“No writing is wasted. Did you know that sourdough from San Francisco is leavened partly by a bacteria called lactobacillus sanfrancisensis? It is native to the soil there, and does not do well elsewhere. But any kitchen can become an ecosystem. If you bake a lot, your kitchen will become a happy home to wild yeasts, and all your bread will taste better. Even a failed loaf is not wasted. Likewise, cheese makers wash the dairy floor with whey. Tomato gardeners compost with rotten tomatoes. No writing is wasted: the words you can’t put in your book can wash the floor, live in the soil, lurk around in the air. They will make the next words better.”
I set out to write a post about climate fiction or reading the geophysical landscape or talking plants, but instead I detoured to write a drabble. Because some days are just like that.
* * *
Help Wanted: Must Love Laser Sharks
The day dawned cold and dispirited. Nila gently set her coffee on the table to keep from screaming. Her mother had ejected her from The Lair exactly one year ago.
She scanned the classifieds out of habit. A new ad caught her eye:
Assistant needed. Must:
understand the intricacies of shark breeding;
be comfortable with most weaponry (prepare for mortal danger);
be skilled in fire management (including molten lava).
Salary negotiable; you keep what you kill.
Yes, please. Six months, twelve max, and she’d take over this aging villain’s empire. Her mother wouldn’t know what hit her.
So I wake up this morning with that age-old cliché in my head: You have as many hours in a day as [Leonardo da Vinci].
Fill in your own preferred goal setter.* Mine changes depending on my current mood and projects. Sometimes it even helps;)
Onward!
* Also, remember that if your exemplar is pre-20th century, your life expectancy is probably double theirs. Strike that, we’re all under enough pressure as it is.
Need a moment to relax? Google’s experimental division has teamed up with the Johns Hopkins International Arts + Mind Lab to bring you this call to chill:
You may have seen that Canadian author and Nobel laureate Alice Munro passed away this week. A prolific titan of the short story genre, she published her first story in 1950 and continued to produce award-winning work in the many decades since. When asked how she got started in short stories, she said it was because that’s all she had time for.
“A story is not like a road to follow … it’s more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while, wandering back and forth and settling where you like and discovering how the room and corridors relate to each other, how the world outside is altered by being viewed from these windows. And you, the visitor, the reader, are altered as well by being in this enclosed space, whether it is ample and easy or full of crooked turns, or sparsely or opulently furnished. You can go back again and again, and the house, the story, always contains more than you saw the last time. It also has a sturdy sense of itself of being built out of its own necessity, not just to shelter or beguile you.”
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