Pictures of dead dogs...

I am writing, again. Which may surprise you as it appears to be what I do here. But this is different, it is fiction, it is from my imagination rather than my observation, and it is hard to do, most of the time. Except it isn't, this time. Strange, I admit. My Low Fat Fiction course has taken off and taken effect. How gratifying. My first three terribly short (300 words or less) stories got turned in last night, and I chose one to read aloud in class workshop, an autobiographical, sentimental piece (although they don't know that, and I will never tell) from my childhood. Now, my childhood was spent with people who had hair-trigger tempers and definite ideas about who I should be every moment of every day, so there was bound to be undercurrents of that angst, though I wrote the piece from the totally objective viewpoint, though in first person. Some of what I did was deliberate. Most just kind of flowed out. All but one sentence of the piece survived to the final draft, an expositional, and unnecessary sentence about childhood dreams unrealized and outgrown, a sentence that dragged the whole piece down with it. And they all got it! In fact, they got even more than I wrote, like the narrator would not do the same thing to her daughter as her mother had done to her, a totally true statement. And my teacher said "Wow"! How sweet is that! If you are wondering about the title of this entry, well, that's a thought for my next piece I am currently mulling in my seemingly fertile cerebral cortex. I actually got to that place I needed to visit to write, that "no mind" mind, where memories and observations live but do not reign. I can get there when I paint, for sure, and my work is best when I am not thinking about it. My writing is, too.