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I’ve been watching YouTube videos for my AutoMFA this morning. I’ve had the Brandon Sanderson Sci-Fi course series playing in a loop in the background on the Amazon Echo 15 in the bedroom and the TV wall hanging in my office while I putter with building the server farm for photos and calibre library, and my digital garden which may not actually turn out to be a digital garden if my AI assistant and I add much more tech to it!

But this morning, a guest lecture by Mary Robinette Kowal on Writing Short Stories immediately caught my attention and I stopped everything to load her into the laptop YouTube app, where I have note taking apps set up!

IDK what’s happened to me exactly but the didactic writing and literature lectures no longer make me start to hurl. I wonder what this means, coming on the heels of a global pandemic that has changed my life and my identity completely?

So far this morning, I’ve learned the MICE Narrative Structure of Stories, which Mary has kindly explained in both narrative and computer code, so I get it. I’m going to ask one of the gAImodes to help me write a “story script” based on this that we will test, but I’m also thinking about adding this to the digital garden as an amusement. I’m not sure if it will still be a digital garden, but if I document what I’m learning via setting up the script for visitors, well, that ought to count.

Mary assigned us to write a 250 word flash fiction, in sci-fi genre, gave us a charactor (jockey) and an object (coaster) plus 3 minutes to write 3 sentences.

My ADHD med is wearing off, so I got distracted, looked up a few things, checked for something new from Kathy Fish on substack and responded to a 3 month old post from Sara Lippman asking if she can exist without a stack!

It was hard to find Kathy Fish’s stack in my subscriptions, so I went back to my email and didn’t find a recent Kathy Fish stack announcement, but in a quick glance at email titles, I saw the greatest line for a story that’s been germinating:

“Three moons and a dancing crab” has one of the rhythms that I like for titles and general sentences in my stories and even in my shitty poems.

For me, starting a new writing project includes a trigger by sound and rhythm of a title or opening sentence. I save these phrases and sentences and when a writing seizure starts, I go to my ‘bits’ and harvest what I need, like fresh greens from my salad garden.

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