Tuesday, December 06, 2011

The violence

I get to be part of the Writing Salon's Round Robin this week! I'm substituting for somebody who left town in a hurry. Today's prompt is The violence. We write 10-12 minutes from that prompt, and email it to our partner of the week. I cleaned mine up a little for you:



I'm having two books for five-year-olds published in 2013. This means that soon I'll be able to say I'm a writer. Every day I've been opening up Publishers Weekly, and imagine how exciting it was this morning when I saw a link to this article:

12 Holiday Gifts That Writers Will Actually Use

Oh boy! A list of gifts people could buy for ME some day. I clicked right over.

#1 was A CHEESY NEW BESTSELLER. Thanks, but no thanks. Unless it's this one.

#2 was GOOD LIPSTICK. Yes! That's a good one! But how would you know what color? Everything I apply to my lips or face turns orange. So just in case you're wondering what color to get me, it needs to be something with lots of blue in it, because blue neutralizes orange.

#3 was FOREIGN LANGUAGE LEARNING SOFTWARE. "Most writers wish they knew more languages," the article claimed. Ha, ha, ha, ha! I'm laughing myself silly over this one. I've never learned my own language and I have to look up any word longer than 6 letters. Plus, I never leave my neighborhood.

But #4 was the killer: A BATHROBE.

"...As Ann Beattie recently revealed, and as a generation of bloggers already knows, most writers wear awful clothing while they are working. Help your writer friend out by giving her a beautiful robe to cover up her bizarre ensembles."

The violence of that assumption!

I stopped reading and stomped into the other room. Then I glanced in the mirror.

I was wearing orange striped bed socks with UGGS. A pair of 10-year-old size large pajama pants covered with different types of faded sushi. A turquoise mock turtleneck that smelled bad. On top of that was a dirty discount sweater that had never worked out. The left side hung down 8 inches past the right side because the buttons were buttoned not ONE-BUTTON-OFF, but TWO-BUTTONS-OFF.

In case you're interested, here's the link to the Holiday Gift article.

p.s. #7 and #10 are great ideas.