Mmmm Good

At our Gainesville Writers Alliance (yes, WAG) meeting last Sunday, Bev Browning talked to us about ghost-writing and her concept of shimmer — "how to craft a sentence to manipulate response and amplify meaning."

There's a huge difference between having a great story and being able to write it. The written words have to stand alone without the benefit of your gesture, facial expression, tone of voice, volume, eye contact, and feedback... "Shimmer" refers to the transparent layers that create subtle dimension in written work.

She said round words and mmmm sounds can create shimmer in a sensual experience, then handed out Belgian chocolates and asked us to add layers to this story:

Bev gave us chocolate. We ate it.

This is my shimmer:

She holds a chocolate
in blue and silver wrapper
close beneath my nose
and makes me wait
to open it or place
it in my mouth, but oh
I see it's round,
and notice first
its scent and then,
upon my tongue,
against the far back
of my throat,
how it softly,
slowly melts.

My Life is a Sitcom?

Last night I dreamed I'd been acting in a sitcom that had just been canceled and we were at a wrap party.

I was talking to a small, dark woman with long black hair, and wondered aloud if our Nielsen numbers were really bad enough to cancel us. Sure, some people out there found the show too edgy, but weren't there enough who appreciated our sophisticated humor to keep the sponsors happy?

She stepped back from me, eyes wide, and sobbed, "We're canceled, and you're talking about statistics?"

I called out the same question to a heavyset man about 6'4" with shaggy, long, gray hair and a deeply wrinkled face. 

He staggered a bit as he turned from shambling toward the door, looked back at me with his eyelids half closed, and slurred, "Mary, half the shows were crap."

"I know that," I persisted, closing in on him, "but the other half were prime." 

He put an arm around me and tried for a slobbery kiss. 

I slipped away.

French Lesson

Mallarmé, he writes, sought
nothingness that is truth.

Then translate this, I beg,
of his magicienne:

Une voix, du passé longue évocation,
Est-ce la mienne prête à l’incantation?

The hand, he scribes,
is quicker than the eye.

More charming, say I,
and now must bid good-bye.

From de Montaigne,
sixteenth century:

Une personne vous manqué

Et le monde est dépeuplé.

A person lacks you and
the world depopulates?

When you miss someone,
the world is a smaller place.