I just submitted a flash fiction piece, Barcodes on his Feet, to UK publication Mslexia. I’m not sure when I’m meant to find out. But it’s another piece out there in the world 🙂
To borrow Ms Yardley’s method:
Pieces out: 3
Goal: 5
Due kudos should be given to Globalwrite, for this article.
It inspired me today, forced me into a bit of introspection…
I’m a student who cannot study. I jot little ideas, tiny one liners that are intended to take full form somewhere in the body of an essay. By the time I return to these ideas they’re flaccid.
I’m a lazy person who can’t sleep. Every bump in the night is an intruder. My lover stops breathing so I watch him just to make sure. There’s a coo-ing and a scratching coming from the ceiling-chickens. Rest just isn’t an option.
I’m a writer who never writes. I have my five-word truisms scribbled somewhere for safekeeping. My one-line journals, which take shape over a day and are never as whitty on re-visiting. My blog, which seems to be a string of the same post over and over…and over.
I’m a person who can’t think. I can’t, therefore I…?
Dan Brown sits comfortably in a window, piled on top of himself, overflowing. Big red stickers – REDUCED – he’s playing the part of ‘bait’ today. I don’t want his book, but it catches my eye and pisses me off so that I go into the damn bookshop for something that is not Dan Brown.
Dancing man at Kew Junction – waving and bucking around. Nanna crosses the road and smiles. Red Toyota passes and toots. People sit in the Kew Hotel and look at him through their half-empty beer.
Pidgeons scratch around my ceiling. They’ve invaded my balcony, and then my space. I can’t be around their scratching, my brain has no room for it.
Man lays in bed, sometimes I think he’s stopped breathing and I panic. We’re ships in the night, I haven’t seen the real him in weeks. I’ve only seen this ghost, this shadow. This hologram version of himself who speaks a language I can’t understand.
I’m surrounded by empty beer bottles and homework.
If only writer’s block worked like tetris, where the blocks fall on top of and into each other and eventually disappear.
Truth be told, I hate writing. I hate the torture it puts me through – I get half way through a story or poem and it follows me around. It’s a haunting shadow that trails after me.
“What if… maybe he could… and then she could say… show, don’t tell…”
What I love is a finished piece. My little piece of the world pinned to a page. A screen.
I’m currently working hard to manouvre my blocks into place, in the hope that it does work like tetris, in the hope that enough of my trying eventually just ends in it all disappearing, and I win the game. I write something of value and meaning.
Sam van Zweden 