Drabble (2) Monday, May 07, 2007 |
On cold --"January the first was his birthday. I remember: tying a scarf round my neck; pulling on a coat over just too many layers and feeling uncomfortably hot; being so eager and just a little sick to get outside that I ran out in trainers, not my boots - feeling the cold ache and dampness as snow melted into them. Mom had bought a long roll of card that read 'Happy Birthday' and I paced it out into the snow under the window. The ends began to roll after me, so I took off my shoes to weigh each end down, barefoot."
It's a horrible today; rainy and humid as hell (though hell would probably be quite dry...) so I'm thinking cold thoughts and sat in front if the fan in my room. Digging through my moleskein (a present from then brunette) for things to post, I found this. Date says January 30th which was the first time we had proper snow in Cambridge while I've been there, so I blew off work to fuck around in the snow with Henry and then went to the library to write this. The picture at the top is one Henry took, and should be on a Selwyn post card to be honest. It's a view of the gardens and chapel. As for the memory that prompted this story; my dad's birthday. Not sure how old I was, but everything else is really clear. I can even remember which trainers I was wearing; my first 'trendy' ones, Nike's I think. I also remember when they got so ratty my mom gave them to a charity shop. She had to wait till I'd gone to school, because that was pretty much the only time I took them off, even though my toes were starting to stick out at the front. As you can tell, I was rather attached to those trainers...
Tune of the moment: C'mon Girl - The Red Hot Chili Peppers
Jac
Labels: drabbles, fiction
Drabble (1) Friday, May 04, 2007 |
(From
Wikipedia)
drabble, n.A Drabble is an extremely short work of fiction with exactly one hundred words, although the term is often misused to indicate a short story of less than 1000 words. The purpose of the drabble is brevity and to test author's ability to express interesting and meaningful ideas in an extremely confined space.
(From me)
drabble, n."Before Hestor, Dog-fi (that is, 'Dogmatic Fiction'), well, the whole scene had just been a complete joke. Hestor J. Cole rescued the genre from pulp novels in charity shop bargain bins, with their faded covers depicting Saints with wash-board abs and bulging biceps (and the compulsory big-titted buxom virgin in a torn shift), and broken and well-thumbed spines. Hestor made Dog-fi intelligent, and he made it respectable. Big blonde Christian boys from Alabama read it. Earnest young ministers with dog-collars so new they didn't need starch discussed it in the refectory. Hell, the sixteenth Dali Lama in exile was reading it when he got hit by a bus."
Wrote that a while ago. Comes in at one hundred and fourteen words, but I doubt there's such a thing as a drabble purist to criticise me. Hestor J. Cole is a rather thinly veiled parody of
Philip K. Dick, who I am quite of fan of. He was a prolific short story writer famous for his science fiction, but his work was much more philosophical, realist and human than most sci-fi. He was also a film producer's wet dream; writing a great deal of stories with a 'gimmick' that could be expanded into a Hollywood blockbuster without the plot restricting the scope for action filled set peices.
A Scanner Darkly,
Blade Runner,
Paycheck and Minortiy Report are all adapted from Dick short stories, with varying degrees of fidelity. However, he also wrote
The Man in the High Castle , an alternate history novel set in 1962, fifteen years after the Axis Powers defeated the Allies in World War II. If I remember rightly I'd just finished reading it at the time I wrote the above drabble. The idea was to mirror the concept of a prolific Sci-Fi writer in a science dominated world with a similar figure in a religion dominated one. Hence 'Dogmatic Fiction'.
Tune of the moment: Heatwave - Martha Reeves & The VandellasJacLabels: drabbles, fiction
