The Kit, Part 1, The Notebook

I was gifted a small yellow moleskin notebook once. I get gifted notebooks very often, actually. It comes with part I play as writer, I'm sure. I have, of course, my favorite notebook, the 9.75 x 7.5 wide ruled composition notebook. They're durable with sewn pages and a thick cover and a tough spine. But when I'm gifted a notebook, I always say thanks and I do my best to fill the pages with my terrible handwriting.

Back in the fall of 2010, someone gifted me a small yellow Moleskin notebook. I say small, because it was maybe 3” by 5”. It was not ruled, and that I appreciated. At any rate, I was working as a waiter at a dying restaurant at the time and I often had time to kill during my shifts. In that little notebook, I decided I would write a short story. I wrote a strange piece called “For the Love of Prosperity.” It proved to be a very short story and with several pages remaining in the little notebook, I wrote an even shorter short story called, “Funeral Tea.”

A Revision: in the time to eat lunch

A few weeks back I wrote out my list for short fictions to read during a lunch hour.

I would like to revise the Richard Brautigan story "The Weather in San Francisco" for this one:

Characterization

Is this chart valuable for you as you develop your characters?

In the time it takes to eat lunch

I'm an incredibly fast eater. It happens to those of us who have had to eat in a rush. I won't even sit down. I'll hold my plate with one hand and eat with the other. It's not attractive, I know, but it's what I do. Even when I slow down, I'm still finished eating within seconds. Ultimately it's because I have always felt like eating is a chore and I'd rather be outside playing.

I bring it up only because I've recently read Rachel Grate's 14 Brilliant Pieces of Literature You Can Read in the Time it Takes to Eat Lunch. I agree with her list, fully and totally. She has picked some great pieces of literature.

But I eat very fast.

So here's my list:

1. "Happy Endings" Margaret Atwood
2. "Girl" Jamaica Kincaid
3. "The Elephant" Slawomir Morzek
4. "An Episode of War" Stephen Crane
5. "A Clean, Well-lighted Place" Ernest Hemingway
6. "Midnight Mass" Paul Bowles
7. "On Meeting the 100% Most Perfect Girl One Fine April Morning" Haruki Maurakami
8. "Homage for Issac Babel" Doris Lessing
9. "Crossing into Poland" Issac Babel
10. "The Dead Man" Jorge Luis Borges
11. "The Dead Man" Horacio Quiroga
12. "The Weather in San Francisco" Ricard Brautigan
13. "The Other Wife" Collette
and if you can eat slowly, and I mean slowly:
14. Things That Hang From Trees by T.A. Louis

Short Story advice from Roberto Bolano

I pinched this one from Biblioklept.

I feel like I'm always mired in step one.