Odd Trapezoid

Today, the online arm of The Normal School is running a flash fiction piece of mine, "MicroDry." Hooray! I wrote this piece as an exercise for my workshop class last semester, and then I tinkered with it until it was send-out-able, and then The Normal School said "Yeah, we like that," and now I'm directing you to it here.

Warning! It uses dialect. I love writing in dialect, but this acceptance is nearly the first positive reaction I've gotten for it from anyone, so if you (along with many others) hate dialect, don't click. The original exercise derived from a series of photographs, but it mutated a bit. I meant to experiment with tone; I think/hope that "MicroDry" can read as comedy or as existentially troubling, depending on your general worldview and specific mood.

I was not thinking of George Saunders, who writes about the blackest existential trouble with a tone as light and frothy as a mousse made by Jane Austen. No, not that. I think I was partially thinking of those utter weirdos who ruined Lawrence of Arabia for us by laughing at every line in the film. Asking myself, and the reader: what's the result when you inelegantly slap one mood on top of a completely different mood? Mostly, though, I was thinking of these two particular characters, and the odd trapezoid of space and time where they meet for 1,500 words. A trapezoid I found neither funny nor tragic but something else.

If you came here from there, thank you for paying me that compliment. You've come just at the wrong time, because this is my last blog post for a while, I think. (The previous post was about that.) But there's plenty here to read, and I'd like to invite you to subscribe to my blog via email, which, if you're reading this in a web browser, you can do by entering your email address in the box in the frame to the right that is labeled "Follow by Email". That way, when I do post again, you'll know - you won't have to keep checking. You can also "join" the site by clicking on the eponymous button, although I really wish Blogger would use a different word than "join", because you're not joining it in any typical sense of that word, you're just adding it to the list of blogs you follow through your Google account. This joining business is helpful to me, because I can see how many people are interested in reading my blog. I don't know how to find out how many people follow it via email.

Anyway. I hope you enjoy/ed "MicroDry" and I hope to see you again sooner or later.