Writing: Hmmm. And I didn't mean to create a clip show post, but...

I noticed that I have a lot of little scraps of writing that I never posted. I think. If I'm going to blog every day, that seems to be a fine time to use them. Here's one, written a few weeks ago. I think.

In The Forest for the Trees, Betsy Lerner says, "If you are struggling with what you should be writing, look at your scraps. Encoded there are the themes and subjects that you should be grappling with as a writer."

A few weeks or months after I wrote my brief series of StoryADay stories, I noticed patterns in them, and then I saw the same ones, less clearly, in my other fiction scraps.

In Bitter Oranges and The Princess and the Caffeine, predators befriend prey. In Recycling and The Princess and the Caffeine, parents don't care a fig about their children. In Recycling and Tulips and Butter, children fight the pull to fulfill their parents' needs. In Coriolis Effect and Tulips and Butter, parents impose their needs on their children, with the classic "for their own good" excuse. There's betrayal in Caveat Emptor and The Princess and the Caffeine, and the last line of Bitter Oranges. Recycling involves finding love (sort of) somewhere new, walking away from where it was sought before. So does The Princess and the Caffeine. So does Caveat Emptor. So does Bitter Oranges.

Hmm.

Allies acting as enemies, enemies acting as allies, finding what you need somewhere else.

Now I want to write a new set of stories, just so several months later I can once again figure out what I was writing about.