Inspiration Monday: Start at the Finish

My last post was about how I want to finish things this year.

I still do.

I really do.

I want to as much as the person who put a curb and a stop sign and a little piece of road here with the full intention of connecting it to bigger piece of actual road.

Maybe the stop sign is for the deer. Makes sense.

I usually get about that far with my projects, too. Why? I have never not wanted to finish things I start. So why don't I finish them?

I have no idea. Well, truth be told, I have a lot of ideas, but to mention them here would be to finish the thought and that would be against type.

Sometimes when writing fiction I get so into the story, I feel like I'm a reader and not the writer. I cruise along dropping one word after the next in a thrilling creative fury. I fall for the heartthrob, I suspect everyone of the murder, I wonder just what heart-wrenching thing happened to the troubled protagonist to bring on such intriguing emotional scars. I wonder and write and make it up as I go along, twisting here, turning there...until I hit a wall.

Smash. Splat.

When I hit a wall, I hit it hard. Headfirst at a hundred miles and hour, and then...nothing. Complete darkness. Instant creative coma.

After that point, I start tiptoeing around my work like it is some kind of shrine to the creative consciousness that once made it alive. I read through it reverently and speak of it in hushed tones, afraid I might disturb what vestige of memory I have left of what it was to inhabit that world. The words themselves become sacred, like artifacts that should be only studied, and even that from afar.

This, of course, is a crock. There is nothing about any of my words that makes them sacred. My face will not melt off Indiana Jones-style if I dare move one of those precious words or (gasp!) ADD MORE WORDS TO KEEP THEM COMPANY.

I know this. I know it and I know it and I keep knowing it. But I never seem to do anything about it.

Therein lies my problem. I think maybe the key to finishing some fiction is to finish it first and start it later. Then I won't have a finishing problem, I'll have a starting problem, and I can't have a starting problem for a project that already has a finish. (Thank you, Roald Dahl, for creating Willy Wonka, because without him as a casual backhand reference, people would assume I am as crazy as I actually am.)

What I mean is this: if you have even a fraction of the difficulty in completing projects as I do, let's try a little experiment. Let's begin at the end. Draft out a whole expansive, fully formed, nicely written ending. It should grab you by your neck and hold on to you. It should make you want out to rush out and buy your own next book. Most importantly, for crying out loud, no matter WHAT, it was NOT all a dream.

Once you've crossed the finish line, taking a stroll back to the starting line should be like a walk in the park.

(As long as you don't get lost on your way to the park.)

Book Review: A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty by Joshilyn Jackson

A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty by Joshilyn Jackson

Brief Synopsis: The Slocumb family is no stranger to a vengeful God. Ginny "Big" Slocumb fetched up pregnant with her headstrong daughter, "Little" Liza, at the age of fifteen and was promptly booted out of her Southern Baptist home to fend for herself. Another fifteen years later, Liza showed up pregnant herself and left home shortly after the baby's birth, only to show back up on her mother's doorstep two hard-lived years later. Now her daughter, Mosey, is fifteen, and the Slocumbs are dead in the middle of another "trouble year." Liza, at a too-close-to-home thirty years old, has suffered a stroke that they chalk up to her rough past and methamphetamine use. Mosey is shrugging around in her skin, trying to figure out if she's sharing it with a sex-maniac who could take over any minute and repeat Slocumb history. When Big has Liza's favorite willow tree pulled up by the roots to make room for a therapeutic swimming pool, a box of tiny bones rips out what seams are left holding all of their lives together.

Published: 2012

Format read: Hardcover, until Husband caught me reading my signed first edition and made me buy the e-book to finish. Meanie.

Comparison: It is hard to compare this book directly to any other book because I haven't read anything else quite like it. Joshilyn Jackson's writing is whip-smart and tangy a la Haven Kimmel, but there's depth there, too. In this book, especially with Liza, she yet again shows off her unique skill in capturing the tangled-up complexity of the human spirit held in bondage that I've only seen done half as well in A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick. In this work and all her others, she writes about poverty with a truthful, almost journalistic eye which reminds me of John Steinbeck. Her voice is so very different, but the heart is the same. She tells the worst of it like it is without pointing a single, judgmental fingernail. It is just how Steinbeck used the hard-luck Joads not only to break our hearts in The Grapes of Wrath, but to underline the tenacity of the human spirit, the universal worth of mankind, and hope which keeps right on springing up, even from nothing but salted earth. She does that so well that it squeezes my heart to pieces and I can taste sweat and dirt on my tongue.

Review: I have been a devoted fan of Joshilyn Jackson's work since I first read gods in Alabama as an ARC (Advance Readers Copy) when I was a wide-eyed, story-starved bookseller. I got the book off the freebie shelf in the back room of the store where it was mixed in with a pile of this and that. I picked it for the simple reason that it was the only book on that particular shelf that didn't have a black and white spine. Dumb way to pick a book, I know, but it worked out for me. I read that book in one voracious setting and have been an advocate for Ms. Jackson's books ever since. I've read everything she has put out to the public, including her wonderful blog, Faster Than Kudzu, and so should you.

If Joshilyn Jackson has a mid-life crisis and gives up fiction writing to spend the rest of her life writing the backs of cereal boxes, I will throw out all my Honey Nut Cheerios and read on.

So should you.

What I'm saying is that her books are good. Very.

A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty does not disappoint. It has the same salty southern women running down its spine, this time three generations deep. The POV shifts between the characters, with Big and Mosey in first person (a feat in itself given the gap in their ages and personalities), and third person limited for Liza. In all of them, Jackson manages to keep in her signature playful style without sacrificing the individual voices of the characters. I have yet to figure out how she does it, turning nouns into verbs and verbs into nouns and basically batting around syntax like a cat with a ball of yarn, and somehow it makes things more clear. Maybe that's why her work feels so heartfelt. She says things the way we mean them, not the way we're told to say them.

I will admit that I had some trouble with this one when I started reading it. It was Liza. Right off the bat, we're told that she was a hellion from the womb, yet when we first meet her, she is a raisin-soft shadow of her former self. I had trouble picturing her young. My age. It was too wrong, too wasteful and unfair. Reading her chapters was hard going. I couldn't be in her head like I could be in Big's and Mosey's. I had to work my way in from a distance. Like Mosey and Big interpreting her "Mosey-baby" noise, or her "yes" and "no" signals, there was a tendency for me to throw my hands up and say it was too hard, too sad to look at her with her scrambled eggs trailing down the bad side of her face. I was feeling what Big and Mosey must have felt, and the frustration was almost unbearable.

Having read all of Ms. Jackson's work, I should have known better.

She does not write weak characters.

Ever.

Even when they're broken. Even when they think they're used up and spent. Even when they're captive in their own bodies. Even when she lets you pity them, it will only be for a flash, because she does not write weak characters.

Ever.

Eventually, Liza's chapters became my favorites. There was so much complexity to her character, this woman who did all the things we're told makes someone "bad" but she is so very, very good, so truly herself even when she is lost inside of her own broken body. A firecracker forced underwater is no less a firecracker at its core.

The book weaves in and out of their three lives, and eventually you come to see that there is far less truthful communication between the characters who can talk to each other than there is with poor damaged Liza. Big is tormented by loss and responsibility, and bursting with love for her family--and for what her family should be. Mosey is such an engaging character, wise for her years, but not so much that she's not a believable fifteen-year-old. She and her best friend Roger have a great, three-dimensional relationship that earns Roger his place as the Encyclopedia Brown clue-finder to assist with furthering the plot. There is enough mystery and puzzle-solving to keep the pages turning, but as I went, I realized that I wasn't just reading for the answers like the back of a crossword puzzle book (as I'm apt to do with many mysteries/thrillers. I'm looking at you, Dan Brown). I cared about the answers because I cared about the characters and all their jagged pieces. I wanted them to fit together, somehow, so that they could finally be whole.

That's the mark of a good literary fiction novel--you don't just want to know what happens/happened, you just want to know. Anything. Everything.

I would also throw in a mention that I wish more men would pick up books like this one. Yes, the cover is feminine, it has "pretty" in the title, and it doesn't just have a woman protagonist, it has THREE of them. However, I think if more men read books like this one, they would understand women so much more--what maternal instinct looks like from the inside, how fiercely we can love, how fiercely we can fight, and not to count us out, not even in what looks like the end of days. Strong women are not to be feared or reviled or ignored, but should be seen for their truth. We are allies, and when necessary, warriors.

"You have to hold these things and strive, always, for one more word and one more step. You push forward and you fight, for as long as ever you can, until the black world spins and the moon pulls the tide and the water rises up and takes you." --A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty, by Joshilyn Jackson.

In Which I Have the Stupidest Kind of Amnesia

Somewhere along the line, I forgot that I love to read. 

And I do. I really, really do.

I imagine that somewhere in my mind there is a little hole where important information like this tends to leak out when I'm not looking. I think it happens when work gets more than its fair share of me, and this is an easy thing to happen. It is even easier because I fiercely love my work.

But still, y'all.

I forgot.

I have been reading as long as I can remember, and I mean that sincerely. I do not remember learning to read. I just knew how as long as my brain had all its parts that make memories of things. I do remember still having my fat little toddler legs when my mom would trot me through the living room when we had company and whip out one of her tabloid rags. "Do it," she'd say with a big grin and I would read whatever headline she pointed at. To prove it wasn't a trick, the guest got to pick out words for me to read next. I like to think they only chose the good items from the National Enquierer, ones about Patrick Swayze being a nice guy or that up-and-comer Tom Cruise being good to animals.

From then on, I was hooked. My mom, from whom I inherited my literary gene, read me Charlotte's Web over and over so many times that we started taking turns--she would read it to me, then the next night I would read it to her. We went to yard-sales and bought up stacks of Reader's Digest condensed books which had fat, gilded spines that called to me like sirens and I got my first taste of Ring of Bright Water and Old Yeller. I read everything I could get my hands on, and faster than anyone could keep up with, so I developed a penchant early on for being a notorious re-reader. It has never phased me a bit to pick up a copy of something I've read six times and drink it down a seventh.

It was only natural that someone who loved words that much would turn to writing her own. When I was really young, used to steal all the good pens in the house and write what clumsy words I knew on the blank pages in the front of all my picture books. My earliest notable work came during summer camp when I was still young enough that I was not allowed to staple the pages together myself. It was a harrowing tale with hand-drawn illustrations known as The Adventures of Katy the Kitten. 

It was about a kitten. Named Katy. I think stuff happened to her. I only had about half a frontal lobe at the time, so I'm not really sure.

Either way, my dad caught on to what kind of daughter he had on his hands--he bought me a grown-up desk and a Brother electric typewriter for Christmas when I was just seven years old.

When I wasn't at my little typewriter, I had my Mead spiral notebooks and Lisa Frank pen collection. I will never forget that giddy blank-page hopefulness that would come when I would flip over to a fresh sheet of paper and think up a character and an opening sentence to write neatly on the top line in hot-pink ink.

Yes. I had hot-pink ink, and yes, I liked it.

I read and wrote my way through childhood so thoroughly that in the seventh grade, my teacher realized that I had already read all the books on the literature curriculum and she had nothing else for me to do during in-class reading time, so she loaned me her own paperback copy of The Client by John Grisham. (I still really like that book, by the way. Early Grisham may not be high-literature, but there's some good meat there! Besides, it's fun.)

In high school, like any red-blooded American teenager, the rebellious part of me kept me from reading the assigned books for my honors English classes, but it didn't stop me from reading other books I found on the classics shelf next to the ones I was supposed to read. To this day, I have still never finished Moby Dick or The Scarlet Letter, but I discovered Flowers for Algernon (which may have subconsciously awakened my intense fascination with psychology) and The Catcher in the Rye. The exceptions to my rebellion included To Kill a Mockingbird, Fahrenheit 451, and Cold Sassy Tree, all of which changed my life in one way or another. (Read the books they tell you, kids. These teachers might know a thing or two...)

In college, I read my way through most of the complete works of C.S. Lewis and discovered that not all non-fiction is horrible, dry stuff that drags trenches in my brain. I read Night by Elie Wiesel alone in my dorm room and cried so much I had to skip class. A fierce passion for social justice took up residence deep inside my bones and started rattling around. I devoured Dead Man Walking and Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger and built myself some soapboxes. I was a hungry, zealous psych major and I read Man and his Symbols by Carl Jung as readily as my friends were reading Harry Potter. Then I read Harry Potter.

Then I graduated and went to work at a bookstore. 'Nuff said.

I still read, but I forgot that I like it. For the last six years or so, I have kept a notebook with a list of every book that I read. I have made myself a rule for every one of those years that I would read at least two books every single month. I have still managed to do this without fail, but somewhere when my work started getting hard and the writing guilt-monkeys took over my brain, it became a chore. I chose books for their spine size instead of the mood I was in or what they were trying to say to me. I got in those two books, but it might have been on the last day of the month and they might have been plays because they are short but are bound with pages and they count as books.

I am reading three books right now, and all for fun. Some are better written than others and they are all of totally different genres, but they are FUN. They are fun because I wanted to read them, so I picked them up and started reading them. That was all there was to it.

It has been too long since I've done that.

Today, I remember. I LOVE READING. Writing is my passion, but that passion came from READING OTHER PEOPLE'S GOOD WRITING. How can a passion born of another passion thrive if not fed? Reading and writing go hand in hand--no, they go heart in chest--and I can't excel at one unless I slow down and put in the work with the other. Reading makes you think, and who wants to read something written by a person who doesn't know how to think?

Plus, you know, I like it.

I forgot to take care of a large part of how I came to be the person I am, and that really is the stupidest kind of amnesia.

Maybe it's time to re-read Charlotte's Web and the National Enquirer, where all good things begin.

Book Review: They Shoot Horses, Don't They?

They Shoot Horses, Don't they? by Horace McCoy
 

Brief Synopsis: 
In the height of the Great Depression, two young Hollywood hopefuls with empty pockets meet and decide to hitch their dreams on a marathon dance. They are forced to stay on their feet for weeks on end, swaying, dancing, and competing in "derbies" in which they heel-toe around a track like racehorses, fighting to stay in the contest one more day where they might be "discovered" by a director and win a $1000 prize. Robert and Gloria explore the limits of their humanity and the jagged edges of mercy.

Published: 1935

Format read: eBook (I read this on my shiny new Kindle Paperwhite, but if I had it to do over, I would have sought out a floppy old mass market paperback, well used with musty, yellowed pages. There is just something about reading a moody book full of grit and truth in a format that mirrors that experience. Sometimes eBooks are just too...virgin.)

Genre: Most often considered "crime noir", but there is a lot of character and symbolism to chew on here.

Comparison: It is kind of a cross between The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck and The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds by Paul Zindel. It is set in the Depression and centered around characters who are struggling with internal demons amid a parallel event, in this case a dance marathon, that shakes up their insides until they froth out on the surface and soak into the ground.

There is an element of the gray desperation that permeates The Grapes of Wrath but without Steinbeck's peculiar eye for simple beauty and hopefulness. Short, tight, and dramatic, it has a little of the flavor of Marigolds, but in an inverted form. The depraved enmity and bitterness shown by Beatrice in Marigolds is also present in Gloria from Horses, as are Tillie's hardiness and (to a lesser extent) faith present in Robert, though in this case, they are basically dumped over his head, worthless as water.

Review: This novel did not fare well in the US when it was first released. It was not until the deep days of WWII that it found its way into the hands of French existentialists. They were a natural audience, given the contrast between Robert's "take it as it comes" attitude and Gloria's fatalistic bitterness.

Robert finds meaning in life through whatever opportunities present themselves, and he desires to become a director of short films that demonstrate the daily lives of average people. Some could argue that he invented reality television, but that's neither here nor there.

Gloria, on the other hand, has no meaning in life and nothing to strive for. She's not even striving to strive. The dance marathon is so symbolic of the way she has lived her life until that point--moving, moving, moving, resting for shattered moments, patching up only the most broken bits, and doing so only waiting to see how long it takes until it all ends. She is simply through with the world and everything in it. She doesn't care about anyone's feelings because she doesn't care about her own.

An existentialist might say that the world means only what a person brings to it, and Gloria comes with empty hands--limp, painful, empty hands. When Robert comes to realize that she is broken and that she will never be able to hold onto any sort of meaning which would bring her anything but misery, he has to resort to his own internal framework for right and wrong and must act based on his own personal experiences of mercy.

This novel is a tight one, so tight you could probably bounce a quarter off the cover and end up with two dimes and a nickel. It's almost like a play and has been adapted for the stage and screen. The novel is in first person POV, but even then doesn't linger much in Robert's inner monologue, and when it does, it is worth it.

There are some spots when a little more color could have been dabbed on to make the setting and characters more vivid, but somehow the drab tone works. It becomes experiential--the tone of the novel mimics for the reader what the characters are feeling, which is predominantly dehumanization. They are numb, they are holed up in a dark, sweaty space, and they are shuffled around from trough to trailer to track until they fall on their faces. 

The absence of "color" offers the reader a heightened sense of contrast, just like going outside after a long time in a darkened room. There is one notable passage when Robert dances his way into a triangle of sunlight streaming through a window. He stays in that triangle, swaying, until it creeps all the way up his body, finally standing on his tiptoes so that it can linger on his face as long as possible before leaving him back in the dark. Later, a character leaves under duress and Robert finds himself staring through the crack in the door as he goes, drinking in a flash of red from a fiery sunset. Though he should have felt sorry for the character's departure, he states that it had been the greatest part of his day because he had been allowed to see the sun. When Robert and Gloria finally go outside, there is a brief but beautiful passage detailing Robert's first breaths of sea air after being inside for nearly 900 hours:

"It was after two o' clock in the morning. The air was damp and thick and clean. It was so thick and so clean that I could feel my lungs biting it off in huge chunks." 

He's hungry, so hungry. What a great way to show it. 

One of the things I enjoyed about this novel is the way McCoy layers on the symbolism. Maybe he meant to, maybe he didn't, but that's one of the most important tenets of understanding art: it is a collaboration between creator and consumer. Either way, there were some elements that were striking to me, and in keeping with the kinds of literature that we normally consider "higher station" (which doesn't mean a heck of a lot to me).

Pay special attention to the parallels between the lives of these "kids" and the lives of horses. They are forced to compete in "derbies," in which the male partners have special belts for their female partners to hold onto, like a jockey on a horse. They are herded and fed and offered sleep and medical care insofar as it keeps them on the dance floor. Once they are past their point of usefulness or turn up last in a derby, they are little more than dog meat.

There appeared to be some parallels between Robert's shifting view of the Pacific Ocean and his shifting view of life. He mentions that he comes to resent the Pacific, which rolls endlessly under his feet beneath the dance floor without his permission. This becomes symbolic of life rolling along, vast and ageless, knocking us off our balance and driving us mad with its persistence.

This is not a book to read after a rough day, and it is certainly not going to leave you with a smile. However, if you pay attention and dig for the nut in the shell, you'll find that it leaves you with a lot to think about that is worth thinking about. It can be read in one good-sized setting, and I think it benefits from that kind of momentum. It adds a sort of meta-effect that strengthens the emotional resonance of the book. If you get tired of reading it, it just gives you a tiny taste of the what the dance marathon is doing to the characters. Where you, reader, become antsy and start thinking about the leftovers in the fridge, the characters are coming apart at the seams, worn to their washed-out bones.

I'm planning on seeking out the 1969 Sydney Pollack film, which I know took a lot of liberties and stretched out the narrative like a stiff piece of taffy. Even so, it has a great rep among film buffs, and I'm eager to see Pollack's interpretation of this little book. It sure does pack a punch. 

Writing in the Negative Space

No, I don't mean that I'm making my Hemingway-esque descent into drunken, depressed mad genius (though I wouldn't mind a good dose of mad-genius every now and then). I've just been thinking about one of my works in progress with which my creative wheels have gotten buried in about two feet of gooey, frustrating, infuriating mud.

This novel is a complete rewrite of one a did a few years ago. I mostly just scooped the cream off the top--the main character and all her delicious flaws, a couple of supporting characters, and two male leads. From there, I took the characteristics that spoke to me about each of those "cast members" and I used every drop of my psychology degrees to invent backstories that explained every quirk and facet of them all. Then I did that about twenty-five more times until I finally ended up with a social history for this little handful of people that rivals War and Peace.

Of course none of that will be in the book, but whatever. At least I know it, and that helps me to have the characters fully realized and in beautiful technicolor on the page, right?

The problem that I have now is that they're so technicolor in my mind, I have no idea what's on that page. Once you've gone that deep with your characters, you can't pull yourself out and see what the reader sees anymore. No mother looks at her child the way a stranger does, and that goes for fictional children, too.

This brings me to my problem. My main character has just experienced a fairly traumatic emotional crisis which will have lasting implications on her life-path, but also harkens back to some of that ginormous backstory I mentioned. I'm pleased with the lead up to this event and the direct aftermath, but now I'm kind of stuck. This character's history has set her up to be the type who puts on a facade while she's full of raging waters inside. I think I got that across in the "first punch" phase of her crisis, but now I'm up to the point where there are a little details that have to be ironed out and the next steps are setting in. I keep getting caught up in these little details even though I know the reader would be rolling their eyes and telling me to just get on with it.

Generally, that's a bad thing.

I want to get on with it. I do. I really, really, really with sugar on top do. My problem is that the way that she handles those little things show a lot about her character in subtle ways...way, way too subtle ways.

I love this character. We've been hanging out a lot for several years and she's like my little imaginary bestie. We like the same kind of ice cream and we're both left handed. She would get along with my evil cat. Of course it is hard to write about a character that you like going through terrible pain, but I am absolutely determined to keep her as miserable as possible in order to highlight her most redemptive quality--her quiet inner strength and resilience.

This brings me to the difference between the positive and negative space. I don't mean the "Yay, go team!" space and the "Everything sucks and then you die," space. I mean the difference between this:

 and this:

Positive strength in a character is really easy to portray. It's in style. It's cool. You have a character who goes out there and kicks some serious butt. She's taking names and wearing great boots. You really wish you knew who did her hair because it never looks bad, even when she's just taken out an entire room of bad guys while the hot male lead waits outside in the Porche.

Then you have my character. She's wearing scuffed up shoes that are definitely knockoffs from Payless. She's sarcastic and shy and mostly just wants to find a cave to crawl into so the sky will stop dropping chunks on her head. Then, the more you delve into her life and she starts to come out of her shell, you realize that she has been holding the whole world on her shoulders. She's holding it up pretty darn well, considering. After all, you didn't even notice at first. She's just not moving around a whole lot while she's doing it.

It sounds great in concept, but it sure is hard to write through, especially when I already know these things and I'm trying to write for people who do not know them and will never know them unless I get my words in tune. Her strength lies in the negative space, the places around her that reveal her shape while she's holding still. It's one thing to do that with a camera, but it's a heck of a lot harder to do it with the alphabet.

I'm going to keep pecking away at it and hopefully crest the summit long enough to get to another scene that sends me off at a run. That's where I struggle--I just can't stop worrying the lumpy spots long enough to get the rest of the manuscript out front.

If anyone is listening out there, I'd love to hear opinions or suggestions about how to fill in the foreground while drawing the attention to the background without your readers using your book to prop up an uneven table-leg.

I'm definitely wallowing in my warm welcome to the world of literary fiction. Plot? What's that?

Help!

Inspiration Monday

One of my many quirks is that I like to give everything a backstory.

There is a coffee cup left half full on a cafe table. Maybe the owner wasn't thirsty, or maybe the coffee was just too sweet. Right?

Nope! Of course what really happened was that a handsome young man was sitting at that table, sipping that coffee (with just the right amount of sugar for his liking) and playing Words with Friends on his iPhone. He was looking for a good way to use the letters "ERQRIAA" and still hit a Triple Word score when he yawned and stretched to clear his mind. When he opened his eyes, for the first time, he saw her across the cafe. He scooted his chair back so fast that he almost tipped it backward when the leg caught on a piece of broken tile. He righted himself and snatched up his iPhone, forgetting all about Words with Anyone, and ran out of the cafe as fast as his legs would carry him. He left only a lonely coffee cup to show he'd ever been there. 

Okay, it's more likely that it was too sweet or had gone cold, but I like my way better.

Driving through my neighborhood, there is one lone garbage can still at the street days after trash day has passed. The neighbors probably forgot, or maybe they are out of town.

Oooor maybe they were sitting in their living room, minding their own business on trash day. They're both home from work because they were supposed to go on vacation, but he came down with a cold and they couldn't go. Rather than give up the rest and relaxation, they decided to have a stay-cation instead. 

A knock comes at the door. They're not expecting anyone since everyone already thinks that they're out of town, but he goes to the door anyway, praying the whole way he doesn't have another embarrassing sneezing fit in front of whomever it is. 

Standing there in front of him is a man in a blue suit, wearing a grin only a game-show-host's dentist could love. "Congratulations, sir!" says the man, and holds out a check to my neighbor. 

"What's this?" he asks. 

"You've won, sir!" says the game-show-host.

"What exactly have I won?" asks my neighbor. His wife appears behind him, wiping her hands on a paint splattered rag. 

"This," says the game-show-host, and he releases a spray of chemicals into their faces. They crumple to the ground in a heap, and two more men in blue suits with slicked back hair and crocodile smiles pick them up, stow them comfortably in the nondescript sedan they've parked in the driveway, and drive off, leaving only the garbage can staring after them. 

You can see how this gets amusing, though probably not for long-suffering Mr. Husband who sits patiently and tries to listen to my rambling about how the overturned container of yogurt in the grocery store was really left there by someone who was examining the expiration date carefully after that last spoiled-yogurt-in-the-office-fridge embarrassment, only to realize with a start that she was late for an appointment. Not just any appointment, but the appointment...

I digress. Again.

So. You out there. Creative types--what do you think? What can you find around you that seems mundane that maybe isn't quite as it seems? Artists, art! Writers, write! Readers, read our crap and tell us what you think! Inspiration is all over the place if you just pay attention.