Little, happy, beautiful things 1-5

January 8, 2011

1. Warm coffee on a cold morning.

2. Waking up to a mound of cats curled sleepily across your legs.

3. Taking a HOT shower after a long afternoon playing outside in the snow. At first your toes are a little numb and the simple pressure of your weight on the soles of your feet as you step into the shower sends small needles of almost-pain zipping up your legs and then you close your eyes and put your head back, letting the water run through your hair, down your neck and the steam swirls around you as heat slowly seeps back into your body and you feel calm and warm and happy.

4. Finishing an amazing book and immediately reaching for another.

5. Going for walks late at night when it’s snowing and it’s so quiet that you can actually hear snowflakes tinkle gently as they land in ever-growing heaps, slowly eating up all the sidewalks and the cars and the houses, and there is no one else around and the world seems like it’s asleep and dreaming.

It’s winter time. I’ve been cold a lot lately. This may have influenced a few of my selections.

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Haiku 02

January 7, 2011

Alone together,

we are all adrift. Searching.

For dry land. For home.

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Wallace the cat

January 6, 2011

The smallest feline is a masterpiece.

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Book love <3333

January 5, 2011

Reading is a thing that people do.

Smart people.

People who want to experience new ideas and places and points of view. People who want to improve their vocabularies and their ability to actually think, think, think. People who want to increase their general level of awesomeness. After a great deal of pondering, I have come to the conclusion that reading might just be the best way a person can spend their free time. And I’m a smartypants, so I’m probably right.

But maybe I just say that because I read a lot and I want to feel good about myself. In 2010 I read 81 books. In 2009 I read 83 books. I started keeping a book log late in 2008. It’s a really handy tool for not only keeping track of which books you’ve read (obviously) but also how your tastes and preferences change over time. The books people choose to read speak volumes (zing!) about them.

Right now, my five favorite authors are Kevin Brockmeier, Richard Brautigan, Italo Calvino, Kurt Vonnegut, and Mark Twain. All of these gentlemen are incredibly talented at both 1) coming up with beautiful, compelling stories to tell and 2) transcribing their ideas to paper in a way that is simple and elegant and moving. So many authors are terribly good at either coming up with ideas or writing their ideas down, but it is not common for an individual to posses both of these skills.

When I started keeping my book log, I hadn’t even heard of three of of those people. There are so many books and authors in this world!

For this reason, I love, love, love getting book recommendations from people and finding new authors because chances are I haven’t even come close to discovering my all time favorite author yet. If you have a book that you like best, please let me know. I’d love to read it.

In the future I’ll probably try my hand at writing more formal reviews/recommendations, but for now this will have to do.

Books completed so far in 2011: 1
Currently Reading: Nine Fairy Tales by Karel Čapek and One More Thrown in for Good Measure

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Ficly 01

January 4, 2011

Hello!

Today the universe insisted that I write my first piece of flash fiction for this project. I went over to ficly.com and picked a challenge that I thought sounded interesting. Challenges are essentially prompts, providing a bit of direction for a story, which is nice because I generally have trouble thinking of what I should write about. Sometimes whoever submitted the challenge picks a winner, but it’s mostly just for fun.

On Ficly, stories are limited to 1024 characters.

I like the site a lot because there’s a fair amount of content and users submit new stories and challenges regularly. However, the site isn’t so huge that newly submitted stories are quickly wiped off of the “Recently Submitted” section, so other people actually have a chance to read your stories and give you feedback. There aren’t many trolls lurking about, either, so comments are usually pretty nice.

The challenge I selected can be viewed here.

And my super-awesome-A+ story is here.

Feel free to leave me tons o’ nice comments.

Or mean, nasty ones.

I can take it. I’m real tough.

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