wishing you something other than auld lang syne

The second half of the year sort caught me off guard and off-balance. I’m looking to right my ship and get back into the swing of things this coming year, both new and old. But for tonight, the last day in the Julian calendar year, I’m reaching back in time for a tune to replace Auld Lang Syne. It’s called a hymn but it’s a bit of blues rolled into jazz, majestic and hopeful, reaching across time from one turbulent time into another.

Happy year’s end to all.

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the problem of voice in fiction

In articles on writing, in agents calls to prospective authors, in creative writing courses everyone talks about characters needing a strong voice. You really want to see the characters in the way they talk, you want hear a voice you’ve never heard before. I get it, because when you read a strong voice it really sounds like you’ve captured something unique.

But I’m beginning to wonder if these strong character voices in literature are little more than the gilt edging on a book made from cheap materials. Oh, sure, it looks pretty, but how long is it going to last?

Can I blame our current trends in pop music for lowering our expectations? The radio (however you conceive it today) is full of a lot of hit songs that are catchy and bouncy and full of strong voices but musically they’re about as unique as a cheap ballpoint pen; they’re functional, disposable, interchangeable, and forgettable.

There was a time — pull up a rocker, the cranky old man is about to come out — when popular music moved from manufactured hits to artists looking to be more creative. Bands evolved into creative units looking to expand their musical vocabularies, a path blazed by the Beatles and followed by many. And when the Beatles broke up and become solo artists the era of the singer-songwriter blossomed. There are many things to be said — good and bad — about the music that came out of the “classic” era of classic rock, but for a period of time what’s clear is that music was a marriage of vocal, lyrical, AND musical ideas. True, Led Zeppelin was simply amplified blues and Jethro Tull towed old English folk sensibilities into their songs, but there were ideas that went beyond their singer’s voices. Crosby, Stills, Nash and (occasionally) Young didn’t invent vocal harmony, but they didn’t rest entirely on that magical melding of sounds; listen to the structure of their songs, their free-form progressions, and you realize that much of what they did would have been unique even without their stellar vocal approach.

The point is, there was more to pop music than a voice.

But today we have reality TV shows that celebrate the cult of voice as being above all things in music, throwing out the notion of original music by having people sing known songs and not dealing with anything more daring that a slightly different arrangement. As TV goes it’s cheap to produce, and besides a back-up band all you really need is a microphone for the singer, no messy band gear to set up. It is, in a sense, all surface with little substance.

And this is where I’m starting to have problems with this idea of voice.

In the Cult of Voice in pop culture an action hero with a reliable catch phrase is more memorable than a well-crafted monologue. Wise-cracking teens (who are much more articulate and quick-witted than real teens) dance their way through epically-told tales of romance and death fetish (zombies, vampires, etc.). But the author with a unique narrative approach, a story with three-dimensional characters with baroque dialogue, those are not the voices the gatekeepers are looking for, move along.

In a recent #kidlitchat on twitter a question was raised: in today’s climate would Shel Silverstein be published today? I immediately said ‘no.’ I wonder if many of the no-considered classics in children’s literature, or classic rock for that matter, would have survived our contemporary need for strong voices above unique ideas or a bold authorial style. If Vonnegut were just starting out, would he make it? Could Anais Nin unseat “Fifty Shades of Grey” on style alone? Is it possible that Roald Dahl could only have existed in his time?

I know I’ve garbled this subject, with music and TV and book references, but all the same I cannot help feeling like so much of what is published is voice-over-storytelling.

A correction is in order, a new balance. Writers need to dig deep down and let their freak flag fly. Hopefully the business side of the storytelling factory can hear the story above the din of empty voices.

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children’s books about “issues” & a simple lack of parenting

Yeah, I know, that’s a loaded subject line.

I don’t know how many times in the past dozen years or so I’ve heard these questions, but lets just say that since working as a bookseller I’ve heard thousands of these variations on a theme. It goes like this: a parent enters, well-intentioned and polite, asking us for a book about a particular topic. The question is never about whether such books exist for the issue at hand, because the assumption is there, but whether or not we can recommend a “good one” from the many we surely must have on hand. Examples include:

“Can you point me to the books on…

“…a child dealing with the death of a pet (insert animal here, everything from gerbils to spiders to larger farm animals)?”

“…dealing with the loss of an older sibling to gang violence?”

“…dealing with being adopted from another culture, specifically (insert name of emerging country here)?”

“…contracting an infectious disease?”

“…jealousy among friends (mainly girls)?”

“…parents suddenly dying?”

“…fear of flying?”

“…anxiety over (insert a specific food item here, my favorite was ‘dairy products)?”

And many others I have long forgotten. I should probably note, almost without exception these are adults asking for books on these subjects intended for small children, many of whom have not learned to read yet. They are looking for picture books that (they hope) will explain these difficult topics for them.  While I can sympathize with the problem of explaining difficult topics in simple terms to small children, most of the reactions we booksellers receive when we explain that lack of books suggests disinterested parenting.

“What do you mean there isn’t a picture book about surviving a land mine? How am I suppose to explain this to a child?” (A true response, said with a level of incredulity so piercing that I winced.)

The fact is, there are probably more books not written about specific issues then there are books written for them. The major topics – adoption, sibling rivalry, bullying, first-day-of-school-anxiety, &c. – are all represented, and in many cases there is more than one good title to suggest. For the topics not generally considered common there are usually two good reasons, both of which equally sound, neither of which is acceptable to the adults who hear them.

First, the topic isn’t popular enough to warrant a publisher dedicating resources to a title that won’t turn a profit. The idea that profit is even part of the equation so incenses some adults that they practically yell at us booksellers as if it is our fault, some conspiracy to keep kids from getting the books they need or deserve. In some adult minds books for children should be free, a public service, in which everyone from the writer and illustrator to the publisher and printer gladly and lovingly devotes their time and energy. The most withering response I could levy in the regard is “This is a business, and without profits you don’t even have the opportunity to talk to me about it.”

The second reason is that there are many topics that cannot be easily explained to everyone’s satisfaction and should be dealt with by the adults in charge of their wards. Yes, this is about parental laziness. And, yes, when Fifi is old and near the end, it can be difficult to explain to a child that she’s lived good and hard in her 105 dog years and that her time has come. But just because it’s difficult doesn’t mean it should be avoided, or worse, explained away with the aid of a book specifically designed to the situation at hand. I have seriously had adults reject a book on the death of a pet because the type of animal in the book was wrong. I’ve had adults reject a book on dealing with grandparents with dementia because the grandparent in question was the wrong gender. And when it comes to adoption, if the kid and their adoptive family doesn’t look like the ones in the book, well, forget it, because “That isn’t the same thing.”

Many of these conversations finally come around to a half-hearted thanks for my efforts to help them and begrudging acknowledgment that it isn’t my fault. That’s very big of them, and I usually offer up a cheery suggestion:

“You know, maybe you should think about writing that book!”

The only thing perhaps more shocking than a lack of books that enable this unwillingness to interact with their children is the suggestion that they should be part of the solution and not part of the problem.

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#poetrymonday: final twitku round-up & some bonus-ku

I know, a couple extra days worth of twitku after the most recent Poetry Friday… how sad.  These are what I had as I stumbled across the thrice-daily haiku marathon finish line.  Oh, also: I was truly whacked out of my mind all of yesterday due to allergy medicine (there’s a twitku about it).  The stuff worked, but it’s a good thing I wasn’t operating heavy machinery.

29 April 2011
In the cyclone’s wake
stonemasons grinding away
at new grave markers

best party ever
one everyone talks about
is the one you missed

can we retire
euphemisms for AIDS deaths
“from complications?”

30 April 2011
crowded shopping mall
signs of a recovery
underwear sales

lawn torn up by dogs
gardening secrets exposed
artificial turf

deadline poet sighs
last haiku, no ideas
it was all a dream?

As I was going along this month I would come up with some lines of haiku that I couldn’t quite finish.  Sometimes the wording was off (sometimes I went ahead and posted those anyway) and other times I’d have a solid beginning or ending but nowhere to go.  I’d set those aside and would come back and toy with them now and again, keeping them in reserve in case I found myself stumped.  The hardest day was actually April 9th — those ku just had to pulled like bad teeth – but I didn’t really need to dip into the reserves that often.

What follows are the leftovers, the twitku that either didn’t fit that day’s theme or for whatever reason just didn’t strike my fancy at the time.

1 May 2011
drifting through twilight
whacked out on allergy meds
thoughts dance with the breeze

cloudy horizon
blues come rainin’ into town
no point shelterin’

singin’ out the pain
‘cause despite how it feels
it ain’t in the blood

it never fails
if you can smell the dog poop
then you stepped in it

you appreciate
the most valuable things
once you have lost them

dining conundrum
once you’ve discovered the mold
do you keep eating?

trying on new clothes
sizes shrink, waistlines expand
one of us is wrong

for fake soothsayers
no sense making predictions
there’s no future there

true insomnia
means knowing the exact time
via street cleaners

Wait!  30 days, three times a day, that’s 90 haiku.  Plus nine that didn’t fit until the end… I can’t quit at 99 haiku!  So I’m thinking and I’m thinking, and finally I dip into an old notebook to see if I’ve scrawled something inspirational.  Old grocery shopping lists, measurements for furniture, fake band names, nothing is doing it.  Then I hit a page that has a partial sentence on it.  “Surrealism means.”  Means what?  Why did I write that?  When did I write that?  What the heck was going through my mind that felt that fragment was so important that it was best left unfinished.

Clearly it was my future self who needed that fragment.  My past self just didn’t realize it.

Here’s the thing, I was working through the second line and I realized that the most surreal answer wouldn’t be anything I came up with.  In true surrealist spirit, the final line would be whatever made the least sense to the individual reader.  Suddenly the missing element is actually the thing that makes it work. For my last twitku of national poetry month I provide you good, loyal, most-inspirational  readers with a choose-your-own-ending haiku.

Seriously, what should the last line be?  Feel free to propose your own ending in the comments. I wish I had a prize for this, beyond the fame and honor of providing the most surreal ending to a haiku.

And the 100th monkey is…

Surrealism
Means never having to say
(”                                      “)

And for the record, “refrigerator” has already been taken.

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outlined to the point of distraction

I’m in the last act of my current work-in-progress, making a crazy-mad dash to the finish.  It’s a first draft and it’s ugly and beautiful and will probably bear no resemblance to the final draft after revisions.  Still, knowing that revisions are coming, I’m planning ahead and outlining my next project.

I know the benefit of letting a draft “rest” before taking it on in revision, but once I get to the end I usually have a better sense of the beginning and want to rework it some.  That causes a ripple effect down the line and I’ll end up trying to rework the entire manuscript.  This is wrong, bad-wrong, and crazy-making wrong because I don’t have the perspective to see it with fresh eyes.  The only way around this is to try and force a rest period by having something else lined up and waiting for me to work on.

So in those moments when the Muse refuses to sing these final pages to me, I’m outlining.

Boy, am I outlining.

I have a rough three-act outline for the story, breaking the main and sub-plots into large general chunks.  I have another outline I call The Haiku with has the three acts broken into thirteen chapters – three for act one, five for act two, three for act three, with a prologue and epilogue chapter on either side.  I have a five-act outline modified from screenplay structure, an original idea I came up with years ago that’s more satisfying to me than a three act model. And somewhere around here I have a folder with all the key story points written down on small sticky notes to be shuffled and rearranged into a proper order according to how I see the story unfolding on any given day.

At this point I have the story so over-plotted that when I finally sit down to write I shouldn’t have to review the outlines at all, which is the point. I have heard and know of writers who finish their first drafts and then delete them, an extreme version of pre-writing designed for them to get a sense of the story before settling in and writing the “real” draft.  If I’m being honest, that’s probably what I’m doing in the long run between my “first” and “second” drafts, because they are often so radically different that the first draft probably holds the same purpose as those “vomit drafts” that others throw away.

But if I really thought that draft was disposable, I’d never be motivated enough to finish it.

So this new project with all its outlining, it’s less about locking myself into the story and more about pre-visioning a first draft so that when I start writing I’m actually on the second draft.  Each of those outlines contains god bits not found on the others.  In some, the plot points are different, though they exist on all the drafts.  The sub-plot weaves a different pattern into the tapestry of each one, but the through-line is the same. The unnoticed holes in one are filled by the details in another. I’m so ready to write this thing after all the outlining that I’ll probably never look at the outlines once I start.  Which is the point.

Am I playing games with myself?  Yes. I’m overlapping my involvement with the stories so that when I finish the current WIP and need to let it settle I can start up with the new one immediately. It’s said that to be successful you have to show up for the job, every day, Butt In Chair.  Agreed, but there also needs to be something going down, and I call that Always Be Writing. And if it takes outlining myself to the point of distraction, so be it.

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#poetrfriday: s’mother goose rhymes

‘Nother Goose?  S’mother Goose?  I just cannot decide.

It’s been a rough week on the writing front as our primary school is in final rehearsals for the springtime musical and I’m on board overseeing a crew of fifth and sixth graders running the lights.  I feel lucky to have scrawled out a couple of these ditties in the margins of my script!

Mary, Mary,
Ordinary,
Your garden has gone to seed!
Please, leave me alone!
I’m bringing in stone,
And cacti I don’t have to weed!

.

King Cole Nat
Was a Jazzy young cat,
Yes a Jazzy young cat indeed;

He tickled the Whites,
And he tickled the Blacks,
And he played them well, all agreed!

.

Georgie P says “Keep away!
All the girls have ruined my day!”
When somebody asks him why,
Georgie shows them his black eye!

Oh yeah, it’s Poetry Friday in the Universe again!  Liz is our gracious host this week over at Liz in Ink. Do drop in for a visit.

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reading: i iz doin it rong

When you take on any art form or craft for that matter the act requires a shift in awareness.  In order to draw you must learn how to see with the eyes of an artist.  You don’t simply see line and form but you see what isn’t there, negative space and the story intrinsic to the relationship between objects.  To study film is to learn not only about visual narrative but the craft of editing, lighting and dozens of otherwise invisible elements. There is the surface image everyone sees and then a substrata beneath, the chemistry that causes a sheet of paper to hold a photograph.

Writers must read on two levels, on the story level and the craft level.  Sometimes referred to as reading like a reader and reading like a writer, every writer has their own way of doing this. All creative people do this with their art, and while I am comfortable enough to slip back and forth between multiple layers in movies and fine arts I find I am still required to read everything twice in order to both see and know what is going on.

I could blame my being a slow reader, or that my study of writing came later than the other arts, but this weekend I sort of had a delayed epiphany about my “reading problem” as a writer.

I’ve been doing it wrong.

The oddest thing is that I’ve known, on some level, how to do it “right” for a long time, but I compartmentalized the process in a way that makes no sense.  In fact, it’s almost amusing. It’s almost like a form of enlightenment, an answer that has always been there waiting for me to see it.

Marginalia.  Notes, in the margins. Like I used to do in college.

The problem isn’t that I’ve fooled myself into thinking that I’ve grown beyond the college need to underline, highlight, and scribble notes in the margins.  It’s that, for some reason, a switch in my brain was set to regard fiction as above defacing.  The book, fiction, had become an ideal, a fetish object that existed like a work to be placed on a pedestal.  It’s absurd to even write these words, because as a reviewer of books I have never balked at making notes or of seeing books for what they are and not elevate them unnecessarily based on content.  But somewhere deep down, lurking at a level that probably goes all the way back to when I was first becoming a reader, there is a voice:

Never write in your books!

The realization wasn’t as sudden as it seems.  For years I would prowl used book stores and reject books that had notes written into them. My reason was simple: I didn’t want someone else’s ideas preventing me from seeing the work myself.  Ah, yes, but why had it never occurred to me to mark my own copies? And even recently I saw the marked up pages of books owned by David Foster Wallace, notes clearly of someone who was studying the text at multiple passes and gleaning multiple insights. (“Setting is slow — does not set the stage” he says on the inside cover of Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree) It looked like nothing less than some of my own marked-up drafts of my own writing, which often were as informational for me as they were instructive for future revisions.

Also, there were the Post-It notes, those little sticky pages of ideas whose edges I would line up under specific words near the page edge of my thinking.  Like some netherworld between highlighting and margin notes, the little multicolor slips (I always hated yellow) poking out in all directions made them impossible to shelve or would fall out and suddenly become impossible to repatriate to their original location.  And it was one of the first flaws I noted in the design of the early e-readers, that you could not keep notes attached to the text.  This has since been changed, especially as e-readers cast their eye toward the college textbook market, but I don’t have any direct experience with it.  Yet.

Keeping notes isn’t the issue, it’s this idea of committing them to the page, and specifically to the page of someone else’s thinking.  Yet even that isn’t really new when I think about the number of manuscripts I’ve annotated in workshops, the number of student papers I’ve marked. I have always participated in this form of communication between the word and my experience of it.

So here goes, one final wall to break between me and my dedication to the craft of writing. I will purchase a box of mechanical pencils and settle in to become a better reader. And if it slows me down even further, so be it.  This might be the final arbiter of which books I keep in my library and which I don’t, something a little less arbitrary in the process than “I guess that was okay.”

At the crux of this bold new era of book marking I can’t help but wonder if books with marginalia will acquire a deeper significance to me as a result of taking full, complete ownership of them. The commitment is strangely daunting.

Now, who will be the first book?

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kidlit book love

It’s St. Valentine’s Day, which means among many other things that it’s the day the Cybils winners are announced.  After a public nominating process and two rounds of judging by bloggers in the kidlitosphere, the 2010 winners have been selected and are officially posted on the Cybils website.

Once again I was a judge, and this year I was back to graphic novels.  I’ll have more to say in about a week about the winners and my choices in the graphic novel category (and perhaps about judging in general), but for the next week or so I’m going to be posting reviews of some of the books considered for this years Cybils over at the review site, the excelsior file.  I’ve decided to hold off on posting about my decisions until after my reviews are up, starting tomorrow since I’ve got a (semi) Valentine’s book reviewed today.

As with most years, they Cybils provides a nice alternative to the other book awards out there.  I don’t know if it’s the nominating process, or the variety of people involved in judging, but there always seems to be a few surprises when it comes to naming winners.  And this year I actually read a number of winners before they were announced! That’s a first.  (I even reviewed the Teen Sci-Fi winner Rot & Ruin for Guys Lit Wire.)

Always full of surprises, the 2010 Cybils: check ‘em out.

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confluence: where do 20 great ideas come from?

Two things popped unto my writerly rear view mirror in the last 24 hours, both of which I found interesting, but neither of which I initially thought merited public comment.  Then, as happens, the two things got together and frolicked a bit and created an odd connection which, after the fact, seemed destined for the obvious file.

The first came from an oblique (to me) tweet about “the rule of twenty.”  That sounded vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t put my finger on it.  Sure enough, a Google search brought it up as a term for Bridge, not a game I play but where the reference made sense to me.  Except it didn’t, because the tweet was from a writer friend and it didn’t seem like she’d be talking about card games.

Inquiry led me to a blog post about Bruce Coville’s Rule of Twenty, about how you have to come up with, on average, twenty ideas before you land on the one that is right.  Twenty story ideas before you come up with the one that’s unique, twenty character names before you find the one that fits like a tailored suit, twenty plot twists before you uncover the truly exceptional. Okay, on average, perhaps it does take many trials and errors before landing on the one that “takes.”  It’s not a hard and fast rule but a reminder that settling for the immediate, for the obvious, will yield immediate, obvious results.

A little later comes the question: Where do your (creative) ideas come from? Ugh. This was the essay question I had for a college admission back in 1980. When you’re 18 years old and have spent your formal education learning basic artistic skills and then intuitively applying them, the idea of consciously thinking about where creative ideas come from is a sort of cat turd in the sandbox.  If creative ideas could be reliably summoned, if one could delineate the process for coming up with creative ideas, basically if an idea could be articulated why would it need to be created?  At least this was my teenage objection to the question.  If I had to explain how and why I came up with an idea as hair-brained as putting Beethoven in a modern-day city (an actual short film I made) it sort of lost its charm and humor.  It was fun, it was funny, it had no real plot, why did I need to explain where it came from?  Just watch it and enjoy!

The point of the question — then and now — is not really where, but how.  What do you, does one, do to allow for creative ideas to flourish?

Here these two separate-yet-connected ideas (did you notice the crows, one from a Crowe’s Nest, the other from an Upstart Crow?) meld into semi-articulate the idea of what is involved in what we call “the creative process.”  Both the Rule of Twenty and locus of ideas actually come from a process that people often think of as god-given, as talent, or simply as mystical.  The actual word for the true creative process is called discipline.  All the creative arts can be learned but they require the mind be open to the possibilities.

Creative ideas come from creating ideas, the same way that using muscles creates muscles.  It comes from the simple permission to think and combine thoughts in new and unexpected ways.  We are actually born with this talent, if you will, and have it slowly replaced over time with more rigid thinking.  Be reasonable, be logical, behave, take these subjects in school seriously; we are taught that this is the way to be, to think, that this is the point and purpose of education. We may occasionally be thrown a “what if?” but it usually with a purpose.  Purpose. What we do must have a practical application, practical and accepted.  This is what comes to replace our intuition, our sense of play, our ability to create.

So by the time we make the conscious decision to dedicate ourselves to the creative act we find we have to unlearn much of what we have been taught in order to access those dormant areas of our brain that are naturally creative.  We need to relearn the joy of a line without a purpose, wordplay without rigid logic, story without rules.  We have to discipline ourselves to see beyond the surface and imagine new definitions, we have to develop a mental yoga that builds new flexibility into our thinking. We have to work backward in stripping away what we know and assume, idea after idea, until we find the core of raw, pure, pungent creativity.

Where do ideas come from?  We are born with them.  They are lumps of coal that are hardened into diamonds over time just waiting for us to begin the process of mining them. If you are sturdy and disciplined enough you can find them just twenty layers or so beneath the surface.

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#poetryfriday: in flu

I’m about 99% over the flu now.  I was in denial for a long time about having the flu this season because I really had the full-blown flu back in 2001 and that practically killed me. I had fever and hallucinations for days and i vowed I would never call an illness the flu unless is truly was as brain-boiling as that last time.  This year I apparently caught a strain that didn’t involve fever but left me feeling pretty cruddy at times.

Anyway, I was combing some computer files and I found something I wrote about five years ago with a title I didn’t recognize.  Turns out “What a Mess” is actually a poem I wrote about having the flu!  Clearly it needed some work (and a new title) but it seemed to have found me at the right moment all these years later, and so.

in flu

When your ears fall off in the middle of the night,
And they slip beneath the mattress
Where they’re hidden from your sight,
Can you hear the bedbugs chomping,
Or the dust bunnies clip-clomping?
When your ears fall off in the middle of the night.

When your nose drops off as you’re getting out of bed,
And goes running to the closet
Where it hides behind a sled,
Do you slip upon the trail
That it leaves just like a snail?
When your nose drops off as you’re getting out of bed.

When your tongue rolls out and flops down on the floor,
And it slithers like a python
As it ripples toward the door,
Do you round it up like cattle
In heroic epic battle?
When your tongue rolls out and flops down on the floor.

When your eyes pop out while you’re sitting there in class,
As they skitter off the table
Where they shatter just like glass,
Do you put them back together
With glue made from old shoe leather?
When your eyes pop out while you’re sitting there in class.

As your head caves in sometime shortly after noon,
When your brains ooze out your ear holes
And you catch them with a spoon
And your skull has turned to chowder
And your teeth have ground to powder
As your head deflates like an empty old balloon…

There’s no way you can deny it
So you must admit it’s true
That it’s not some crazy diet
You are dealing with the flu!

Poetry Friday, and all the poems you can eat! (it’s a Bugs Bunny reference, sort of.) Tara at A Teaching Life has the roundup today.  Head on over for more goodness!

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the new grimmoire: sausage mouse

Sausage and Mouse were the best of friends and were inseparable. They were poor but happy and lived together in their tiny little flat.  Once a week they would set up two large vats of hot water by the fire, one to bathe in and one to cook their weekly supply of boiled cabbage.  One week Mouse would bathe and then go to church while Sausage stayed home and boiled the cabbage, the following week Sausage would bathe and go to church while Mouse stayed home and cooked.  It was an unusual arrangement, to be sure, but one born of time and familiarity and mutual adoration.

One week after Mouse had bathed and left for church Sausage accidentally dumped the weekly cabbage in the bath water.  Afraid that too much of the flavor had already transfered from the cabbage to the bath water Sausage decided to leave it there and hoped Mouse wouldn’t notice anything was wrong.  But Mouse did notice.

“This is the most delectable cabbage ever,” Mouse said.

“I accidentally cooked it in your dirty bath water,” Sausage said.

“It was a most fortunate accident!” Mouse said.  “We should repeat this accident every week!”

And so the next week when it was Sausage’s turn to bathe Mouse stood by with the cabbage.  As the surface of the bath water started to show oily pools Sausage decided it was time to get out.

“First let me taste the water to make sure there is enough flavor.”  Mouse tasted the bath water.  “It’s good, but perhaps just a little bit longer.”

So Sausage stayed in the bath water.  As the water continued to warm by the fire Sausage began to sweat and could feel its body tighten beneath the skin.  Mouse tasted the water again.

“Almost,” Mouse said.  “Perhaps if you dunked your head beneath the surface and counted to one hundred that would be enough time.”

“But–”

“Trust me, Sausage, this will be the best tasting cabbage ever.”

And so Sausage went under the surface.  Before Mouse could reach even half way to one hundred Sausage floated to the surface.

“Poor Sausage,”  Mouse said.  “Well, nothing to be done about it now.”

Mouse removed Sausage and laid it out on the cutting board.  Then gently, lovingly, Mouse sliced Sausage into coins and slid them into the bath water with the cabbage.  That night Mouse lit a candle and toasted Sausage’s memory in feast.

“Although you are not alive, dear Sausage, you can at least participate fully in this wonderful meal you helped create.”

Afterward Mouse curled up in the corner next to the fire and slept long and hard. In the morning Mouse felt a little sad to not find Sausage nearby but the feeling didn’t linger.

There were other Sausages in the world to be had.

.

c. 2011 david elzey

.

Another of my weekly exercises in re-imagining and adapting tales collected by the Brothers Grimm.

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