Category: Poetry & Short Fiction

Patience has never been one of my virtues.

Sometimes, I liken my brain to that of a shark. I can’t stop swimming or I’ll die. It makes me insufferable. So, I find myself with a holiday weekend, completely frozen creatively as I wait for feedback from my editor.

This isn’t something I can stand. I find myself itching for the pen, and writing anyway. Writing deep, dark lore for my series that should never see the light of day. This helps ease my twitchy fingers, but only slightly. I need more purpose. 

It’s been almost a year since I’ve written any short fiction, and I’m tempted to push myself. There’s something so inherently attainable about writing short fiction. Anyone can write six-thousand words. I’ve spent a year struggling to bear the creative weight of an ambitious trilogy narrative— and as soon as I conceive of the idea, I’m enchanted. Oh the exquisite freedom of unbound words.

Of course, you need an idea if you’re to write, and all of my ideas feel gobbled up by my current novel. Good thing I’ve spent the past two years learning how to reliably conjure them. 

For me, there’s a bit of a sacred ritual to it all, the summoning of these tidbits. I file details away in my brain, which may take years to resurface, but when they inevitably do, it often feels like kismet. 

I allow myself creative meditation. I pluck words, images, and concepts from those sleeping recesses of my imagination. Then, like my surrealist muses, I blindly combine them, rolling them around in my head until they take on a shape of their own. 

I love this process. This is where I feel closest to writing. It’s no different from the way musicians pluck out a tentative new melody that jangles in their mind. Or the way a painter holds the pencil loosely, allowing expressive motion to guide the first lines of a sketch. 

There is no commitment at this stage. I conceive of many ideas, but some sink to the bottom, while others float, worthy of my attention. And that’s where I found one.

Short fiction is the perfect place for me to challenge myself, to fail, to try a voice I don’t understand. It feels like a breath of fresh air when I’ve been languishing in four-hundred pages of structure for the last year.

That’s how my Byronic Horror weekend began at least. I conjured the demons on Thursday, began drafting on Friday, and completed the draft by Sunday morning. While all over America, families ready their yards for Memorial Day Weekend barbecues and beers, I sank myself deep into a haze of grotesque religious horror. 

It’s equal parts arrogance and amusement to imagine myself as a modern-day Mary Shelley, quietly obsessing over the darkest story my mind could conjure. In fact, it must have been catching because my wary husband also caught the feverish bug. We agreed to both write a short horror fiction, with a religious theme over the weekend, keeping the details secret from each other, until we could swap stories at the end.

So I wrote like I always do, half-mad, forgetting basic human requirements outside of caffeine intake, and dreaming of scripture I don’t understand. Even now, as I sit smugly, my finished manuscript printed and waiting to be read, I can hear my husband clacking away at the keys, occasionally catching him standing in the kitchen rubbing his face in frustration. 

This is the kind of creative madness I adore. In so many ways, this is what keeps me writing. I feel renewed by the ritual of completing something, even when it remains unread. I feel the possibility. I feel the terrifying fear that I wrote something I do not understand. 

Because if what I’m writing doesn’t scare me, I don’t know that I’ve been digging deep enough.

Fretfully—SMH