It's Always Something.

Best and Brightest came out twenty years ago. It's a real stretch to suggest we're in the same world that we were in then in who "infests" Washington.

All I know is what I read and observe.
 
Its too early (dark) to harvest potatoes but when the Sun is up I'm gonna dig up a potato plant and collect the spuds. I know theyre there, cuz I looked earlier in the week. Been waiting for the plant to die. The other plants aren't ready to harvest. Within a month I'll have plenty of potatoes, onions, and tomatoes.

The garden is ready for okra. I plant okra May 1st. Okra likes hot weather.

The sweet potato vines look good. They like hot weather, too, but take a good 5 months to grow.

And the corn looks good. I can buy corn a lot cheaper than I can grow it but the taste is superior, and its all organic.

Thinking about growing some peanuts. They grow here.

The test potato plant is nuthin to write home about but it did make a few potatoes.
 
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The new story is past my usual word count, and about 1/2 done. A reporter spends the night alone in a haunted house. Lesbian readers like plenty of raw meat, and it has that. The old house, Queen Anne-Gothic Style, was a secluded home for unwed mothers a century ago. Its where ruined young women went.

I recall such places, in my childhood. One of my aunts went to one.
 
I got 3 pounds of spuds from 2 plants. Not bad considering they weren't hilled.

Planted okra.
 
Correction. I got 4 pounds of spuds yesterday.

I planted potatoes in boxes and buckets and planters and in dirt, to see what works best. Next year gonna plant potatoes in garbage cans.

About the first thing new gardeners learn is, most garden experts are fulla shit.

The 2nd thing you learn is, Nature almost never cooperates.
 
Downloaded some essays by Robert Louis Stevenson.

One is a writing tutorial that's unintelligible blabber.

What he meant to say is, do it Mister Miyagi Style, wax on-wax off, and apply that skill to prose composition. That is, start by writing poetry, to learn the drill, and the poetry drill will come out in your prose.

Then I downloaded some F. Scott Fitzgerald stories. I like his style but don't care too much for his Jazzy-Flappery world.

Then I downloaded OF HUMAN BONDAGE by Somerset Maugham. Its David Copperfield all over again. I read this book in 1967, and recall none of it, but I like the writing style. Maugham knew how to translate action into words, and reveal character through action.
 
Lunch today was yummy: Pork roast with carrots, onions, and red potatoes I grew. Biscuits with strawberry and blueberry preserves made from my fruits. Maybe next year I'll have some home grown peach preserves or guava jelly.

Harvested more red potatoes today. Havent harvested the potato boxes yet, just the extras I planted in the dirt after the boxes were filled.
 
Pulled my ancient Me2000 outta the junk pile and salvaged plenty of old stories I believed were lost. One is 14000 words long. The funniest line in it is, I KNOW WHAT YOU WANT TO STUFF, AND ITS NOT MY STOCKING!
 
Read the first F. Scott Fitzgerald story from TALES OF THE JAZZ AGE. It was excellent till the end, when it fell apart. A true WTF resolution. Fitzgerald wrote marvelous prose, and knew how to cobble a story together, but his endings suck. I call them 'punts'.

Lotsa useful material in the stache of old stories I salvaged from my computer.

I had a major epiphany about people, yesterday. It pertains to ambivalence and congruence. So now I need to think about how best to use this new construct in writing.
 
Found a 6600 word porn story on the old computer. Wrote it 4 years ago. Gotta remove a dream from it to make it LIT kosher. The LIT jelly-beans will like it.

Found a 900 word non-consent story I call BITE ME.

Found a 600 word non-human story A GIRL FOR ALL SEASONS that needs some filler.

Plus a historical fiction story that runs, gad, forever at 8500 words. It needs some work but is mostly good to go. I call it ANIMAL CRACKERS.
 
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Read the first F. Scott Fitzgerald story from TALES OF THE JAZZ AGE. It was excellent till the end, when it fell apart. A true WTF resolution. Fitzgerald wrote marvelous prose, and knew how to cobble a story together, but his endings suck. I call them 'punts'.

Fitzgerald was famous (infamous?) for fudging his endings. One English teacher I had used him as an example of how not to end a story.
 
Fitzgerald was famous (infamous?) for fudging his endings. One English teacher I had used him as an example of how not to end a story.

It really did suck. Of course, Fitzgeralds ending sucked, too.
 
Maybe she snuck off with a guy, Chubby.

LUTZ --
Someone stole her girlfriend.

At least that's what deputies say a Spring Hill woman was shouting at bargoers around 2 a.m. Sunday while smashing glasses and spitting on people at the International Beer Garden in Lutz.

Deputies say Deborah Gavish, 31, had been drinking and became unruly, yelling at patrons and threatening to beat them up.

When the bar owner, disc jockey and an off-duty detective asked her to leave, deputies say, the 5-foot-8, 225-pound Gavish became even more angry and began smashing pint glasses on the bar floor.

They say she even threw a bottle across the room.

Luckily, no customers were hit.

Deputies arrived at the scene and after seeing the broken glass, arrested Gavish. She is charged with two counts of simple battery and criminal mischief.
 
BLOCKHEADS and IMPOSTERS is what Charles Dickens called teachers. H.L.Mencken used pretty much the same terms, and added: WOMEN and 3rd RATE MEN.

Sampled one more F. Scott Fitzgerald story then deleted the file from my Kindle. But he did capture the stereotypes of bored, rich, young people of every era.
 
BLOCKHEADS and IMPOSTERS is what Charles Dickens called teachers. H.L.Mencken used pretty much the same terms, and added: WOMEN and 3rd RATE MEN.

Sampled one more F. Scott Fitzgerald story then deleted the file from my Kindle. But he did capture the stereotypes of bored, rich, young people of every era.

Can't help feeling that FSF was 'of his time'.
 
Can't help feeling that FSF was 'of his time'.

Youre right. My grandparents were married in the 20s, and all of them were stamped from the same batch of dough. The 20s were Make Believe and the 30s were too much reality for them.
 
Submitted an 800 word story. I used the NONCONSENT tag tho several categories applied.
 
Dirty Pixtures
 

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So last night I made a stab at identifying what it is that sux me into a story. That is, what creates trance?

The official answer is: Different strokes 4 different folks. What grabs you is what resonates with your fund of experiences and appetites. And one size don't fit all.

And that insight opened Pandora's box of characterization, and prolly explains how readers score stories.
 
Ordered EXQUISITE CORPSE by Poppy Z. Brite. I found one of her stories in an anthology that includes a story by Gahan Wilson, the strange Playboy cartoonist.

Almost done writing my vampire story. I don't know that its all that frightening but its consistent with vampire theory. There are different kinds of vampires, and some even work the day shift. But in this tale blood sucking vampires and psychic vampires (they use humans to do evil deeds) tag-team people, to feed and exploit.

Then I'm gonna overhaul an old tale I wrote about Florida's prison farms circa late 1800s. A tourist is robbed by a dear friend while visiting her home, and when she complains to the woman's daddy she is abducted and taken to a wilderness camp, to cook for the inmates, and service the warden. When the warden cant get it up she is tied to a post and whipped. She escapes after trading her soul to Satan, who sets fire to the camp. She is captured by Crackers, escapes death by an alligator, and is possessed by a vampire when freedom seems certain. Its around 14K words.

About noon Old Man Fleming re-appeared with three guards and was carrying a strange looking object Joanne had never seen before. The old man noticed her looking at it.

“It’s what we call a ‘black aunty,” he said, smiling. “It’s for discipline.”

Joanne studied it from where she stood. From its wood handle stretched a two-ply leather strap five feet long and four inches wide. Old Man Fleming smeared oil of some kind on the straps, then coated them with sand.
“It’s for discipline, he said and smiled at her.
 
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My grandson got his name in the paper yesterday. He wasn't arrested. No feel-good affirmative action Chelsea Clinton trophy, either.

He was the losing pitcher in a conference play-off game.

He got in the paper cuz he almost whipped the other team, and forced them to sweat bullets for their win. His team led till the end. The other team's #1, and a loss woulda killed their plan for another title.

So the sports writer was impressed with my grandsons grit and talent. My grandson is 15 and 6'-3".
 
Spent the evening looking at samples of the best descriptive prose. I wasn't impressed, though F.Scott Fitzgerald is prolly the best at it.

So I kept looking for what it is that sux readers in to the story. Excellent description doesn't do it alone. What does it is simply depicting what resonates with the reader, what touches the reader's fund of experience and understanding. And if the reader has no comparable experience or insight the writing is lost on him. Secret hunger also does it.
 
Downloaded several Charles Dickens novels onto my Kindle. All free. Reading NICHOLAS NICKLEBY.

Bought a bag of peanuts to plant in the garden. They will grow here, I grew peanuts when I was a kid. Summer is tough on most crops, but okra, peanuts, sweet potatoes, cotton, and cukes do okay here.

Got jury duty next week.
 
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