Maybe adapt a scene from a nonfiction setting on shipwrecked cay.
Maybe not.
Use these words liberally: ablation; asperity; cassocks; chasubles; hooded cowls; astringent; incursive; afflux; minikin; Grand Guignol; rutilant; cadge; rebus; limpid; enmity; hackles; pathoformic; sabbat; afflatus.
Format: one-hundred / 100-word chapters.
End abruptly, midway through the narrative, and append a long footnote that elucidates nothing.
Add Autocorrected Texts and Overheard Conversational Automatism.
Include two single word chapters: “Isotope” and “Gunplay” on pages 33 and 66, respectively.
Include the anecdote about the Girl Scout merit badge you were awarded for Sailing.
Title the work: Lime Automatic See-Thru Cats Aging in the He Code Other Using Nixon No-Stow Straws
Include the anecdote about Harry and Jerry not having cottage cheese on their plates at your Sweet Sixteen BBQ—and how Stone took the big wooden spatula and rammed it into Orpheus.
Remember people are usually pessimistic about rain.
Include the scene where you make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for every potential boyfriend on the first date.
Include the line: “I’m not a hipster.”
Don’t disappoint anyone.
No one was mad at you!
Remember what Dr. Greene said: “Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose, or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation.”
Include the words THE END.
“The end of this story should give us hope, but it doesn’t give us hope.”
A vicious penny farthing flashes across the window, as the dreadful coins are placed upon her eyes. The incantations from the holy man’s mouth sound like blaspheme as the sky grows bright outside.
We move across the floor in time to the funeral dirge, we move across time with the conviction of ascetic monks. When we stop the shadows affix us to our places; we stop sobbing and silence fills the empty spaces.
As the sun arcs out the top of the window, we remain frozen in place. The shadows grow long in filtered light and we grow as we stand here still.
“Of all that thrives among Satan’s noisome progeny, the rock drill and mosquito.”
… let’s move on to dreams, phosphenes and the armatures and substructures that make up those worlds. Even in the most extreme and intense dreams one may see below the action unspooling in said dream narrative and peak at the structures moving the characters and things about in a dream. If one sneezes hard and freezes their vision—or better yet, rubs their closed eyes hard for five seconds—revealed to them for a few short moments will be the armatures, or puppet master’s strings if you will, that move things about in one’s dreams. They are always present, but in the waking state have nothing affixed to their ends—nothing to clasp on to, and you don’t see them. But blow out your consciousness and they will be forever present—waiting for the characters to mount, the scenery to take its places, the director to yell “action”…
“Dog autumn attacks. Syphilis autumn. And death visits one of twilight’s paralyzed legs.”
A vibrant tuning fork in hand— This is normally a prime time for burrowing a hole in your heart.
You tell me to videograph your heartache. You claim that this crowded urban area saps your optimism and your love for your fellow human. Someone’s banging on the door, yelling: get out, get out. You will slowly reopen your heart and repair the gaps, and hope for the best. It’s still not easy to be asymptomatic. Over the next couple of weeks before October love forlorn, love clinically enervated, will disappear permanently.
Fuel for the broken heart. Food for stormy weather.
“The invisible tissue of civilization: so thin, so easily rendable. It’s a miracle that it exists at all.”
