March Flowers

General Musings

I’m writing to you now from a coffee shop in Paris called Ob-La-Di. Let’s be clear: I understand how pretentious that sounds, and I challenge you to read it more as an honest admission of procrastination. It is the 29th, which is generally when it pops into the front of my mind that its newsletter time. So allons-y!

Spring has hit Paris and brought along sunshine, budding trees, and the need to be out and about to soak it all in. For me, Seattle Spring feels both highly transitional and a little apprehensive, maybe disappointing at times. We watch the budding flowers wake in the sun. But more rain is on the horizon. The sun will come out (when, when, when?).

Craft Concern

What are the right words? As I was working on a recent short story, most top on my mind was tone and flow. With a setting physically and metaphorically in a mystical woods, the flow of transitions from physicality to internality was vital, and the words had to be right. 

Right? What’s right? 

So much of writing for me is listening and visualizing, so in selecting the “right” words for this story, my practice was to read the lines and listen to the musicality of them–how do the syllables fit together, what about the sounds of each word–how does one word lead to the next and does another halt the reading or force a hiccup? If so, is that where I want the reader to stop for a moment?

In a shorter piece, I find this practice fairly accessible. It is like sifting through every word like grains of sand to see how they will form together to make a picture. For longer works in progress, I’m not sure.