Training Day

Without tradition, our lives would be as shaky as a fiddler on the roof!

Yes, yes, I must share one of my traditions. I finished my second (relative to recent writing endeavors) short story last week. Last Wednesday, to be precise. On an airplane, which is sort of unusual because nearly the entirety of the story was written on a train. Which was appropriate because the majority of the story takes place on a train.

This one is not as good as the previous. Maybe good isn't the appropriate word, but rather finished. While "What Lies Within" is mostly complete, with a few small rewrites, this new one (which is as of yet officially untitled, but uses the moniker "I was on a train the first time I saw her...") has at least one major rewrite ahead of it. At least three major changes have already been identified.

I'm okay with that, of course. I wanted to get the whole thing down before worrying about fine-tuning.

But, because it is what I do, here is an excerpt from my Train story...

"Like art, I suppose, these still life portraits in motion. Some are whimsical, serious, beautiful, absurd.

Let me paint the picture for you. The train is not colorful, but it is bright. Soft yellows, greens nearly like grey, and subdued blues speckled with the green-grey so as to mute it even further. The florescent lights are dull but many, and the shadows are few and hidden beneath the seats. The tint of the windows keeps the shine of the sun out, though the light still makes its way inside. The men wear darker, earthier, colors, the blues of their jeans and the blacks or browns or tans of their jackets. The colors in their hair do not stand out. The colors the women wear are more varied, accented. The darks are deeper, the lights are brighter, and the subdued tones matched in ensemble. The colors of their hair do not match the extreme differences between the whites, greys, and darks of the men, but they are more nuanced. They have depth, and texture, highlights. Among them, she is standing, feet set apart wide, holding on to the rail with one hand. In her other hand is her phone, its white headphones trailing their way up past her scrubs to her ears. You cannot see her eyes; it looks as though they are closed, but she is simply looking down, distracted from the world by her phone.

There is nothing special about her. She is spectacular.

I look for her often in this gallery."

 Before you all jump to conclusions, this is NOT based on a true story, and she is NOT based on a specific person!

Anyways, I have the Tierra Bella Century bike ride in Morgan Hill this weekend, so expect tradition #2 to make an appearance Sunday or so. Maybe I'll do that one in iambic pentameter. And by "maybe," what I really mean to say is "I will most definitely not write that post in iambic pentameter unless someone volunteers to pay a large sum of money for me to do so."