Fiction for Dessert

A smooth flowing story, with crunchy word topping, please!

“Read for an hour, and you can have dessert.” Are you kidding? Reading is dessert.

For a while, when I was little, my parents gave me a choice of punishments: “Go to your room and think about it, or take a spanking and go back outside to play.” Well, don’t throw me in that briar patch…

It didn’t take them long to catch on that solitary confinement, to an introverted child with an overactive imagination and well-stocked bookshelves is no punishment at all.

I once confessed to my mom that one of my greatest joys was surreptitious reading, under the covers, with a flashlight, after bedtime. She confessed to me: “I know. I made sure your flashlight always had fresh batteries.”

Excuses, Excuses!

What happened to that child, who found such joy in reading, telling, and writing stories?

Life. Apparently, I’m not alone. Despite 4 out of 5 adults being at least functionally literate, only 72% of U.S. adults have read a single book in the past year. And that’s not necessarily a book they read just for the pleasure of it.

For me, “life” included work, law school, having babies…these things can’t wait.

Technical writing. It paid the bills, much better than fiction ever would, for all but the luckiest of “bestselling” authors. And I like my creature comforts. I didn’t hate having a steady job, benefits, health insurance, 401K matching contributions — the promise that one day, I might be able to retire. So fiction took a back burner to a career spent doing other things. Happily, those things involved writing. Just not fiction.

Ironically, all my earliest report cards contained phrases like, “Doesn’t pay attention, doesn’t follow directions!” And I swore, while majoring in “Rhetoric & Writing” at the university, that I would be a great and famous novelist, one day.

“Why not go into computers?” my dad suggested. “Language and music majors have the skills to pick up programming easily. Logic, syntax — programming is just another language. You could do well, make a lot of money.”

“No, Dad, computers are boring,” I whined. They were all about number-crunching, and numbers gave me brain freeze. “I want to do something creative.” Nearly a decade later, I was writing and coding for online, text-based role-playing games. Not too long after that, I landed a job at Compaq, writing directions for other people to follow. Take that, third-grade teachers!

Law school, with assignments that usually involved thirty to sixty pages of reading — every night — after a long day at work. The reading was fascinating, giving me intriguing insights into human nature, creative problem solving, and finding or inventing loopholes. But it wasn’t fiction, and it wasn’t reading for the pure pleasure of it. It was exhausting.

Family. Motherhood — good lord, bringing actual human beings into the world — is a far more rewarding and important “creative work” than writing a novel will ever be. Writing children’s books for them? That was fun. It’s not for everyone, but I love being a mom, and now, a grandmother. If I never wrote again, I wouldn’t trade a minute of it.

Retirement. Ahh, finally — the kids have flown the nest, self-sufficient and with lives of their own. They’ll be relieved to know that mom and dad have interests beyond controlling their every move. Retirement — time to travel! Time to write! Time to learn new skills, like oil painting and gardening!

Pandemic.

You’d think a pandemic would give me plenty to write about, wouldn’t you? Apocalyptic fiction, here I come! But no — I sit on the back porch, sullenly wondering why my garden gnome pretends to be made of worn ceramic and refuses to tell me his stories. I don’t want to write about bar-hopping zombies who are such “independent thinkers” they refuse to wear masks to cover their fetid breath. I just don’t. It’s too depressing.

I want sweet, sticky, richly layered dessert. I want to return to reading as an escape from a punishing reality. But nothing suits my mood, so I stare at the blank page and will words to appear on it. If I could choose a superpower, I think, it would be to will the words onto the page — just like drops of blood from a mosquito bite if you squeeze hard enough.

I want to write a fun romp through a better world I create in my head, and then I want to share it with other people. I just hope the zombies down the street will give me enough time to write it.

Long naps. This is the imagination’s lazy way out: even nightmares are a cinematic adventure — passive entertainment, cooked up for free by your own brain! Too bad they fade and pop like the smoke curls from a dying campfire, just seconds after you find the pen and turn on the bedside lamp.

Procrastination. At least the office is clean, the “art room” is shaping up, the garden is lovely, Face is booked, the twits are all a-Twitter…

A possibly broken finger — would you believe I tripped over the bathroom scale and caught my balance on the (thank God for small mercies — closed) lid of the toilet, and sprained my finger? It’s not bad enough to be non-functional, so I assumed it was just a sprain. A month later, though, and the letters O, P, and the punctuation marks “.”, and “>” are my sworn enemies. L is not exactly my friend, but we’ve declared a truce so long as I don’t smack it in the face. Of course, it would be my right hand. I slept with it in a little finger splint, last night, and slept quite soundly. Off, it’s like having a persistent, chronic headache in my hand. I should rest it.

I’m not going to rest it.

Enough idle navel-gazing and wishful thinking. Time to write, in earnest. Sometimes, the hardest part is simply to start, and to string one word on, after another, like cranberries and popcorn for the Christmas tree.

Yesterday, J.A. Taylor graciously invited me to submit something to

or

It turns out that what I needed most wasn’t a writing prompt, but an assignment or a deadline. And the 500-word limit is a good exercise, as is poetry, for forcing a writer to focus on the words that count and move the story forward. I hope that you enjoy:

It was also a fantastic refresher exercise in following submissions guidelines. Jim has set forth some of the clearest, most consistent, and succinct guidelines I’ve found on Medium, and he enforces “house style” with grace, diplomacy, and an iron fist. I was happy to defer to the minor suggestions he made, in order to comply.

Self-publishing is fun and feels empowering for about five minutes, but it plays hell on discipline and professionalism — something every writer needs, even if only to satisfy their own inner critic, at some point.

And now, for a little break — some reading I’ve enjoyed after getting a little story out of my system, and before cranking out another for a contest I plan to enter.

Ann K Frailey shows us the sort of epiphany it takes before we can really love others the way they need to be loved.

Oh, dear Lord, I loved this story — Taylor Carr had me on the edge of my seat with a character in Sam that I could (obviously!) relate to, and a story so full of tiny twists and turns she had me sure he was going to break his noggin, but noooo:

Maïa Belart has a gnome in her garden. What a fun friend she’s made!

I have a gnome in my garden, too. Just don’t call him “cute.” And lock up the fireworks.

Now, time for a stretch, some ice for the finger, and the crafting of a contest entry!