Snippets: A Year of Writing Dangerously

By Morgan Smith

Flash Fiction without limits. A writer sets out on a journey of exploration, setting herself free to write past her own boundaries or with any eye to "product" just to see what happens, and then has no idea what to do with it all.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Morgan Smith
• Release date: Nov 21, 2019
• ISBN: 9780463284827

Morgan Smith

Morgan Smith has been a goatherd, an artist, a landscaper, a weaver, a bookstore owner, a travel writer and an archaeologist, and she will drop everything to go anywhere, on the flimsiest of pretexts. Writing is something she has been doing all her life, though, one way or another, and now she thinks she might actually have something to say.

Book preview

Introduction

I made a vow about a year ago to write more just for fun. So, three Fridays out of four every month, I just tossed a little something together. I gave myself total freedom to write badly, to be incomplete, to enjoy the process and see what came out of me, without any pressure other than to get it out there, just a little bit at a time.

Sometimes it was just a rewrite of an old scrap of whatever, and sometimes it was like a fragmentary bit of dream or something, but it was really good for me. For writers, I highly recommend it: it’s a bit like pliés for ballet dancers or scales for musicians – it keeps your skills limber and sharp.

So here they are, in all their disjointed and patchwork glory, just for the pure joy of it.

Note: these pieces don’t, in the end, appear in the exact order I wrote them in. Sometimes I was too fixated on a particular subject, and for the reader’s sake I wanted to mix things up a little.

Snippets: A Year of Writing Dangerously

October, 2018

On the morning of her death, Myra woke up at exactly 6 a.m., as she always did. She lay gathering her thoughts for precisely five minutes, then rose, put on her brown terry-cloth bathrobe, went to the toilet, brushed her teeth, made herself some coffee, and sat down at the kitchen table to write a grocery list.

It was not her usual list, though. This one was heavy on the ingredients for casseroles, crackers and similar appetizer finger foods, and freezable desserts, all with longish shelf lives and suitable for the kind of function that inevitably follows a funeral.

*

Charley was a witch.

I don’t mean that in any pejorative sense. She really was a witch.

If she lit a green candle, she found a crumpled