It’s exhausting to always be making and talking, whether in front of people or behind them, synchronously or asynchronously. Now, when every popular technology is just another doorway opening onto the ever unfolding dormitory of life—the one we’re all expected to drift up and down with casual curiosity, looking in on each other for the latest bit of gossip or distraction—not even our desks are our private domain. We’re always just a click away from leaving the workbench for the forum. — An Introverted Writer’s Lament, by Megan Tiftt
This week’s Breakthrough exercise (and I do mean exercise): Don’t open that link until you have logged off, gone to your workbench (be it notebook or computer document) and written for thirty minutes. You might begin with this opening: I am here. Please send us what you write. Then you can open that link. I’m going back to my workbench to work on Bread, a new short story that begins:
My lover Mick looked at me across the Trillium Farms Talking Circle. “Just a few minutes, Liz. Okay?” He hunkered down on the rocky ground. I stayed on my feet. The Trillium Farm cows – who had no fewer rights than humans – were allowed to amble wherever they wanted.
A short guy with a shock of white-gold hair stood up and grinned. “I’m Angel Larue. ” he said. “The kindest thing my friends ever call me is a pissant runt. The local farmboys tell me on a regular basis that if they catch my goddamn hippie self messing with one of their daughters, they’ll take the gelding clippers to me. Me? I just tell them that a little piss-ant runt like me, you could probably use manicure scissors.”
“That’s one sneaky dude,” my lover Mick whispered. “Got all the chicks thinking about his johnson and how big it is.“
“Not me,” I said.
Martha Scott, Red Larue’s old lady, sat stone-faced a little back from the circle, her baby nursing under her Indian shawl, her two year-old limpeted to her side. My three kids, Sonny, Jimbo and Max were running around in their bathing suits somewhere outside the circle with the Trillium kids, most of whom were butt naked. I had been pushing undercooked beans and rice from dinner around on my plate for a half hour and trying to figure out how I could get rid of the chewed-to-glue flaxseed cookies wadded in my mouth.
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