Susan's Archives From December 2019
Flash Fiction: Jellyfish Graveyard
Agave Lillyhogan spent the first seventy-five years of her life following the rules of society and the last seventy-five making her own. Her mauve-tinted hands placed the home-made candle on her plate and she lit it singing and dancing to herself and her purple poodle, "Happy Birthday to me, one-fifty I see, oh Violet, it's been an eternity." She blew out the candle and said, "I have been telling everyone for years, those store bought candles with their chemicals seeping into those processed cancer-filled cakes, but do they listen, nope, I'm the crazy one."
5 Reasons Why I Love Magical Realism
What is Magical Realism?
Maggie Ann Bowers in her book Magic(al) Realism, pg.3 defines it as something that ¨relies most of all upon the matter-of-fact, realist tone of its narrative when presenting magical happenings." Famous authors of magical realism include: Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Salmon Rushdie, Isabel Allende, Toni Morrison, and Arundhati Roy.
Five Things I Learned from Reading Alice Munro
An Analysis of the Short Story: Dance of the Happy Shades
Alice Munro is a Canadian short story writer that won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013. I remember hearing bits and pieces about what a gifted writer she was, but I never made the time to actually read her until my writing group decided to start analyzing short stories this year. Alice Munro is the first author we have been studying.
Fumbling Around with Filter Words
My name is Susan, and I am a filter word fanatic. At least in the initial drafts for getting the story out, I naturally insert them everywhere. Could you have this problem as well? Let's see...
First of all, what is a filter word?
I saw a man dancing in the street as the clock struck midnight.
Saw is the filter word, this kind of sentence has an easy fix of cutting the beginning and making it a more direct experience for your reader.
A man was dancing in the street as the clock struck midnight.
