Happy Halloween, folks! Well, there’s a day to go, but at least I’m not saying this in late September. Anyway, I didn’t think I was going to write anything for Halloween this year (and let it be known that no, I’m not doing NaNoWriMo, even though I thought about it because my decidedly non-author friend is planning to do it, but I’ve got enough on my plate as it is trying to wrap up Love&Darkness and maintain a 4.0 GPA at the same time), but my muse struck me the other day, and I came up with this one in about 24 hours. It’s my attempt to write a “creepypasta”-style story, so fans of that quasi-genre will notice some familar tropes.
Fyrewrit
So like I said, there’s a plethora of creative writing-related opportunities around Seattle, but the principal ones so far for me have been right on campus. For one, there’s the quarterly sci-fi/fantasy journal AU (to which I will be submitting a brand-new, thematically-relevant story within a week), as well as the more general Bricolage, but there’s also two groups: The unfortunately-abbreviated English honor society Sigma Tau Delta–a formal, albeit currently quite small closed club–and the casual gang of literary geeks that is “Write Away!” So far, the latter has been great; I’ve only been to one complete meeting so far (and due to a scheduling conflict, I’ll be missing yet another next week), but the camaraderie is splendid and the trio of prompts we’re set to work off of each time produce some remarkable stuff. There’s no criticism involved, but that’s okay–there’ll be no shortage of that in my actual English classes!
Anyway, the point: At yesternight’s meeting, the middle prompt was intended to be based on whatever “inspiration” we happened to have, though the time was prefaced with a pair of videos of performance poet Sarah Kay (if you like yourself some deep free-verse in front of a mike, check her out on YouTube by all means). Afterwards, I learned that some people continued their prompt from the first exercise, and some people either zeroed in on a very specific part I didn’t catch right away or just did their own thing, but I tried to work based on a synthesis of the two poems she performed. One was about the California wildfires, another was about desperately-written postcards. I thought about it, and… I came up with the attached poem.
Note: I did give it some editing afterwards, and since I also felt a little uncomfortable about it being composed in my pet rhyming structure, about my pet subject matter (even though it was largely stream-of-consciousness at first, and we had 20 minutes), I… embellished it a bit.
Spreading the Word
So I’m about a week and-a-half into my residence in the… interesting city of Seattle. It’s liberating (well, liberal, at least), but I’m rapidly missing a lot of things I used to take for granted back at the old homestead. Still, there’s one undeniable bright side: With this shift from small-town living comes a much broader set of opportunities to get the word out about my writing!
To that end, I’ve come up with a promotional “card” of sorts for Love&Darkness, which you can view below… (lo-fi version–sorry, but the original wouldn’t upload)
What’ll I do with it? Well, to be honest, I’m still working on that. Aesthetically, I couldn’t really fit my website and Twitter page (yes, I have one now! @TrevorNWhite) on the front, so the first set of four I made as a test run have them written on the back in pen–so that kind of suggests a lean towards passing them out. Then again, every light post and utility pole on my block is plastered in utterly obtuse stickers, so I suppose vague marketing is fine as well. Besides, I don’t want to end up like the half-a-dozen people I try to avoid making eye contact with on the street, selling trial offers of this or begging for that. In any case, there’s a variety of writing-related clubs, literary journals, and art houses with scheduled readings in the neighborhood, so I’ll be employing those as best I can.
Notes&Sketches 