Inspiration, Desperation, Suspiration, Broccoli…

Posted by M. K. Waller

© David Davis, Alien Resort. Used with permission.

Want to know how I think up topics for blog posts?

Of course you do.

I use several techniques:

1. A topic comes to me about 9:00 p.m. and I write fast and then stay up all night fixing it (and hoping readers can tell it’s been fixed), finding pictures, and making pictures stay where I want them.
2. Sometimes I forget I have a post due on Writing Wranglers and Warriors until 9:00 p.m. the night before, and I stay up all night doing the tasks listed in #1.
3. Sometimes a topic comes to me at 9:00 p.m., and I write about it and then see what I’ve written is so horrid that I trash it and write about something else. Often the something else is a topic I’ve meandered into while writing the horrid part.
4. Sometimes a topic comes to me while I’m driving. By 9:00 o’clock, I’ve usually forgotten it and have to think of something else.
5. Sometimes a topic comes to me while I’m working–cooking, washing dishes, moving the refrigerator and scrubbing the floor under it. We have a dishwasher, and since my diagnosis, David has done most of the cooking and cleaning up, so those pathways have lain untrodden for a while. Letting David cook is called “Taking Advantage of a Good Husband.” I should have been cooking every night for a long time. But until recently I’ve made it through only half the preparation before wearing out, so he might as well do the whole thing. I move refrigerators at 3:00 a.m. and so usually lose those topics, too.
7. Furthermore, David serves a lot of pizza and frozen entrees (TV dinners for the baby boomer generation), so I don’t have to eat the broccoli I’m supposed to eat. I’m happy. I was tired of broccoli before chemo, and now I find it almost intolerable. Don’t even mention lettuce in my presence. [This paragraph should follow #5 and not be numbered at all, but current formatting doesn’t allow it, and I don’t care. I could paste the list into MS Word, take out the formatting, and paste it back here; that might work. But, as I said, I don’t care.]

[The next paragraph began as part of paragraph #7, but when I changed my mind and spaced down, instead of becoming #8 or #9, the text flew clear back to the margin and didn’t number itself. Go figure.]

I repeat, I don’t care. I’ve been cooking, and I’m too tired to care.

I’m also too tired to proceed with the topic I planned to write about, which came to me while I was cooking: How to and How Not to Cook a Casserole for a 6:00 p.m. Dinner If You’re Still Doing Something Else at 5:10.

Putative Casserole. With broccoli.

And last week I promised myself I’d stop writing 1,000-word posts. The ideal is 300 to 500 words. This post will make the cut. If I stop now.

It’s only 6:40, but I have to find some pictures and properly attribute them and make them stay put, so I’ll probably be up all night.

*

522 words, not counting this line. Close.

***

M. K. Waller used to write as Kathy Waller. Then she discovered Kathy Waller is the name of the CFO of the Coca-Cola Corporation, and every Google search hit on Kathy the CFO a dozen times before it got to Kathy the writer. So the writer switched to M. K. There aren’t so many of those.

Her personal blog is M. K. Waller–Telling the Truth, Mainly. She also blogs at Austin Mystery Writers and edits HOTSHOTS!, the newsletter/blog of the Sisters in Crime Heart of Texas Chapter.

Her stories appear in the anthologies listed below. You can read her flash story, “And Justice for All,” in Mysterical-E.

 

  Lone Star Lawless (Wildside, 2017)

 Day of the Dark (Wildside, 2017)

 Murder on Wheels (Wildside, 2017)