#may writing

[aleheartilly]

May Writing Challenge

So, April challenge didn't go too well for me, since my injury gave me a hard time during the past weeks. But I wanted to congratulate @angelosearch who smashed through hers! Way to go 💪💪💪

I also started another writing challenge for May! It's open to everyone and all you need is a Pacemaker.press free account and a goal measured in words.

You can join here!

[tcstu]

Ekphrastic Fiction Contest Winner (May 2020)

The winner for this month’s contest is @wemitodd​​! Congratulations!!! You can read the winning submission below and then make sure to check out @wemitodd​​‘s page to see more work from this writer!

This writer was also the winner of my December 2019 contest. If you would like to see their previous winning entry, click here! There is also one Honorable Mention that will be posted later today.

As a reminder, this month’s feature is an untitled digital piece created by @muraokamiart​​. This artist has some incredibly interesting original art and fan art, so if you like this piece as much as I do, I hope you’ll visit this artist’s Tumblr page and also consider browsing through their work on this art shop!

Missing: Two Boys Vanish at Sea

Lain and Mike Nickles went out yesterday morning on their father’s fishing boat. They were meant to come back home in time for dinner but they never made it back to shore. Their father borrowed a neighbors boat and went to bring the boys home but found his boat abandoned in the middle of the water. Investigators have launched a lake wide search.

[charlie---writes]

Mid-May Roundup!

I haven’t been tagging people in my prompt responses because I didn’t want to keep spamming you! Instead, I was waiting to have a roundup :) 

Adventure -- [318 words] -- A missing scene of the moment the boy starts running. From “In Which Fate Has A Speaking Role”.

Faith -- [352 words] -- An observation of the distance between two brothers where one wants to make amends and one never wants to see the other. From “In Which Fate Has A Speaking Role”.

Float Downstream -- [307 words] -- Inspired by The Beatles song “Tomorrow Never Knows” for “Music Monday”. This is a second person flash fiction that’s a little about dissociation and a lot about realising your inner potential again.

Into The Wild -- [240 words] -- For “Flash Fiction Friday”. This is a second person flash fiction of someone going to bargain with the lady of the lake in a strange, potentially post-apocalyptic world.

If you don’t have time to read them all but would like to read something, I’m most proud of the last two (the fourth might even become an extended piece). 

Enjoy! :) Tag list under the cut.

@katerinarevel | @zigortega4life | @scribbles-to-feed-the-void | @aurumni-writes | @endlesshourglass | @starlitesymphony | @reininginthefirewriting | @the-real-rg | @cjjameswriting | @human-nonsense | @alessia-writes | @soul-write | @maskedlady | @ashesconstellation | @dreamswithadashofspice | @skyfootsteps | @omgbrekkerkaz | @letterstomidnightkids | @georgiacambrielwritblr | @mgcorvo-author | @if-only-we-could-read-it | @yetmorestories | @ohnoitsthebat | @mvcreates | @quilloftheclouds

[wordslikeflowers]

Every passing touch was something to breathe for- now look at us, kissing on the stairs and making love in the halls. It may not be electric anymore, but that's only because we are making our homes in each other's fire these days.

We have come a ways from friendly chatter over beer.

[itsalloverbabyblue]

Female Musicians Part III - Pure Heroine, Lorde, Miley, Taylor, and all the Other Girls

I grew up in the 1970s and 1980s, so my musical tastes are heavily shaped by folk music, dirty hippies singing about revolution and cocaine, bad bourbon breakups and the way the blues close you in. I got a fair amount of harder driving stuff there - Chrissie Hynde, Laura Brannigan, The Runaways, The Slits, Heart, right? Even Fleetwood Mac which has never been my groove because while I dig the 1970s I don't much love the sound of fighting and black lace gloves and spiteful breakups fueled by proximity and artistic differences.

But it's not like this is a new era of the girl in the spotlight. There's always going to be a girl in the spotlight, and we're always going to be condemning her for every poor choice or brash choice or good choice - for being too perfect, too preachy, too trashy, too crass, too raunchy, for writing her own shitty songs, for not writing her own shitting songs, for smoking up or dropping out or grinding on a dude twice her age or writing songs about her shitty teenage boyfriend.

And I've done it, man, I've done it, because there's a power in the art, in the rise to stardom fueled by the adoration of young women, of girls, really. And as a girl, a former girl, I guess, now a grown-ass woman, I see how hard it is to go from little girl to adolescent to adult, and I know how much I was guided by music, books, words, tv, and film. I know that if there had been a teen star that I worshipped, I'd have followed her anywhere. I mean we grew up with Madonna, right? I was too young to go through a Like A Virgin stage, but damned if I'd had the confidence I'd have shown up in a man's shirt and garters.  I didn't, and we're all grateful, but I had a lace bow for my hair, and I fixated a bunch more on the music and less on the fashion.

But once a sound grabs you, once the performance of power grabs you as a girl, you know that you've gotta figure out how to get some of that because literally everything else in your life is about how little power you truly have.

So while I don't get it all, musically, I groove to their presence, all those varieties of girls you can admire and love - Lorde's weird goth look and hypnotic sound, her talent and her sheer presence. Miley and that adventure she's taking herself on. Taylor and her evolution into a grown up version of the teenager my stepmother holds up as a paragon. The girls from Haim, with those guitar skills. Kacey Musgraves with that delightful sound and low impact bouncy anthem of love what you love and don't give the fucks.

I'm so glad those girls are out there. So, so glad.

[itsalloverbabyblue]

Our Time in Eden - Female Musicians Part II, Natalie Merchant

I'm not sure it's really fair to talk about Natalie Merchant as an artist because my connection to her music more or less stops with the 10,000 Maniacs MTV Unplugged album.  She's an interesting artist, an interesting musician, but her work outside of 10,000 Maniacs hasn't particularly resonated with me.

However, I can't dissociate my first year of college with In My Tribe, Our Time in Eden and Blind Man's Zoo any more than I could separate the experience of listening to The Pixies or Peter Gabriel or Graceland with that first year. It's not even a soundtrack so much as part of the warp and weft of that experience. It was that experience. Listening to those albums was the experience I was having and I don't have any critical distance to that.

The albums hold up - the lyrics retain a depth and prosaicness. They still avoid (just barely) preciousness in places. The arrangements are still deeply musical and deeply moving and don't feel dated, although it could be that my musical development is dated and they just feel right, in the same way that 7, Laid, Stutter and Strip Mine feel just right.  Those albums might as well be part of my DNA.

Coming back to the house/dorm I lived in at Bennington and hearing "These Our Days" spill out through the windows, onto the people sitting on the grass?  That's visceral, that's part of the things I remember about that year that weren't painful or lonely or bracing or uncomfortable. The music that became part of my life during that experience made me better, fuller, and richer, and I took it with me, letting my awareness and tastes broaden and deepen.

And I can't think of those albums without thinking of my friend Lori Ann who was a constant inspiration to me during that year and beyond, still is, in her unfailing constancy, brightness, fierceness, in the richness of her singing voice, her warm humor, her compassion and fight for justice, fight for everything.  All of my feelings about In My Tribe, all the richness of those songs, of Merchant's voice and her words, are too strongly tied into how much I loved my friends in that year where I figured out that I could belong to people, but I didn't belong to that place.  I listened to that album over and over again all summer after I'd left, trying to make it okay that I'd made everything change.

The tape player in my car, so much more used to The Wall, to the Depeche Mode cassette that someone had left in the console, to angry broken boys, didn't know what to do with the thoughtful, dreamy ferocity of 10,000 Maniacs.  Neither did I.

I don't think I have a favorite song, although "These Are Days" still makes me feel like that - warm, placed, dreamy, possible.  I love the way Merchant's voice can coo and growl without true aggression. I was fine with that, I could get aggression from other singers, but it wasn't passive either. It was quietly contained, raw where it needed to be.

It's possible I listened to "Verdi Cries" a thousand times that summer. I'm not ashamed.  It wasn't the first time, and it won't be the last, that I played a song into the grooves of my consciousness to get back a sense memory.

I think of Lori Ann and the strength of her voice when I hear 10,000 Maniacs. She has a growly sweetness to her voice not unlike Merchant did in the earliest albums, in the Wishing Chair, or on Pit Viper.  And sitting in a sun-spackled room, dust motes floating, hours of reading and writing and talking to be done, hearing Lori Ann sing was one of the best things I took from my year in Vermont.  And every time I see a 10,000 Maniacs album, I get a little big of that back.

[itsalloverbabyblue]

Heart Like a Wheel - Female Musicians Part I, Linda Ronstadt

There are a lot of little girls in my life right now, all at various stages of their growing up, and at various degrees of separation and contact. I wish, with all of them, that I had more time in their lives, that I had more of them in mine. They're all amazing. They all have amazing parents, and are becoming interesting, weird, funny, determined, talented people in their own right.

Recently, I had a request for some music suggestions for a girl who was broadening her sense of who she grooved to. Her mom wanted to help her build, and is recruiting from people she knows and loves, getting that wide exposure is the key to honing in on what moves you, what will move her daughter.

My own legacy with music that influences me is so tied to my family, both of my parents, really. I've written legions of words, whole battering soldiers of words on this, but a few steady presences have remained.  I don't really need to talk about why Bob Dylan would have been so important in my musical education, why I connected with his songs, his words, his presence in a sonic landscape.  But Dylan is canon now - love him, hate him, you've heard him or you've heard his songs, in the same way why you might not get down to Prince but if you love music, he's part of your landscape. His influence is huge, unavoidable, even if you don't know it.

But I want to talk about some of the female artists who've shaped my tastes and interests, because I think they get short shrift, get lost, often in talk of their image instead of the music they create.

So this week, I'm going to talk about a different female artist every day.

When I was about 8 or 9, my dad made my mom a tape labeled "Ladies." It was a bunch of Ricki Lee Jones, Janice Ian, Emmylou Harris, Joni Mitchell...pretty typical singer songwriters of the late 1970s and early 1980s.  I listened to it a lot, and when I got old enough to drive, that tape was on rotation in the car along with The Wall, and the Violent Femmes, and whatever else I'd stolen from my dad that he'd stolen from his students.  My favorite moment on it was when it rolled out of one of Hejira (not my favorite of Mitchell's oeuvre) into "Different Drum."  I'd rewind and play, rewind and play, partly because while my voice is a universe away from Ronstadt's, I could hit the highs and lows and singing that song felt so good, revolution good, Friday payday good, orgasm good.  It's a song of pitches, of lilts and longing, and it's so fast, and so yearning and still so bright. It's not a self-pitying song, just one about how pieces don't fit, and there's a little bittersweetness, and a whole bunch of I've already gotten through, and so much of that song is about her voice, that Queen of Rock n' Roll voice.

To Hear Different Drum

I learned about Buddy Holly and the Everly Brothers because of Linda Ronstadt. I knew Warren Zevon, and Mike Nesmith (who wrote Different Drum) and Patsy Kline. I discovered the entire American Songbook thanks to her albums with the Nelson Riddle orchestra. I shaped an entire study of jazz around the influence her voice and her song choices stirred up for me. She took everything she sang and made it bigger, bolder, and more wistful.

Ronstadt is someone I want to share because she made a career out of songs written by other people but made supremely her own. They've got personality, opinions, heft, and weight.  She understood how music plays on all of the things that make you yourself - warmth, dreams, hopes, ambition, secrets, heart.

I feel rich and heady when I listen to her, particularly her early albums and her book of standards (the later more adult contemporary stuff showcases her big voice, but doesn't resonate with me. There's nothing edgy there, no point being made, but that's okay. Her early cannon is supremely satisfying).

Her songs are voices and instruments, twangs and talks and taunts, and there's no electronic beat, just a drum and a heart and a bass. There's a lack of that now, so much music driven by digital dreaminess, and I think that's what I love.

And despite it being on a tape made by my dad, Ronstadt's music makes me think of my mom - joyous, enthusiastic, uncontained, so much about words and chains of melody, looping lyrical layers matched by a country-rock beat.  I love that part too.

That she can't sing any more is a tragedy.  That I can introduce someone new to her early work? That makes a huge difference. And she battled media attention when your sexy 1970s girl image and figure faded, when she was judged more on the merit of her body than on that remarkable voice, drive, and interpretation.  She had to publicly weather all sorts of denigrating publicity that was tied into the power she'd held, and the power she lost as the media tried to reconcile a female artist controlling her own destiny and no longer being a sex symbol, or asking for a transitional idea of what was sexy. 

I don't know that I think that most girls now will swoon to her singing "Round Midnight" or "Heart Like a Wheel" or "Crazy", you know? But there's a change, and I can hook them on "That'll Be the Day", I not only get to introduce them to one of my favorite artists, I get to open up a whole world of music to them.