to do than to sift through my lifetime and people I’ve known to come up with the story that will be both real and entertaining in some way. Something moving, something to which others can relate, something funny or tragic, big or small. And still, I find my emotions creeping in and closing the door.

When artist Carianne Garside made the commitment to a piece of art every day for a year through 2011, I decided to match it with a piece of writing, fiction, essay, or poem. I’m always worried about quality when pushing for quantity, but there’s always time to go back and do the editing. The other problem is story, but what helped here was the art to inspire, much as word and phrase prompts were the flint in the 52/250 Project that’s just finished.

When Carianne found in mid-April that other things pulled for more of her attention and she took a hiatus (I believe she’ll be picking back up her routine, but instead for the 100 Days Project through the summer), I wondered if I could continue with no obvious source of ideas, no limited amount of something to focus and draw a story around.

It’s been difficult, and yet I’ve found other ways to come up with narrative. The old fashioned way; looking around, reading, noticing, seeing something that may not be obvious without a creative mind to look for it. The other good thing is the freedom of timeline. It was often tough to wait for a piece when I had time to write but without knowing what the piece would inspire (in 52/250, themes were listed weeks ahead). Being me, I was often out of mental energy when I got the base to build on. I’m a morning person and was better waiting until the next morning to conceive and write.

Better too, to take advantage of a flow, and I often find myself writing several stories at once when the dam’s open. That covers me for days when the muse is on vacation in Tahiti with no cell phone or internet connection. With the 100 Days and the 365/365, I didn’t have that option of starting a story until I saw what the inspiration piece would be.

So coming back to time, while I feel there are certain stories that are some of my best work ever and some have already been published, I’m not pleased with each and every day’s work and would never have left these stories without editing before moving on to the next. But as long as I use downtime to go back and edit, to reread each story or poem and rework those I’m not happy with, that’s an acceptable method of working for me right now.

One of the best articles I’ve read on the situation of college students not being proficient in English grammar. Kim Brooks, a professor and writer tells of her frustrations and her efforts into researching the problem.

Death to High School English

It appeared to me, as an older student returning to the college classroom that the curriculum was geared to the student’s abilities and that in general, the solution was to lower standards and make the learning “fun” to ensure that the students would take part, interact. I found this odd; all through my own elementary and secondary education I’d been expected to learn and raise my knowledge up to a level, and work hard to do it. It amazed me that my first English class at a community college that was required, despite my achievement on the placement test, was “Composition.” I thought I’d been done with that in eighth grade. Composition?

Screw fun in the classroom. If they don’t want to learn, they ‘ll flunk or require remedial studies until they learn how to learn. The offer to impart knowledge is generous; at the college level it’s worth gold.

The third quarterly issue of the fabulous 52/250 project has just been released and it’s another winner.

thirtynine is a selection of the best stories and poetry produced during thirteen weeks of work by an average weekly  group of between thirty to forty writers. The 52/250 Project was based on a different prompt each week that offers the winds of creative thoughts and stories to fly, unlimited by anything other than a 250-word restriction.

My own story Unspeakable is included in this anthology and I thank the excellent work of the editors, Michelle Elvy, Walter Bjorkman, and John Wentworth Chapin for once again producing an amazing collection.