Words I Know After 30

It was a day that started like most other days in the small home of one stern not-quite miller, one ghostly knitter, and one young bicycle pedaler. There was flavorless stew from the night before and, on this particular morning, there were even a couple of eggs. The mother boiled water for the last bit of dry coffee grounds in the small tin above the ice box. The coffee was not good. It was yet another of the flavorless, water-based dishes in the mother's repertoire, but it was coffee and there was at least some magic in that. The father scowled at a story he was reading in the morning paper and grumbled something distasteful about politicians and the state of the economy. In truth, the father could only actually read about half of the words on the page having received an education only through the 3rd grade and, of that half, only comprehended an even smaller percentage. The young pedaler saw that the paper was something his father put on, like a costume. He had already noticed ...

Tommy Minker was a bull-headed little brat full of freckles and spite. He had red hair that was constantly kept in a buzz cut and stood 6 inches taller than every other boy at the Harold Meeps primary school. H.M.P.S. went all the way to the 8th grade and Tommy was only in the 6th grade and still outclassed all the older boys. He liked to kick frogs and throw bricks through windows. He would have been the type to burn ants with a magnifying glass but he didn't have the patience for such things. He was violent in an abrupt way, grabbing other kids on the sidewalk to whoop them and take their money or bash their heads into their lockers in the hallway and take their money or hit them with a bat and take their money. He had even put a good whooping on the principal of dear old H.M.P.S. one time when he had been called to the office for a taste of the cane for one of his earlier acts of violence. He was in the 3rd grade at that point. No one talked about it openly but it had quickly be...

The driver had been precocious as a child. A lot of auspicious characters start out as such, but he had also been very talkative. His hair had flown off his head in unintentional dusty blonde wisps back then. His eyes were not as keen as they would become but the beginnings were certainly apparent. He looked for detail in everything, wanted to know how everything worked. And that was just the thing, the how of it. He was probably the only child who has ever existed who never asked "why?" of anything he encountered. "Why" never even crossed his mind, as though he had been born into an innate understanding of the great mystery. Or perhaps motive was simply less interesting to him than the action and mechanics of things. He was smaller than other children his age and he was bullied, as were all of the smart ones. He never once wondered why the other boys treated him in such a way. He merely observed how they did it and adjusted. The Tommy Minker incident was the pinn...

I try to write fiction and I just sputter and quit. I don't know what it is about fiction that hangs me up. I mean, I love making up stories but I feel like I grew up writing songs where you have to get right to the meat of the thing and avoid extra words. Not that I think fiction requires extra words in the sense of extraneous words, but I certainly enjoy thorough, descriptive passages about a place or person in the story. It boggles my mind how someone becomes proficient at fiction. If I'm really honest I guess any kind of storytelling writing really sort of goes over my head. The way a good writer can hold you in the palm of their hand with words on a page. That is impressive. This blog post was actually supposed to be a foray into a character sketch but I gave up about 3 paragraphs in because I started trying to make it a story. There's my problem, I think. I sat out to do a character sketch and tried to force it into a story. Maybe I could just tell you about the dri...

Here starts another blog. The internet has more information than the world will ever know what to do with and I'm starting another blog. I think I'd like to sit down and write just for fun for half an hour every day, says I. I will believe in myself this time and it will be different. I feel like other blogs I've written have been untrue in some way because I've never really known how to write or say things simply. This blog, therefore, should be an attempt to say as much with as few words as possible.  Don't worry, I won't start today. Today is the first day and that makes it special. I started my first journal when I was 10 and wrote in it by hand before I had even learned cursive. I burned that journal somewhere in my mid-twenties when my then-girlfriend got hold of it and saw that I had written about other girls before I met her. She flipped out and I burned my journal thinking that was a solution. I was an idiot. And she was a bitch. I wonder if she...