Blogging live from Viable Paradise

…where skunks are having sex outside my window.

Yes. Skunks.

So far this week has been both hearteningly familiar and inspiringly strange. My face has developed a permanent flush from all the blood feeding my brain. I have not thought so many thoughts all at once since university; nor have I laughed so hard so many times in a day.

Our major writing assignment for the week has been a 5000-word dark fantasy story with an American Gothic theme. I have almost completed it and I’ve managed to grow it from a seed planted almost twenty years ago.

Big Note to Self: Keep those seed files. And add to them more often.

In addition to the length requirement and the theme, I was given a word that must be included in the title. Add to this my seed file idea; a conviction that all of this had something to do with Riley Child-rhymes with Hoosier Pictures, a book which I have not even seen since I was perhaps twelve years old; a few gestures toward Poe and Baudelaire, and the knowledge that the latter had a strange relationship with his mother. Behold: a story. My first genre story in twenty years.

May it find fertile ground. And may I find the momentum to write a few more, because this? Is fun.

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