Prompts Aug 24

I've been away a few days, but here:

When all this is over, I shall give them the finger
The weakening eye of day
I saw an x-ray of a baby
AXE
Unwearied still, lover after lover
Not even in my thoughts
I did not think death could undo so much
DANDELION
She is beautiful. I dream about her.
The rain flies down the street, flaps outside our door
BLOOD TEST
All the sun long it was running
Appointment in Basingstoke
The stove’s heat mottling her legs
Moving the books
Her dead body wears the smile of accomplishment
I know where you are
Thinking of an old lover makes it hard
JUG
We renounce everything except the self
Uzi Wedding
Her floured hands at the baking board
Show me the kitchen, the knives
Three thousand years ago they didn’t give a fuck
GUN
I would like to be terminally ill
Red and yellow, silver-back, half-imagined things
16 GIG
I kept my wife’s heart in a canary’s cage
DUFFY’S TRICK
I’m going to sail round the world
I cannot speak to you
Horses passed from dawn into the night, horses, horses, horses.
PAIRS
We come to terms with shade, the principle of grey
One or two blackmailers, a poisoner
Unnatural Acts
Every fear is a form of desire
Use the back entrance

Prompts

In the depths of the Greyhound terminal
The soldier takes pride in saluting his captain
A white mare
My days wind out, aimless, hopeless
Pursuit
Old men and women, rich and poor
Pencil
Gold, Gold, Gold, Gold, Gold
A cricket bat, a box
Nothing to do with Hamlet
Two men in blazers
Crew
The boys are not well
It’s about the end of the world
Clear plastic
An aged man is a paltry thing
This is fresh
I shall hide behind being old
The fun starts here
We pace along the battlements, hoping
Two men have been found
Edgar wins!
A winding staircase, candles flickering
A Mexican green pepper
Without love, the world is too heavy
Rage-driven, rage-tormented
Swan
When we were young we had pretty toys
Tennis-ball
They are holding a public meeting
Silver
I started running weeks ago. I will not stop
Atlas
I’m trying to come to the point
On the cover of TIME
Through icy streets
There are places where I have not been
They reject spirit
This man can sing!
I imagine a land, rain-soaked

But

2008 has been miserable for me writing-wise.

Boot Camp has shrunk to an all-time tiny and that's a problem because it has a certain 'critical mass" (around 20-25 members, 12-15 active) when all the buzz interacts and energy spirals.

under ten members the opposite happens. it goes quieter, duller, I get depressed and my input is less inspiring.

i stopped logging the hits (after 5-6-7 years of doing it), a few more left, one old member without even saying goodbye.

This August (only announced July 31st at 22:00) I thought "Sod this!" and launched the AUGUST BLAST, a one-month kick-ass attempt to write X words, X flashes, X stories.

My target was

31,000 words

31 Flashes
31 Subs
05 Stories

as of midnight Thursday 14th I had achieved

22,020 Words

16 Flashes
01 Subs
05 Stories
02 "Poems"


The big issue with "blasting" is, "What about quality?"

Does working harder, faster reduce quality? Most would presume, "yes."

BUT THEY'D BE WRONG. Some of the best Boot Camp stories have come from flash nights, or Children-in Need (24 stories in 24 hours) or Blasts like this one.

I've written one not-so-good story (but probably publishable), one short which is a bit throwaway (works but a bit so-what?) and two very iffy poems. But the rest is strong and getting stronger as the month goes on.

it's as if the "Just Do It" attitude releases tensions, removes fears and the brain-muscle exercise starts to pay dividends.

In a few months I will list the stories and poems and what happens to them.

I predict I will place 90% of them, 20% "well" and win at least two first prizes from the batch.

Wanna bet?


Alex

OOPS!

This was a good blog, then I got distracted trying to finish off the chapel in Wales. (Still trying)

But now that I'm here...

We are running an "August Blast" in Boot Camp (guests partake free) and though it's a long way from the most active we've ever had we have crept up to 53 flashes, a few poems and seven stories for the month.

My own output exceeds my output for the first seven months of 2008

Interested? Go to Yuku's "BootCampKeegan"

I'm away today (so will be writing about 10PM - mustn't miss a day!) and usually the prompts are better than these (I trawl books, letters, poems and so on and "react"

These are a little less inspired

Dogfight
There’s a problem with Mrs Evans
White on White
When you are old, if you should think of me
Yes, but apart from the race massacres?
Airfields
And they killed the cat
The edges of doors
Full English Breakfast
Katie is back soon
Rocked the cradle etc
Two single duvets
How do I love Theo? Let me count the ways
Twenty-eight hours
A lot of rough edges
No, THIS is a knife
Boil, carbuncle
It is cooler than we expected
I know she died, but how?
I keep my son awake
Go gently, go otherwise, but go.
We are arguing. Twenty? Thirty?
I don’t like how the wind comes through
My gnome has run off again
I heard he was Welsh, but OK
Blessings, Effendi
I may go, I may come back. But I will only come back if I went.

Naturalistic use of language

Over in Boot Camp, where I learn my writing craft [writes Tom C], we're having a discussion just now about writing styles. I quoted this, from Don DeLillo's Falling Man, describing the moments after the first plane had crashed into the Twin Towers:

He began to lift, his face warm with the blood on Rumsey's shirt, blood and dust. The man jumped in his grip. There was a noise in his throat, abrupt, a half second, half gasp, and then blood from somewhere, floating, and Keith turned away, hand still clutching the man's belt. He waited, trying to breathe. He looked at Rumsey, who'd fallen away from him, upper body lax, face barely belonging. The whole business of being Rumsey was in shambles now. Keith held tight to the belt buckle. he stood and looked at him and the man opened his eyes and died.

This is when he wondered what was happening here.

This, I thought (and think) is a good example of sparse writing. We have a bit of a tendency within Boot Camp to try to write like this - aftercarveritis, it might be called, but we often get it badly wrong and it comes out like Janet and John writing - "I did this. I did that. She did that. I didn't like that." And so on...

We agreed that this is a decent example of decent writing, although Alex suggested ways it could be improved. Nancy provided another quote - from Philip Roth's Everyman:

He was in the hospital for thirty days. The nurses were mostly agreeable, conscientious young women with Irish accents who seemed always to have time to chat a little when they looked in on him. Phoebe came directly from work to have dinner in his room every night; he couldn't imagine what being needy and infirm like this and facing the uncanny nature of illness would have been like without her. His brother needn't have warned him not to let her go; he was never more determined to keep anyone. Beyond his window he could see the leaves of the trees turning as the October weeks went by, and when the surgeon came around he said to him, 'When am I going to get out of here? I'm missing the fall of 1967.' The surgeon listened soberly, and then, with a smile, he said, 'Don't you get it yet? You almost missed everything.'

Wow! Isn't that even better than the DeLillo? The way it flows. The naturalness of it, the way everything has a point. Take the turning leaves, for example. How often do you read completely pointless descriptions of weather or seasons? Here it provides a bit of colour, a bit of freshness to the language, but it also means something. It tells us something important.

And, as Alex noted, look at the pacing of this extract, how it is a crescendo rising to that ending. As Alex says, "the best writing is brilliantly invisible." What better description could there be of that Roth passage?

Tuesday, Some Prompts

A fat alarm clock
A fire is lit
A hedge
A hotel room in New York City
About to sit down with my half-pint of Guinness
And always tucked his daughter up at night
And the flesh of each other
Blue-backed, silver-bellied, half-imagined things
Brought back to me that September evening
Chanting, chanting
Drawn like a moth to the darkened black room
Dumb as a cloud
Her parents love her eyes, how hard she works
His donkey-jacket on the kitchen chair
I am sailing the world
I cannot speak to you.
I died first, I think
I thought we were sitting in the sky
I took myself on for the hell of it
I'm trying to remember as best as I can
Irish Daisies, Yorkshire Nightingales
It begins as a house
It's almost impossible to be here, you kneel
Later he moved quietly to deeper sleep
Light through trees
Like a dwarf on stilts
Men hurrying back across the river
My father decoded the world
My father, drawing the fire
My fellow inmates praise him
Nothing has turned the wood
Our baby's heart, fluttering
People stop me in the street
Right into the mountain
Rockall, Malin, Dogger, Finisterre
She moved him to the hospital
Sometimes in autumn
That other country? Where was it?
The boat chugged up to the little stone jetty
The doors between the days fall open
The past fades like newsprint in the sun
The Unit
The village gossiped
The voices carry from everywhere
Then dusk, and someone calls
Then I gave myself a fright
We were joined at the hip.
When all this is over, I mean to travel north
With ten minutes to kill and the whole place deserted
You do not scorch the sheets or wake your wife
You wonder if it's lovers

A BC Thread

Recently a Boot Camper asked, "Does anyone else get scared?"

He was asking about writing from the deepest parts, how scary it could be.

My first answer was: it's a straight choice. How honest do we want to be? How true? I am only happy when I feel my work is lifting a rug (5% of the time, tops)

Later said:

It ISN'T necessary to directly use your own experience, however painful, however true, or deep or "drama-worthy"

And if you DO directly use something, it's IRRELEVANT whether it's therapeutic, makes you happier or sadder

What matters is the TEXT and what it brings to others

It doesn't matter AT ALL whether 100% of Ballistics is factual, only that it's TRUE. It can be true even if it's 100% fiction.


When you use "your past", your own pain, your own memories, really, the THINGS aren't all that important. What's important is the feelings, and what the events whether directly or indirectly used, SAY, make us feel.

If I use a personal experience directly and try to stay "accurate" I will lose truth. The world and exact accuracy usually kills message.

And later:

Lots of these things are hard to prove, but think like this.

When "a little brown dog" starts glowing, some memory or link to memory, either some maturing part of you thinks it's ready to discover, or some older part of you maybe wants to relieve an internal pressure, BUT THAT IS JUST ONE THING (presume for simplicity)

I suppose it's possible that the conscious and unconscious brain between them choose one single item. one discrete memory, but is it likely?

My belief is that the more we right, the more we try to unfuzz our history, the more we "go there" (I mean in that drifting, available, state) the more things might start to emerge.

The idea that I might isolate ONE and one only (one that might "REFUSE" to ever come out) seems crazy.


When memories and ideas come make sure that at least the emerging tip is not lost. RECORD THEM ALL.


many things may happen her



Example you are imagining/believing that this memory of a squashed cat REALLY MEANS SOMETHING but last week you remembered a
snippet of a song, or an image of an old radio, or someone's shoes, or a car. I have no idea. MIGHT IT NOT BE THAT THE CAT WAS A WAY IN BUT NOT THE KEY? Might it not be that one of you "lesser" ideas/memories will, in the end be more important?


RECORD THEM ALL. LET THEM INTERACT


And later still:

I NEED TO EXPLAIN SOMETHING, WARN YOU


Do NOT presume that all this "must be" an unearthing of your specific past.

It does not have to be YOU or something that happened to you.

Example. Imagine that once you saw, as a kid, a kid getting bullied. You vaguely noted it. It was "gone." Years later you also vaguely note that the kid committed a heinous crime or suicide, or became famous or rich (it doesn't matter). MAYBE you realised the two were the same. Maybe you didn't. Maybe you connected the two bits, connected the relationship, the cause-effect, maybe you didn't.

When these things are pointed out to us we can make a CONSCIOUS, intellectual cause-effect/wondering link. BUT WHEN THEY ARE NOT POINTED OUT TO US, ARE THE LINKS THERE UNDERNEATH SHAPING OUR FEELINGS, OUR EMOTIONS, WHAT WE CARE ABOUT, WHAT AROUSES OUR ANGER OR SYMPATHY.


so a thing might be part of our personal history, first hand

a thing may be part of our history second-hand, ie seen and heard in others

a thing may be part of our psyche THIRD hand, a news report of the above, a book, a play

a thing may, arguably be part of us FOURTH hand, cultural, like "paedophilia" and peadophiles loom so much larger in consciousness these days than they did when I was a kid... or "save-the-planet" or back in the sixties-seventies the fact that most of us went round half expecting a nuclear holocaust.



So memories do not HAVE TO relate to bad or good things you did or had done to you



Now whether or not you have a Hannibal Lecter past or lived with Jesus and ate honey and ambrosia every morning and your shit came out in perfumed bags, you conscious and unconscious pick up EVERY DAY the subliminal links to millions, billions of incidents.

When you read Alex Keegan you read (somewhere in there) HIS past, some of his sensibilities. How much of Dickens' psyche lurks in the bowels of his books... so the more we read and write the more we slowly accumulate "pressures"

if you read a current-vogue book about someone being abused, read absorb, "forget" how do you know, even if your life has been perfect, that this little nugget won't be eating away at you colouring your view of possibly EVERYTHING until you die?



We have many lives now. We absorb from news, poetry, shorts, novels, plays, films, video, TV, the web, in a way people never dreamt of even fifty years ago


but note this... what tweaks you, what sticks with YOU, does so because you are particularly susceptible, receptive to that image or idea

THERE'S A REASON FOR THAT and that's why you have to take an instant snapshot of the "thing" put it on a whiteboard and keep it alive.

If not, if for example, your psychic guardians 'don't want you to know" it will be gone, probably forever in 24 hours.

Think of it as a little fall of mud outside a cave. Mark the spot before mud covers it up.


But remember that it is not "inevitable" that the event or memory or feeling energising this connection is SPECIFICALLY something that happened (physically to you). It might be a combination of things. You might never have been touched by the creepy paedophile from next-door who hung himself when you were thirteen, but maybe you heard his name once when you were out drinking with the office-girls and a childhood friend went white, you FELT.... but the group were playing X and now when you hear X you feel torn, twisted.

It could be anything (or nothing, just an accumulation of juxtapositions and pressures from images, words, ideas from your reading/watching.

If demons made someone write Silence of the Lambs, The Exorcist, Apocalypse Now and hundreds of others, what happens to US when we watch them (even if we laugh)? IF those writers were exorcising their demons (if) what do we absorb?


And

So... I access a feeling, a hurt. a memory and I write about something else.


Yes, that's one way. Often directly writing about something merely energises the defences and we get shut down, anyway. But if we can sense the ache-pressure-fear-disgust (or exquisite pleasure) and find some literary outlet that seems to reflect the feeling, it may well be that what we write will be suffused with the "power" of the partly-unearthed memory.


Say I had walked in on my mother fucking the neighbour and not only that but she looked horrible, told me to fuck off (and then extrapolate)

Yes it may be possible to one day unearth the actual memories and write about them as fictional or actual autobiography but often these writings fai because the memories are bitty and we obsess on the missing parts "wanting to tell the truth"

But if, from the feeling we write about a parent betraying a child, a FICTION, we then can use the pain we felt.


Later someone asked, about these recorded "cues", should they keep one warmed up, ticking over, or should they have many?

Of one I said:

No

IT IS THE ABSOLUTE WORST THING YOU COULD DO

I have many things on the go so the one that wants to can begin to fester and expand. Second two things or more may choose to interact.

Note the verbs. the thing wants to, the thing chooses

NOT the author


One BCer posted this:

It might be worth reading this article which Alex posted on the BC blog.

It came from the notes from a Kingfisher Barn course a couple of years ago, and talks about using half-memories:

http://thebootcampkeegandiaries.blogspot.com/2007/04/little-brown-dog-in-rain.html

and then

http://thebootcampkeegandiaries.blogspot.com/2007/04/theme-truth.html

Note, I am not trying to write (or post) "perfect" articles. I believe that we don't learn so well from the perfectly-formed, but learn better from bits-and-pieces, spontaneous responses which generate questions and then, hopefully, answers.

Friday

A rat crept softly through the vegetation
All day, all night, all weathers
April is the cruellest month
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks
Everyone suddenly burst out singing
Footworn and hollowed and thin
For I have known them all already, known them all
Groping along the tunnel, step by step
Had we been lovers
I believe there were no flowers then
I have come from the borders of sleep
I lay with my young bride in my arms
I lent upon a coppice gate
I love it as a child might love it
I see the image of a naked man
I thought we were sitting in the sky
I was much further out than you thought
It was after the war
Let us go and make our visit
Love without hope
Move him into the sun
No one is twisting her arm but there it is
Nothing but wild rain
Now it is autumn, falling fruit
Once we had toys, pretty toys
Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me
Ten minutes to kill
The darkness crumbles
The fascination of what's difficult
The flood subsides, and the body
The staggering girl
The trees are in their autumn beauty
The troubled midnight
The voices carry from everywhere
The whitewashed wall
The words we have for things that die
There is one story and one story only
There will be time, there will be time
They sing the dearest songs
This is my first time here, a stranger
Turning. And turning and turning
We are at the races now
We drank coffee, talked for an hour
We hired a private nurse
We shall pick his bones, whisper
When she rises in the morning
When you see millions of the mouthless dead
Why have you made this life so intolerable?
You did not walk with me
You would not know him now

Wednesday Prompts

A broken flower-stem, a broken vase
A man riding horseback raises dust
A thousand mountains without a bird
At last his guilt became apparent
Autumn in California, mild, anonymous
Before the end they chatted with friends over a glass
Careless for an instant How we edge away
Clean, white, starched sheets
Flung across a room An old man, black face
Four or five years ago Romance never returns
From the scrotum of the Yak
He doesn't care he looks strange
He let tears fall and wandered off alone
He speaks from the corner of his eyes
Hours are a small thing A lighthouse
I am a man with few ambitions and no friends
I can stare at him, ashamed, shameless
I have a standing order called "surrender" in case of war
I have surrounded you, I was as cold as stone
I must go back to her, to her embrace
If only we could throw you away
It is impossible to see anything
It is your loneliness, not mine
My head, my shoulders, my arms
Night came and they became more anxious
Nobody knows what love is any more
Pedro has the shoes
She poured the tea. Vaguely I watched her hands
She's big, and big, and full of love
So whisk me off out of here and down some road
Sympathy comes between shit and syphilis
The day before he died Rising from the toilet seat
The ebb run and the flood flow
The isolation hospital Suicide isn't always easy
The morning changed grew chilly and transparent
The nervous hum of danger
Then stand, say nothing; nothing you believe
Then the lights went out Unpacking
This was once an innocent country
This was the end of a man who also died
Twice daily, maybe thrice. It depends on luck
Under a winter streetlamp near a bus-stop
We banged on the pipes, but no-one knew the code
We beat it shitless
We know what's funny and unfunny
We look for communion A wind is blowing
We slept naked, on top of the covers
When I grow up I want to be connected
When she was still alive, we often walked

Tuesday Prompts

Only the Lonely

Long, thick, creamy fingers

Bloodless coup a real letdown

Pressing the smoothness out of cushions

Leaving Birmingham behind

It pulses sometimes. It throbs.

Bob Marley rises from grave

The bathroom on the bus is Out of Order

The boy with a sparrow in his hand

Friends Reunited

A difficult woman

Night at the end of the tunnel

Monday prompts

Sad stories of the dearth of kings

Moods of the Sea

In the footsteps of courage and catastrophe

Pi

He did not lift the sheet

Four Cows

Purr

The year shifted a little. The blossom fell.

Lit only by a sunbeam

Pure

The smell of the unburied dead

The peacock had gathered its courage

Puree

Warning my father

Purse

You are History. You are Legend

Pursed

Sunday prompts

Can you handle the angry?

The bustle of waitresses and the chink of silver on china

The second thing that killed my father off

Saturday morning film club with Angela Dawkins

A sweetness of powder and scented things

He stepped around the pie in the driveway

I wish you'd rub my legs and talk to me

Gospel truth

Everything was swept away

Crackling

Killing sparrows was the most festive event

Fingermouse

Prompts for 20:00

There's some of yesterdays here and some openings to novels.

If there's not something for you here, you're DEAD

At sunrise, the small expedition meets beneath a giant fig tree.
During the war years when I was still in school,
Fear presides over these memories, perpetual fear.
He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream.
I am a white man and never forgot it, but I was brought up by the Cheyenne Indians from the age of ten.
In order to pay off an old debt that someone else had contracted, King said yes when he knew he should have said no.
It was in the summer of 1988 that my neighbour, 71, confided in me that he was having an affair with a 34-year old cleaning woman
Light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul.
My name is William Warlick House, residing at Chokoloskee Island, in Lee County, Florida
On the went, singing "Eternal Memory", and whenever they stopped, the sound of their feet, the horses and the gusts of wind seemed to carry on their singing.
Sea birds are aloft again, a tattered few.
She was deeply embedded in my consciousness.
The day didn't begin well.

A stag, proud as a screaming penis
Aardvarks
Abracadabra
After all, he was Welsh
An itch
Avocado
Between you and me
But you, of all people, should not
Cats are contradictions
Chestnuts, Chestnut hair
Cold marble
Crawling
Do you remember an Inn, Miranda?
He was lost in thought as he steered his Sierra through the quiet streets
Hobson's Choice
Horses, snorting, sensing deaths in the field
Human ash is a fine fertiliser
I am considering becoming an astronaut
I count on you naturally I remember, I remember
I dream of gas chambers
I thought my youth would last forever
It's not my vault Let her finish as calmly as possible
Maybe it's because I'm a Londoner
Moira was in the computer room
My astrologer told me Saturn has been flopped over me like a giant cosmic fried egg
My five senses
No financial disasters
On the whole toads are more interesting than frogs
Of those at the table in the café
Once upon a time there were three little foxes
One for sorrow She must not be anxious
Richmond was a good hour's drive
She could smell it!
Steam spitting from stainless steel pipes
Sybille is in the hands of monstrous crooks
That sweet, watch-baking angel
The air electric The tiny fish enjoy themselves
The buggy lurches in frost-stuck ruts
The first movement is singing
There was a small maiden named Maggie
They get her as little as possible as late as possible
This is a secret final letter This is glorious news
Trees grow like insults
Visiting the poet
Which must absolutely be kept from that angel
Who will honour the city now?
Why soffits are brown, black, white and never pink
You without beginning, you always in between
Your official membership is enclosed
Your sweetness and patience and kindness

Three Flash Blasts Tonight!!

and the first is at 7PM

(then 9PM and 10:30)


Here's a list



A brief sickness, a need to get to Paris
A cruising milk-float, the clink of crates
A gap between money coming in and money going out
An itch
As I know with my whole heart
Between you and me
Cats are contradictions
Crawling
Do you remember an Inn, Miranda?
Evelyn, dear
First there was silence
Heroes
I always have plenty of month left at the end of the money
I am a nice, affable woman
I am bored now, with the condescension of my inferiors
I am sending you this little cheque
I cannot ever thank you enough for your generosity
I count on you naturally
I do not want to leave
I gloat and also mourn
I remember, I remember
I thought the Nile was blue, and sane bright yellow
I wanna be a star, I wanna go far
It dripped off though on Octover 22.
It's not my vault
Let her finish as calmly as possible
Let me know if anything grave happens
My astrologer told me Saturn has been flopped over me like a giant cosmic fried egg
No financial disasters
Oh to be in England
On the whole toads are more interesting than frogs
Once upon a time there were three little foxes
One for sorrow
Saris hang on the washing line
She must not be anxious
Sybille is in the hands of monstrous crooks
That sweet, watch-baking angel
The air electric
The small things can ruin one's nerves
The tiny fish enjoy themselves
There was a small maiden named Maggie
They get her as little as possible as late as possible
This is a secret final letter
This is glorious news
Unless I am sure you two are OK
Which must absolutely be kept from that angel
Your sweetness and patience and kindness

And More Good News

Not "Boot Camp" but great news for Joel in Finland who wins a top advertising First Place and cash. October is looking pretty good and the drinks are definitely on Joel.


Next up Matt has been awarded £3,000 to launch a magazine in Brighton. (Please note, should any Boot Campers place in Matt's Magazine they will NOT count as hits.)


Third, yours truly will be judging next year's City of Derby Short-Story Competition. This year's second and last year's second were Boot Campers! Boot Camp stories will not be eligible for the comp.

$500 Second Place for Joel etc

Congrats to Joel based in Finland for his $500 second place in City of Derby's Short-Story Competition

Following are the last few hits. That's a thousand bucks won this month!

OCTOBER




142 Joel wins $500 Second, City of Derby

153 Lexie wins HISSAAC $500

154 Tom named shortlist in HISSAAC
155 Jenny Jackson shortlisted at Leaf (and in print anthology)
156 Jason Jackson shortlisted at Guildford
157 DMW's flash "Zombie Jesus: taken by Four Volts Print Magazine

DON'T CHEAT. Prompts for 22:00

I'm not feeling brilliant so may not last until 10PM

So here are the prompts

He sold the caravan to a melancholy priest
Kissing old women
A cruise missile passing, just below our balcony
I saw a poodle, crucified
Ten million rooms, all smelling of cigarettes
When you woke, you were more or less insane
The art of losing isn't hard to master
Flour
Driftwood blackened by old fires
A year ago I fell in love with a tailor's dummy
Bogies
Listen to me. I know a lot about melons
We were going to drive to Wales
I inspect her room while she's away
Home is so sad
You passed me as if you hadn't seen, but then you stopped
I think you're an asteroid
Chinese Taxi
Pill
My husband and I
Today is the tomorrow we worried about yesterday
Answering Back
Zurka the pickpocket was sitting on a bench in a Budapest park
It all started the day of Frankie's accident
Lily once told me that…
Is there anything sadder than an empty station?
I met Eric when he was thirty-eight and I was turning forty.
"I'm here to see the owner."
"So, Franco…"
I served in France, you know.
Every morning she comes on deck early.
A Little Pussy
Honey, I saw your note and understand you're a little upset.
David Time's view of himself began at the station platform, his polished boots.
The Moon has eyes, a nose and a mouth
My greeting protocol is faultless
We live in a cabin next to the river
I am obscure, middle-aged, heterosexual and white.
I'm holding Mamoo's hand. I can't stop shaking
He lay in bed listening to the cat-flap clacking
Social Workers!
He was thinking about Michael Jackson again
She writes her name in ketchup
When I got to school this morning there was dogshit all over the grass.
I grew up like any other clown
On Jericho Beach
I'll tell you a story about two soldiers
They tell you a lot about a person, their stains.

Prompts for 20:00

All these years and I still don't understand
Acorns
Black handprints
But let that wait.
Consider the escaped leopard
Dogs etc
Eggs, unfertilised
Fuck You
Great Britain
Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me.
Hassocks.
I marinated it in soy sauce and champagne
Jesus Smith, Traffic Warden
King Fred
Lose it before you use it.
May a good wind blow him to hell.
Names so silly they must be made up
Oh for a muse of fire!
Pissing on the flames
Queen Anne
Roasted Hedgehog
Someone tossed a condom into it
He used a lot of vowels
UP
VERILY, verily
XXX Love Hilary
Yanks
ZZZZZZZ
Here I am on the Brighton Line
He's an excellent cook, especially of people
I felt like a quartered chicken
A year ago, I stood at the window, crying
I remember him best with my skin
An unfortunate accident with a circular saw
If they piss you off, shoot the fuckers
I think this is psychologically acute advice
If music be the food of love, what's a boy band?
My suffering left me sad and gloomy
So, while the light fails
The children are exploring by the stream
The naming of cats is a difficult matter
The ship sank
The sorrow will pass but not the conviction
The voices of dead children singing
This book was born because I was hungry
We do not die
To the Indians who died in Africa
Travel is a contrary thing.
We are an old and wise organisation
Well, romance is not unknown here
What we call the beginning is often the end
When I tell you a cat must have three different names
You have proved nothing
You may think, at first, I'm as mad as a hatter
Now that the year has come full circle

Wednesday Flash prompts 1800

FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE
BYE BYE MCLAREN?
In my craft and sullen art
In the undergrowth, a woman's clothing
In which nothing need happen particularly
It can't be October already?
It is the road now, but I know not where it goes
It isn't just one of your holiday games
Later, bikes leaning against an old tree
Lay your head upon my pillow
Let's go, knock on a good woman's door
A deer, trapped, the dogs loose
A sherbert fizz
About suffering…
After that it was a little easier
Alone, the last legionnaire, afraid
Apples, rotten every one
As the door closes, as the dark envelopes
Before, before there were souls, what then?
Black handprints
Brass Band
Bright and early, fine in his intent
But let that wait.
Consider the escaped leopard
Cycling for bluebells near St Mellons
Duct Tape
Hassocks.
He used a lot of vowels
Here I am on the Brighton Line
He's an excellent cook, especially of people
His was the first corpse I ever saw
I am not respectable or industrious
I felt like a quartered chicken
I had somewhere to get to
I had to move
I have been walking, walking
I have heard that freedom exists
I have seen the best minds of my generation destroyed by MFI
I'll come, no matter where you're going
In an effort to keep day and night together
Marrakesh
May a good wind blow him to hell.
Midgets demand their cake.
Miss Beatty's Moustache
Mr Justice Gray
My dad just left it by the shed
My mother waits too long
My suffering left me sad and gloomy
Names so silly they must be made up
Not everybody's childhood sucks
Of lovers whose bodies smell of each other
Passing strangers on underground escalators

Flash Tonight?

Boot Camp wil have two flash sessions tonight (Wednesday) at 8PM and 10PM

Prompts will be posted here. Why not try this? Give yourself around an hour and just freewheel, unplanned, driven by some response to one or more prompts.

You'd be amazed. Many BCers get their best work from flash sessions.

Post an answer here if you'd want to join us for the evening


alex