Category: Blogging (page 4 of 88)
Day-to-day minutiae.
A few weeks ago I wrote the following self-congratulatory words on LinkedIn, the social network for people with too much time on their hands at work:
I used to be the kind of person who spent days and days tinkering with the look and feel of my website rather than adding anything new in the way of content. This time around, I’ve just changed the highlight colour and added one feature image. That’s all, I promise!
Me, on LinkedIn, October 2021
Oh and hashtag alert: #amwritingfiction #amzenwriting #am
I even had the gall to include a screenshot from the front page of this website (which uses the wonderful Eksell theme by Anders Noren) as it appeared at the time. Which is to say: minimalist, greyscale and about as emotionally expressive as an android in the final stages of its self-imposed obsolescence.
Seriously, where was the love?
True to form, my bravado did not last long—over the past week, instead of working on more pressing things, I’ve added a few more images to the site, just to liven things up a bit. I’ve also re-organised the landing page to give greater emphasis to my editing and freelancing work.
That way, it feels like I’m maintaining my professional status while also giving myself permission to tool around with slightly nifty things—like the Unsplash WordPress plugin, for example (and yes, I know it’s not actually working at the moment)—in the background.
As you can see from the screenshot above, I’ve also added a new category of posts: flash fiction. This, in turn, has necessitated an overhaul of the category taxonomy for the whole site. Turns out ‘writing’ (as opposed to ‘fiction’ or ‘essays’) ain’t such a great name for a WordPress category, after all.
I’ll have more to say about flash fiction shortly.
What I won’t be saying much about, for the moment, is my ill-advised decision to create a local server version of [d/dn] using the free version of MAMP. I suspect I will need to do a whole lot more tinkering (and perhaps take the plunge by paying for a MAMP Pro licence) before that option becomes viable.
The only positive thing to come out of that particular experiment is that I managed to overhaul and re-write the projects in my portfolio. So, my next mission will be to export those from the local server and import them to the live site—a task I’ve added to my to-tinker list, you can be sure.
“But now, about those ‘more pressing things’—”
Patience, childe.
What do you call writing that’s neither fact nor fiction, and over in a flash? Flash faction, of course!
Ehm, well … whatever the terminology (microfiction, sudden fiction, prose poetry), it’s a genre or set of genres I’ve tinkered with on and off over the years.
My 2005 Imaginary Cities: PC Bangs project was essentially 40-odd flash fiction pieces written and set in Korean gaming rooms.
At the time I didn’t think much of the format, which was in any case an accidental result of the stream-of-consciousness method I used to compose the pieces. Ain’t no time for paragraph breaks!
In 2006–07, I also wrote a lot of shorter prose pieces, most of which have never been published or collected elsewhere. I’ve freshened up the formatting on these posts, and included them in a new ‘Flash’ category.
Fast forward to 2021, and I’ve set myself the challenge of writing a few new pieces of flash fiction. Let’s see how far I get this time around.
After watching the first few episodes of The Americans, it seemed to me that the show’s producers had spent more on wigs than they had on the script. But later, having watched all six seasons of the show, I changed my tune.
Across the show’s various story arcs, what starts out as a cheesy 1980s homage quickly descends into vaguely horrifying Cold-War-era gore, complete with dismemberment, assassinations, undesirable sex and, well, honky tonk. I got hooked on it, and I’m not too proud to admit that.
Anyways, about a year ago the forever-bulk-ace Alicia Sometimes and I were chatting about The Americans online, as you do, and she sent me a poem she’d written about Keri Russell (who plays a Soviet secret agent posing as an American housewife, Elizabeth Jennings, in the show).
It was, of course, a great poem. And, you know, even though I don’t write so many poems anymore, I was immediately inspired to write a kind of response, about Elizabeth’s husband Philip Jennings (another Soviet agent, played by Matthew Rhys).
Then Alicia casually let slip that she’d submitted her poem to an online literary zine called Freeze Ray, and we thought it’d be fun if I submitted my poem, too.
Well, I’ll bet you can guess what happened next. Sure enough, Alicia’s poem, ‘Keri Russell’s voice in The Americans’, was selected for publication in that esteemed journal.
Meanwhile, my effort, ‘Line dancing with Matthew Rhys’ was rejected by the Freeze Ray editors, via the immortal burn phrase: ‘Unfortunately, we’re going to pass this time around’.
Now, I’ve been rejected many a time before, and even had some other poems that didn’t make it into this or that literary journal, too. So I was not greatly bummed by this turn of events.
I mean, the whole world got to read Alicia’s bodacious poem, and the two of us still got to read mine.
But, you know, I got to thinking, and then to tinkering with the opening lines of my admittedly rushed effort, and after a week or two I felt like I had a new draft I was happy with.
And rather than subject myself to the whole publimication fandangle, I thought I’d just pop the thing up on my own website HQ instead.
So, anyway, there you have it. Have a read of ‘Line dancing with Matthew Rhys’, and let me know what y’all think.
Oh and don’t forget to check out Alicia’s poem in Freeze Ray in all its sustained glory (and listen to an audio version as well).
So excited that I just had to share this here, too.
My imaginary #Netflix series ‘You’re Killing Me’, a gritty, eight-part murder mystery based on the true story of US indie rock band #Pavement, has been name-checked on a podcast about Pavement, entitled The Pavement Conundrum!
Listen in from 27:20 to 28:35 for some smooth Scottish accents.
Fire.