MMWUC for January 7, 2008

EXERCISE: Eager writers fill the classroom seats. Most are writing; some adjust their caffeine drips; one dozes with a thin silvery stream of drool no wider than floss angling across the table. Emily Dickinson floats up the aisle without meeting the students' stares then stands before the students. She has been dead, after all, for almost two hundred years, her shyness intact. Her pale blue eyes focus on a matchbook size piece of paper. She clears her throat. "Tighten, tighten, tighten," she roars louder than a foghorn, clears her throat again, and in a voice slightly more than whisper, "Close your eyes, take a deep breath, and relax. For the next ten minutes, write from the protagonists POV, 'I never saw...'." A puff punctuates her sentence, and she is gone.

MUSING: I'm revising for the last time one of my novels. It either sinks into the abyss after this or swims like swan fully emerged from an ugly duckling. I've given it a fair chance to find its way. My efforts have proven futile nearly one hundred times. I love the intricate story, but some characters lay like toy soldiers on the floor in the recreation room of my childhood rising to action only to the tune of my imagination and no one else's. We will see what the last revisions can do, and then it's on to the next story beating on the lid of the toy box to be let out.