So. The grand experiment seems to be working. For the month of January I focused on writing, with a few specific goals, allowing myself to not worry about not doing All The Things (and therefore not getting distracted). Because of my stunning lack of real self-confidence I didn’t share my goals for the month beforehand, but here’s what I accomplished this month: Posted four short stories that had been sitting gathering dust. Re-read (after the perfect amount of away time) and edited those stories. In Search for the King It’s…
Tag: five cities
Secret City of Roses
A friend of mine is doing a project called “Secret Chicago”, which now has a wider-ranging LJ group. They’re ultra-short vignettes that open little mind-doors of (often dark) magical realism into whatever place the writer is from or holds dear. Some places have strong existences, once you’ve lived there a while and you go past that shop that has been closed for years or take public transit daily it can start your memory reeling into possibilities of whys and what ifs. Secret Cities is a fascinating project, expanding pocket worlds…
5 Cities: Johnnie
Johnnie stood in his garden and tried to see the hills. The fog was up, making the western boundary a towering dark smear in a light grey wall. Between him and the hills were a hell of a lot of other buildings, but his family’s place was taller than most and the hulking view from the rooftop garden was good—in better weather. Ignoring the misting damp, Johnnie sat, straddling a bench. Though the garden was food-producing enough to justify their solar voucher, it was mostly ornamental. Greenery swarmed in arbours…
5 Cities: The Thousand Gardens
There were more than a thousand gardens, of course. The place that became the Five Cities was built on the skeleton of a forest and haunted by its fecund past. It was lush with a flamboyant excess of greenspace, laid out and continually added to in an attempt to appease the leafy fates. But such stately verdance was proved a pale shade once dame nature had room to stretch. The Five Cities gave her that, tearing up asphalt to get to the dirt, handing out flyers about rooftop gardens, letting…
5 Cities: Bliss
Bliss was pretty goddamn bored. She was pretty fucking bored. She was goddamned, fucking bored because she’d recently learned how cool it was to swear and her parents had moved the family to the Five Cities. It wasn’t just that they’d left the East, where she had perfectly good friends, but they’d moved to the stupid, shitting, Bridge, of all places. “We’re getting in on the ground floor, ha, ha,” her dad said. And continued to say. Bliss wanted to think her mom was secretly on her side, but ever…