Daily writing prompt
You’re writing your autobiography. What’s your opening sentence?
was in town.
Tag: dailyprompt
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Two, one of those notepads with attached pen I see at Patrick’s, for reading & writing stories.
Three, one of my Tarot decks, for telling myself stories.
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I suppose it was a childhood spent in the south with very liberal, thoughtful parents.
One of the first things I learned, once I started attending school, was skepticism about crowds. Many of my classmates were from families where the “N word” was uttered as casually as “cat” or “dog.” Most had parents who were ardent supporters of Goldwater, then Nixon, then Reagan. Hippies were dirty commies, the Vietnam War a righteous cause, and Watergate the legal harassment of a great president. Grammar school history textbooks of Louisiana at that time taught students the Confederacy was grossly misunderstood by northerners who exaggerated the unfortunate-but-rare abuse of slaves. The Reconstruction era was depicted as a dark time when ignorant blacks and dishonest Yankee carpetbaggers were set loose on a helpless population.
By my teens, I’d figured out that moral and rational decisions were not best made by checking to see what most of the people around me thought.
This did not make me popular in certain online circles during the Satanic Panic, or in the months after the 2000 election, or in the wake of 9/11. It can cause me “problems” to this day.
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Is time only perceived as linear? Are there different universes, with different timelines? Does my eight-year-old self still exist somewhere, my teenaged self? Has my death already happened? Is every instant of agony or joy eternal?
I find it hard to believe in our fates being “written” in a book somewhere by a divine hand, but perhaps all time is contained in one instant of unimagineably loud brightness, a single explosion. Maybe “destiny” is the word we use to describe what is incomprehensible.
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I did.
One evening, I walked down the hall outside my office. In the room to my right, Michio Kaku was lecturing. In the room to my left, a chess tournament was going on. Straight ahead, in the room next to the office, the Proust club was meeting.
I was in the right place.
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Daily writing promptDescribe a phase in life that was difficult to say goodbye to.
…and I went from having two living parents to one who was coping with her own grief. It was the true end of a long, happy childhood.
I never went through that stage of hostile alienation towards parents I saw many of my friends go through in high school and college. Maybe it’s because Mom and Dad had me when they were young and our age difference was not so great. Through much of my childhood and well into my adult years, they were an active, good-looking, often fascinating couple, with their own ups and downs, their own adventures.
So it was hardest to say goodbye to that portion of my life when Dad was alive. Goodbye to visiting a crowded, busy house near the beach or on the mountaintop. To being introduced to friends he had made, or my mother had made, then hearing my parents talk about them. Goodbye to the parties they threw. Goodbye to the timbre of Dad’s voice when he told a story, to Mom chiming in, her laughter. Goodbye to the front door closing as he left to play his game of tennis, to the sound of tires on gravel when he came back. Goodbye to the smoothies he made for us all in the morning, the drinks he poured or mixed for us at sunset. Goodbye to occassionally wondering, as I went through my own routine here in California, what he and my mother were doing or saying on the other side of the country at that moment.
All that stopped a decade ago, but still, when I watch an interesting movie, read an interesting book, see some dramatic development in politics or world news, I have to remind myself I can’t call him and ask him about it. I won’t hear, over the phone, Mom and Dad tossing the subject between them, agreeing or disagreeing. When I hang up, I can’t imagine that they are still talking about it, and then, no doubt, dissecting my own life, approving or disapproving.
It didn’t all vanish in one day. It slowly faded as Dad’s health faded and my mother struggled, her life focused more and more on keeping him alive and comfortable. And finally, it ended.
The least children can do is outlive their parents. I understand that, and I know I should embrace the price paid, the emptiness that rushes in when a mother or father dies. But I still dread the emptiness to come.
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Daily writing promptIf you could be someone else for a day, who would you be, and why?
Sorry.
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Daily writing promptIf you could permanently ban a word from general usage, which one would it be? Why?
I dislike this word for the same reason I dislike the clumsy use of the term “ban,” so let me start out by saying that no, I would not want to see people punished and/or silenced for uttering the word “problematic.”
But I do dislike it. Intensely. I dislike how earnestly it’s used, often with a faint moue of regret. I dislike, most of all, the built-in presumption that everyone listening agrees with its application.
Few things anger those who use “problematic” more than someone saying, “Wait, what do you mean? Why is that author/book/movie/artist etc. ‘problematic?’” It frustrates them because “problematic” is most frequently invoked on the way to advocating the exclusion/silencing/shunning of any person or work dubbed “problematic.” Questioning its use means they have to stop and think, not only about why something has been deemed “problematic,” but whether or not silencing (or “banning”) that problematic person or work is the right thing to do. The joy of their righteous march forward has been interrupted.
They might — God forbid! — have to formulate an argument.
This can be dangerous. Question whether or not someone or something is “problematic” and you just might be deemed “problematic” too.
It is the current favored jargon of the censor.
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Daily writing promptWhat is the biggest challenge you will face in the next six months?
Which is a reality every writer faces.
My goal is to always have at least 70 queries out. To keep track of this, I have set up an Excel spreadsheet that I keep carefullly updated. Rejections are highlighted in yellow.
I started sending queries out in December, so I’ve reached the point where at least one rejection a day is arriving by email. Every day the yellow part of the spreadsheet grows. Every day at least one rejection must be replaced with a new query.
That’s just how it goes.
Pam Troy 