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“Did you hear that?
That’s the sound of
me
throwing my
Dale Carnegie book
into the trash.”

Eventually, so few people
bothered to vote any more
all they had to do was
gas the voting booths on election day
to get rid of the remaining
troublemakers.

A girl lives in a castle, surrounded by enormous wealth. She is ignored by virtually everyone. Unbeknownst to her, she is also the source of all this wealth.
A woman she believes is her mother lives with her in the castle. This woman is very sad and still, quiet and pale.
The castle is run by a cold man with a ridiculous mustache.
Even though the girl is surrounded by great food, pastries aplenty, etc., she can sense something’s wrong with the situation. You can too. So you apply for a job as their chimney sweep. And you get it, because you’ve got a certain spark.
Every day, as soon as your work is done, you get to work cheering the girl up, bringing a little fun back to her life. Once you’ve gained her trust, you tell her the truth of the situation, which is this:
The girl’s parents died years ago. The woman she thinks is her mother is actually an employee of this corporation which has taken over their assets. All the money is really the child’s, and if she can only get herself to a certain vault, hidden deep within a set of far-off mountains, she can prove her identity (fitting her hand into a flexible, metallic machine designed to preserve the shape of the left hand as a child grows).
And so off she goes. Off you both go. And the adventures you have!

If you love yourself even a little, check out TMBG.com — They Might Be Giants home on the web.
I have enjoyed this band for, like 19 years. Gack! After sort of burning out on them, I went to a recent show and I was shocked at how much fun I had. They opened with a sequence they call the “Venue Songs.” And man, I’m telling you, I was so thoroughly entertained by these tunes, I actually bought them. Shake before my love!
And now they’re posting free videos from this set, one per week, on their ever-lovin’ web site. Gack gack! So-called Cars fans (and you know who you are), don’t miss “Vancouver.” Is all I’m saying. Click through to the main site for lots more free goodness. It’s like all of a sudden they’re the Crazy Eddie of cerebral pop goof-rock vibrations.

A few years ago I finally figgered out a really obvious thing: that writing’s only one part inspiration/ability. Duh, I know. But there I was, waiting for the spirit of F. Scott to sieze control of my spine, to toss me into my deskchair and start my finger bones pounding out Gatsby II: The Reckoning. And it weren’t happening.
Through fits and also through starts, I figured out a few get-yourself-to-write techniques that seem to help. For a while now, I’ve meant to blog about these, to keep track of them, to share them, and to see if anyone out there wants to jump in with a technique or three of their own. One of my habits changed recently, so I thought that might make for a good opportunity to kick this off. I’m talking of course, about notebooks.
I subscribe to the big-notebook, little-notebook school o’ thought, wherein a little notebook is kept in pocket to jot down random ideas, dialog, observation, and shtick that arrive at unexpected moments (this came from Anne Lamotte, author of my beloved Bird by Bird) who talks about always having a few index cards shoved in your back pocket.) The big notebook is for what Julia Cameron (author of The Artist’s Way) calls “morning pages” — three pages a day, written every day, to uncork whatever ferment you’ve got in ya.
For the last six months or so, I’ve dropped from doing morning pages most days to writing three pages once or twice a week. Part of the problem was that three pages was a big enough forced-writing mandate that it only fit into my two chunks of scheduled writing time on the weekend. Also, it had pretty much devolved into pure journal. Which is not entirely a bad thing. I like having a running record of life as it’s lived. But it wasn’t really what I was looking for.
So I made two minor changes about a week ago that seem to be helping: (1) I cut down my per-page obligation to just one little page a day. A small enough bite that I can work it into my commute, or my the-kids-are-being-read-stories-by-my-better-half time. (2) Journalling is still part of the process, but each day I make sure I also write at least one paragraph of fiction. And I try to keep it a little random. No more of that “there’s a guy, and he’s sitting in a coffee shop stuff” I tend to write when, as a guy, I find myself sitting in a coffee shop.
So far, it’s an improvement. I wrote all but one day over the last week. And with the no-pressure-groove that comes with the one-page minimum, I find I’m shpieling a bit and ending up with a few extra pages most days. All told, I have something like 16 pages from the last week instead of the usual 3-6. Oh yeah, it helped that I also went to a smaller size notebook….
So OK, enough about me. What about youse? Any writing techniques you care to share today, notebookly or otherwise?

I have seen you eat eggs, and it’s a fearsome sight.
If I was an egg, and you looked in the window, I would start to cry. I wouldn’t have any legs, so I’d just rock back and forth, thin tears tracing down the hard shell of my face.
Now maybe you’d surprise me and not eat me. Maybe you’d wipe off my shell and make me your pet.
But still, if you ever ate eggs in front of me, with a fork or something, that would gross me out. And I’d be like: “Dude, don’t eat eggs in front of your egg pet.”
And you’d say: “Don’t worry, I only eat dead eggs.”
Like that made it OK.

The absurdity of sports was really bothering him now.
The idea of rooting for this team or that team.
Some group of people wearing a costume
similar to a costume
he used to react favorably to
when he was young. Or at least younger.
Some subset of super-athletes whose contracts matched.
Whose agents got along.
“You might as well root for a cloud,”
he thought.
“Or for some portion of a cloud.”