Michigan's Missing Glove
Meet SoundbiteStory! A new and improved Twitter brought to you by Jessica.
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So… my Twitter profile “NotLikeEggs” wasn’t doing much. If you were curious about that name, by the way, it comes from how people learn my last name and say, “Oh, Hatch like an egg!” No. Not like an egg, dammit.
It was yet another way to keep in touch with friends and celebrities, and I didn’t need one more thing to check every time I logged onto my computer.
…unless it had another purpose.
Enter SoundbiteStory. I wanted it to be called “SoundbiteStoryhour,” which is catchier and more apropos, but Twitter has a thing about maximum character limits, y’know. At any rate, I’ll still use Twitter to chitchat on the side, but starting tomorrow, once a day, everyday, I will post off and on for an hour and create a little short story to entertain my readers. It probably won’t be great everyday, but hopefully it will be worth tuning into.
One hour. One story. Exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, denouement. Each and every day.
Hemingway once wrote, “For sale. Baby Shoes. Never worn.” This is the world’s shortest story, poignant and presenting a message in thirty-three characters. I’ll try to live up to his example in 140-character posts. One at a time. Over the course of an hour.
Anticipating the School Year
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I miss having free access to the OED online.
I miss Bodo’s Sundays.
I miss the libraries and the lovely architecture.
…especially the Harry Potter Room.
I miss social living.
I miss having a tight schedule and actually needing to use my planner.
I MISS WRITE CLUB!
I’m itching to get started on Voices of the Class.
I can’t wait for Fondue Fridays and Monday dinners in Lambeth.
I miss the opportunity to do great things at every turn.
I miss living in a city that has approximately twice as many people as Chester and more restaurants per capita than New York City.
I miss Thomas Jefferson, UVA, the whole shebang – I’m a Wahoo through and through (I even miss “The Good Ol’ Song”) – and I can’t wait to move back in!
…just 30 more days…
(I’m working on my proposal to gain entrance into Intermediate Fiction Writing, so maybe starting on that will make term get here faster.)
Jessica’s Gothic Romance Rides Again!
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Smog filled the air and couldn’t stop until it felt like smoke entering in under a door. The streetlamps glowed orange. It was a stereotypical murder mystery scene, right down to the steps clicking in well-polished heels down the empty pavement. Clip clop. Clip. Clop.
Silence otherwise. The man didn’t really seem to breathe. His cloak tied up around his chin to ward off the December air. Northern Europe could be cruel to beggars e’er Christmas. No one at all on the street, though. No Dickensian cheer, or even bleakness.
He passed St. James’ Park and thought he owned the world. When no one else was there to disturb his thoughts, he could make himself believe he owned the still pond broken into ripples only by swan wings. Just like his footsteps on the pavement. This was his world, this place of shadows and light. His imagination owned it all. He was not even English. He did not dare open his mouth and break his own little reality. But what if he were English, and not from Yonkers? Would he find these five minutes before midnight as magical as he did? Or would it just be another late night walk home from the pub after last call?
A few blocks over Big Ben sang in his tower and a harsh wind whipped past the buildings from the Thames. December in London and it was beginning to snow. ‘Snow, snow, snow…’ Ben said.
He would not be going back to her flat. She’d kicked him out this afternoon when the grey sun glinted harshly off of office windows. It seemed harsh and clinical, somehow like this night, but a lot less inky. The night was undulating, and honestly if he couldn’t find a hotel, he could talk his feet into walking around ’til daybreak. Ribbons and roses and leaves scattering on the ground. He was stuck in a Romantic nightmare.
Oh, ridiculous. Ah, fool-hearted. No one else walked on the street because no one else waltzed with madness at midnight. He did and he felt it in his heart. Maybe if he walked til morning he would find his heart exploding in the modernity of the Underground thrumming beneath his feet.
Tags: black lace, epic fail, fog, Gothic style, idealistic, London, quixotic, Romanticism, rose
Spiral, a Work of Creative Fiction
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© Jessica Hatch 2009
I continue to find abandoned snail shells on the driveway, outside the house, right beside the itchy grass of the backyard. Desiccated little filaments and fledglings that have been done away with. Done in. And lots of other things beginning with the letter “D.” It makes me wonder where the little inhabitants of these little habitats have crawled off to. Can they survive alone without that shell? Maybe they outgrew their homes, went to too many garage sales, bought one too many naked lady lamps – you know, the ones with the black fringe around the shade – and had to move into a new shell, another spiral.
The spiral, these shells tell me, is supposed to be the most perfect shape in the universe. I wonder if that snail with all the stuff knew that before he left. The spiral is everywhere in the universe. Furious maelstroms and docile desiccated snail shells. It’s perfect and eternal and the snail bought out of it.
Maybe he wondered why it’s called a “downward spiral.” Spirals are repetitive. You get stuck in a rut and just do the same things over and over again. You can watch yourself last Monday waking up in the late afternoon just as you are right now, sitting in the browning sunlight that laps over your skin and makes it look like you kind of sort of have a tan. You haven’t had a tan since 1985.
Don’t worry though, the snail hasn’t ever had a tan either. When he exits his shell – his safe, repetitive, dusty eternity – he is scorched and dissolves or sautés into oblivion. There is no hope for him or for anyone who is captivated by these little round orbs sitting on a white windowsill.
There’s a gentle music in the air, and it knows how fragile this little house is. If you hadn’t spied it while crouching in on the step looking after the cat, if instead you’d gone walking across the cement porch, you could have crushed it into a fine powder. There would be no record of this snail, its past, all of its fifties pin-up themed furniture. And if that’s what will happen to the snail with his secure little spiral, what hope do we have?
I Want to be the Next John Updike.
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After musing over my fiction writing and the arc it has followed to this point, I have decided I want to write fiction about a realistic middle class, not the happy ice cream and sunshine one in 1950s Technicolor.
Until now, my fiction arc went: Really Badly Written Stuff about Love (early middle school, when every girl was discovering puberty and the opposite/same sex), Really Badly Written Fantasy Fan Fiction (middle to late middle school, when I discovered Lord of the Rings), Slightly Better Stand-Alone Fantasy Fiction (9th grade), Crazy Awesome Slightly Mythical but Mainly Period Piece Novels about Foppish Pirates (10th grade), Thom the Rare Books Dealer and Bernard the Quixotic Expat in a More Realistic and Gritty but Still Exotic Vein (Summer after 11th grade ’til now). My writing seems to be taking a lazily meandering path towards realism and things I know about, so why not the middle class? Many current authors overlook it in favor of the very rich, the very poor, or even those societies in other worlds and/or other time periods. I mean, check out the general fiction shelves at your friendly neighborhood Barnes and Noble! I think the middle class needs more fictional representation. With few other worries (sometimes money, sometimes affairs), the middle class has a big emotional concern with death, loss, and sickness. Maybe money and love affairs fit under loss… Anyway, this big emotional concern can lend a lot of weight to conflict, struggle, and character development.
So. Just thought I’d share my ideas with you fine people. Be on the lookout for some short stories as I experiment with my potential new vision!
Church Camp! the musical.
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I know I’m really spazzy and probably talk too fast, but I haven’t had an inspiration to write something (much less a musical — don’t think that’s ever happened) in a very long time! (Dude… check out my biceps!!)
Also, does anyone know how to get Sharpie permanent marker off of wood?
Tags: Christianity, church, Church Camp! The Musical, musicals, show tunes, the Bible, Writing
Exercise in Anxiety
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It’s definitely not the best thing I’ve ever written, it’s not even fiction, but it was good enough to continue scribbling even after my cereal was done (which is the minimum amount of time I’m forcing myself to write during the day. It’s surprising how a person can get inspired in five minutes). Anyway, here it is, raw and uncut.
**
‘What’s wrong with mushy cereal?’ That came out defensive. Been reading people wrong lately.
‘It’s just that, when you sit there writing, you go away for hours – I’ve seen it, and seen the cereal disintegrate into semi-circles, after poofing up into massive Michelin man rings.’
Ok, this also sucks. Can’t think of anything while Mom yammers on to the fatter cat. But you have to write, even when not inspired. That’s what a writer does. Otherwise I might be stuck doing half a novel for the rest of my life. The best-seller that wasn’t quite.
What has HAPPENED to Mom in the past two years? It’s the most degenerated I’ve ever seen her. If two years ago you’d said, “Mrs. Hatch? Yeah, your husband’s gonna leave you for his co-worker, your son will choose to live with him, your daughter will stay with you – grown bitter and angry in her removal from friends at such a “tender age” – and even she will leave you for college, entrusting you to the care of your two cats.
“Oh, you’ll still get out: when your 78-year-old dad drives up to take you to church, the grocery store, their house every night for dinner, sometimes a movie. I know, because Tush lists these events every week in her letters, this sad collection of so many seashells they’ve chipped each other in clacking together.
“Don’t think they’re so immortal either, your parents. They’re almost eighty, and your dad has a heart flutter. This is not the time for illusions. What will happen to you when they pass on? It’s hard to imagine Cat Ladies paying the bills.”
What if I’d come, like the messenger of a prophecy, seventeen and shining with desperation in my long hair?
“There is nothing left but those broken scallop shells like little Dutch clogs. I look back to talk to you through the rear view mirror and see wrinkles around your mouth, ones that insist you’ve frowned a lot lately. You sit in the back seat, gaping as you stare out the window. It’s too young an expression to be endearing, too old and senile for you to be wearing it, but it’s especially terrifying when seen through a mirror.
Voices of the Class Post 2
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I got the part! I am part of the Voices of the Class ensemble cast 2009!
Things are finally looking up for Jessica theatrically at UVA. I am so excited for next fall.
Tags: acting, playwriting, Spectrum Theatre, SUCCESS, UVA, Voices of the Class
Boys on the Docks
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I must be out of my mind.
I mean, isn’t NaNoWriMo enough?
But no. I’m a writer. I’m an overachiever. I must therefore be an overachieving writer (that’s a chiasm, by the way).
Script Frenzy, NaNoWriMo’s sister project for April, is quickly approaching. I wasn’t going to do it. “No,” I said. “I have much too much work. I have to apply for summer jobs while getting As in my classes. There is NO time for me to write a one-hundred page script in thirty days. Especially since I’m not inspired to do so.”
Oh dear. I should not have included that final clause. Tonight I became inspired to participate after revisiting my Dropkick Murphys musical idea. I said, “Ah well, one hundred pages in thirty days? That’s what, three pages a day? And it’s script format. That’s ridiculously large margins.”
I don’t think I’ll ever learn.
But at least I’ll have a little blog miniseries (if you will) in the month of April… keep you readers up to date on my progress. For now, here is my Script Frenzy author page. And the poster I made for my musical.
Dropkick Murphys musical poster
The musical will take Dropkick Murphys songs and characters to describe the lives of protagonist Johnny, his wife Shannon, and his best friend Andy, and their interactions with the underbelly of South Boston labor unions. It should be interesting… we’ll see.
Tell me what you think so far!! *is mildly excited and nervous*
Tags: Boston, Boys on the Docks, Dropkick Murphys, Irish Americans, NaNoWriMo, Script Frenzy
