“If you must use your cellphone, kindly use conversive tones.”

Day Two of The MayDayChallenge finds us visiting the baristas at The Raindrop Cafe, who got something to tell us:

• fair trade, shade grown
• fair trade shade grown
  roasted 3 blocks from your home
  shipped in sacks from africa
  hispanic lands and sumatra
  each cup is crafted expertly
  all our milk is hormone free
  or if you dont take to dairy
  we also offer milk from beans
• fair trade, shade grown
  & for your dog a biscuit bone
  our flavored syrups ultra pure
  evaporated cane sugar
  and if you’d like a pastry
  we buy ours from french bakeries
  except for these delicious pies
  they’re made by this one bearded guy
• fair trade, shade grown
  our cafe, your second home
  and if you must use your cell phone
  kindly use conversive tones
  we offer high speed internet
  (don’t use it for your bit torrent)
  yes we compost & recycle
  as marked on these receptacles
• fair trade, shade grown
  succulent, velvety foam
  we’ll top your late with a heart
  of if you like some abstract art
  we’re here before the sun is up
  especially to fill your cup
  and if you’d prefer the decaf
  we promise you we will not laugh…

This is a part of my Over The Top Non-Stop Stop Action Non-Toxic Sock Poppet Rock Opera.

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More Writing Shop-talk (boring warning!)

Here are a few words that are on my rewriting “watch list”, which I try to minimize / synonymize in each successive draft:

• Look
• Just
• That
• So, very, really
• Something
• Said
• Walk
• Actually
• Suddenly

These words (especially just) are used often in casual conversation, so they just tend to slip in when one is first ‘telling’ the story.

But writing, imho, should actually be a grade above the casual. Also, I’ve seen a lot of first drafts where writers use double modifiers on the subject, I.E.:

The stairwell sent him quick, dark echoes…

It’s a matter of taste, but I think that the second of the two modifiers should always be an uncommon word, or else the prose comes off as really, very predictable, or something.

Most importantly: while editing, concentrate on the tone and rhythm of the narrative itself, and let all the rules and such attend to it like servants.

If all we did as artists was follow rules, then this game would have long ago been over.

we are storytellers first, and writers by way of revision

Why I am Not Not a Christian

My first spiritual experience was most likely my conception, or “benception” as my mom calls it (I am kidding, my mother is not too hot on puns) — but as that moment of happenstance-laden and conjugal-sanctioned becoming is about as far removed from my conscious recollection as the goings-on in our Sun, I will move past that, and also past the childhood experiences which are neither completely accidental nor intentional in their selectivity — moving forward to my tenth year, where at a week-long Bible Camp hosted at the college where my parents met I was taken up — all 95(approx.) pounds of me — in a charismatic flowering of my heart.

The chapel in which I found myself on that warm Monterey evening was dark and filled with praise music. I’m not sure what triggered the sudden flood of emotion that came over me. It was something about God’s love for us. How amazing and awesome it is. But as the tears came, followed by strange movements of my tongue, I knew with certainty that God is real. This had nothing to do with belief or anything I had been told. It was a pure and powerful experience of a vibration that was beneficent and all-encompassing. When my parents swung by to pick me up the next day, I told dad that I spoke in tongues. He (jokingly) asked for a demonstration. That was one of those rare instances where I failed to find something funny. I shook my head. You can’t tell the Spirit when to come or where to go…

There was a couple more incidences that year or the next where I was able to know things that were marginally unknowable. Our church had lost its pastor, and after waiting several months for the right fit, a man with the correct qualifications came through, and the congregation voted on him, and I started bawling and bawling because he wasn’t right. Over the next couple of years that man dismantled the fellowship. Things like that—that can only be verified by retrospect—that have no true ‘gain’ to them, in the material sense… what is call Insight, is what I think I had a line on for a year or two, back then.

But then came the coarse hair and the itching drives of puberty. The hormonal crush of anxiety, self-consciousness and icky, icky change. That swallowed up my insight, obscured it with a dorky sense of humor and the need to cuss when out of earshot of my parents and pastors. Over my high school years I was very involved in my church’s youth group. I loved being in church—not the services necessarily, but the building itself felt like home to me. It’s odd that I keep finding myself working in them, though I haven’t been a congregant for a teenager’s lifespan, now.

What People Want from Art

personality > emotion > humor > honesty > originality