the fur snake

living in a house with another writer means you have to negotiate what is real from what is real with a twist. my girlfriend layce gardner is a very talented, very funny writer. she has the same quirk chromosome that i do. sometimes we have to negotiate on who gets to "use that" as we call it when something oddly entertaining occurs–a quirk moment that the universe has seen fit to bestow upon us. the "fur snake" moment came when a family fable was created about a creature i had seen hanging around the garden. layce and em started telling me about the oklahoma snake that was  large and dangerous and as the story continued the snake ended up having fur. the fur part finally tipped me off. so now when a real story goes real with a twist i ask, "is this like the fur snake?" which is code for it should have gone this way and isn't it more amusing? and yes it is. it's the kind of thing writers do all the time. we take what we see and turn in into something just a little better than real. a distilled moment noted and mulled over and then tweaked. some of the time it's an instant revamp. other times it foments. when those two things come together it becomes a novel.