Tuesday is here again and once again I have very little written. But here are two sentences I wrote this week:
"F.I.T.--the Fashion Institute--is just a few blocks down from here, and there are manufacturers and designers as well as students, professors, shopkeepers…all people who don’t keep nine-to-five schedules. And they all smoke, so they have to stand out on the street for at least ten minutes every couple hours."
I rarely--really rarely--review books, but LibraryThing has an "early reviewers" program, so I signed up to see whether I could get a copy of A Dog Among Diplomats by J.F. Englert a while back. The book intrigued me, but it's so far from the kind of thing I would normally read that I wasn't sure I'd buy it. I got my copy yesterday, and here are the first two lines:
It's not every day that a young man clad only in boxer shorts embossed with red hearts dies beneath an opened parachute in a small third-floor room in one of New York's last boardinghouses. It's even rarer that a visual artist, the owner of a Labrador retriever equipped with a generous belly, a fine mind and and admirable temperament, is called to the scene by the local police department before the body is even cold.
Looks like fun, eh?
If you want to post two sentences on your own blog, just put a comment here and we'll update the post with links!
This week, check out:
Travis Erwin's two sentences
Britta Coleman's two sentences
Posts
8 comments:
I wrote:
“Some traps aren’t possible to avoid,” she called after him as he stomped away. “They can only be survived.”
The last 2 sentences I read just happened to be this long:
As it happened, though, Kim Philby had been out of the country for two months when Germany surrendered; as the new head of Section Nine, he had been off visiting Paris and Athens and other capitals of the newly liberated countries, reestablishing the prewar alliances and the old cordon sanitaire against the Soviet Union. Hale postponed writing his letter of resignation, and for now simply kept reading and signing off the fifty-year-old files that were still piled on his desk every Monday.
- from Declare by Tim Powers
Clare2e I"m really intrigued by yours and Laura i can visualize those people out there puffing on their cancer sticks.
And thanks for the link. I hope more people get on board. It's fun to get a tiny glimpse of everyone's writing.
Well, you're doing your part to share the wealth, Travis. Thanks!
I hope more people get on board, too, because I'm so darned nosy about everyone else's beeswax.
I've been playing around with haiku this past week and here's something I wrote. Since the whole thing is just three lines long, I'll include it all:
Sitting at clean desk
Paper ready, pencils sharp
Closets need cleaning
Here's something I read:
Lee, Stephenson and Knott, Attorneys at Law, occupies a neat wood-frame story-and-a-half that was built right after the Civil War across the street and half a block down from the courthouse. The county did an architectural survey a few years back and our place is described as a "charming example of tasteful vernacular," a phrase I take to mean that some local builder had heard about Victorian styles but didn't have a millwright who could turn out yards of rococo gingerbread trim without a pattern to go by.
--from Bootlegger's Daughter by Margaret Maron
The haiku of distraction.
Elaine - love the haiku. I can SOOOOOO relate. And I just bought Bootlegger's Daughter for a friend...Maron is my idol.
Clare - some traps should be avoided at all costs! (Usually the trap of "closets need cleaning," which can prove fatal.)
Travis, I, too, love the little bits of people's writing!
I wrote:
"So unlike the safe schoolroom in Central Otago, where my seventh grade teacher had used colored markers to write metaphors on the ceiling. Where I’d kissed Danny McKenzie in the cloakroom. Right on the mouth."
I read one long run-on sentence so I'll let it count for two:
"But even in the middle of an Indian summer's day, when the sugarcane is beaten with purple and gold light in the fields and the sun is both warm and cool on your skin at the same time, when I know that the earth is a fine place after all, I have to mourn just a moment for those people of years ago who lived lives they did not choose, who carried burdens that were not their own, whose invisible scars were as private as the scarlet beads of Sister Roberta's rosary wrapped across the back of her small hand, as bright as drops of blood ringed round the souls of little people."
- from Texas City, 1947 by James Lee Burke.
Great image on the smokers at FIT. Your reviewed book looks like a winner, too.
My sentences are up! Thanks for the link.
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