C.B. Potts's Blog, page 14

Friday Morning: Writing Prompt Exercise

The cats are acting strangely. Not ours; the outside ones. Four of them have appeared in the last week or so. One black, two gray tabbies, a big sleek orange Tom, striped and naive-faced. Their paths cross as they travel through our yard. They pay each other no mind. Each has their own agenda.

One of the grays is big and shaggy. He is ruffed, like a lion. In the evening, he goes down, alongside the curb until he's near the culvert pipe. There are frogs there, big, fat, juicy and delicious....

Thursday Morning - Writing Prompt Exercise

Working to Protect American Agricultural Security. This is the postcard my daughter brought home from Career Day. It is very retro; the illustrations, I suspect, came off a Farm Journal cover published slightly before my Mother was born. There are two pears, perfect, unblemished - if I were an agricultural security specialist, I would be suspicious of these pears. Pears that are good aren't really good looking.

The sixth word on the back of the postcard - where the copy spells out the exci...

Wednesday Morning - Writing Prompt Exercise

Remy was my first marketing teacher. He sold bibles, torahs,korans and religious commentaries from a blue tarp he set up next to the Farmer's Market. Sometimes he had a folding table to display his inventory; sometimes he didn't bother. All those books would be spread out on the tarp, end to end - holy caterpillars, sacred words crawling over the ground.

Nothing was priced. When a shopper stopped, they'd look at the offerings. Then they'd look at Remy, hard, and then at the boo...

Tuesday Morning - Writing Prompt Exercise

When Aaron had suggested the city beach, May had shaken her head. "You don't want to go there. Too many people." Instead, she'd taken him north of town, into a wood where the trees grew thick and tangled, branches linked into fences, roots knotted over the ground. They climbed up, up, up, scrambling where the ground was muddy and slick, faster when it was rocky.

Just as Aaron was beginning to doubt the wisdom of this entire enterprise, they reached the top. He could see the l...

GROUP PROJECT

Hey, I need some writing prompts. I want to focus on my descriptive skills over the next week or so. Can you, in the comments, share something you'd like me to write about?

They'll all be screened, and will stay screened, so you can ask for whatever you want without pressure. I can describe things from my own observations or I can just make stuff up - either way I want to stretch out a little bit and play. I need this week to be a positive place for me emotionally, so let's not del...

Monday Morning

Yesterday I was outside a good long time. The asparagus bed is weeded, part of the lawn got mowed, I finished reading le Carre's Honorable Schoolboy. The sun was hot and wonderful. There was a time when I sat on our little bridge, just watching the horizon over the swamp. Every now and then a bird would swoop through, beak stuffed; some are building nests; others, it seems, have hungry to feed. All the birds were black; the sky a diminishing blue. Columns of clouds stood up; fat, white, p...

Eliot Rodgers Didn't Suprise Me. I Wish the Reaction of Many 'Good Men' to Eliot Rodgers Did

The world is full of men like Eliot Rodgers; it always has been. The community building aspects of the internet can be used for good or evil; MRA groups are evil. They've done a tricky thing by taking legitimate concerns - family law/custody situations, for example, where it is often assumed the mother would be the better parent in absence of any evidence to support that - and using them as defense when anyone complains about things like the rhetoric that women shouldn't have the vote...

Thursday Morning

I like dandelions. Not a lot of people do. Wars are fought against this little flower. They're spaded out of the ground, dosed with poison, mowed and mowed and mowed again. I'm not sure why the fury is: the blooms are bright and cheerful; the greens edible if sour; they're hardy as hell. Dandelions are the botanical embodiment of inevitability. No matter what, they will endure.

Perhaps that is what the problem is. It can be uncomfortable to face up to the fact that there are wills...

Wednesday Morning

There was a mouse in the bathtub this morning. He was very wee - no more than an inch and a half long. Clearly shell-shocked too: I don't think he got into the bathtub under his own initiative. Voodoo probably chased him there. She's our best mouser, and I'd thought I'd heard some thuds just before dawn that were probably associated with her stowing him in the tub for later play. It didn't take much to persuade him into a box and outdoors. From there, I must admit his chan...

Monday Morning

Over the years, I've made some gloriously stupid banking errors. I mean great big, 'can't you do math?' sort of things. And this morning, when I sat down and looked at the account, because cars suck sometimes, I discover that I have done it again - except that this time, the mistake is actually in our favor, to the tune of several hundred dollars. I'd been holding back a lot of cash waiting for a charge to clear, but it turns out the charge actually cleared more than a wee...