My Month of Micro

I have few natural talents, but among my strongest is the ability to sign up for multiple things at once without knowing I’ve done it.

The only way I even slightly manage is by having a few good friends who herd me to wherever I’m supposed to be, and sometimes even do my work for with me.

I’m currently signed up for a course called Lit Mag Love led by Rachel Thompson, a multi-week thing focused on submitting to literary magazines. I’m in week three of that. I’m also on day twenty-six of Darien Gee’s Month of Micro, where she gives daily prompts for 10-minute writing sessions. I’ve never done something like this before, nor have I ever been able to get into prompts the way other people have - an annoying failure on my part. I’m also at least three weeks behind in a year-long Spanish course I signed up for, and this coming weekend is a two-day, six-hour Novella in a Flash workshop with Finnian Burnett. On June 7th I’m enrolled I “Submit-a-Palooza” with Darien, wherein I suspect I’m supposed to have something ready to submit, so that might be a problem. Then starting June 12th I have two full in-person weeks of writing instruction at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. I have two more of those in August.

Did I mean to sign up for so many things? Of course not. But courses are like jelly beans. You eat one flavor, then you need a break from that flavor, so you eat another flavor, but that first flavor was really good, so you go back to the first flavor, but then you remember that the first flavor mixes well with a third flavor, and there went a two-pound bag.

Interestingly, I never need a friend to remind me to eat jelly beans, or that I’ve bought a sack of them. This is not the case with writing and Spanish courses.

I’ve been shocked at how much I’ve stuck with and enjoyed the month of micro writing, and I’ve gotten one submittable piece from it so far. Perhaps more will come of those little snippets when I revisit them. But I thought I’d share a couple of them for fun, and perhaps you want to try a 10-minute writing session from the prompts as well.

Prompt: Write about the image above.

Tip: Let the reflection extend beyond the surface. Consider what might be outside the frame as well.

Here’s what my ten minutes got me with this one:

Basilica

The rain fell sometime in the night, when most everyone was asleep, before the early morning bakers and drivers, the tourists, the business executives, and the retail workers had begun their days. In the dark, the water washed the residue of a million footsteps down into dips and crevices of the road, the result of a hundred years of use.

The men who labored to build the road, bent, on their knees stone after stone, had nothing to do with the powers that had commissioned it; a king, a Pope and a dictator razing a neighborhood and dividing a city like pie so that each got their share. The workers slept in small houses with their families, for a decade and a half eking out the best lives possible, enough food for their children to grow, arriving each day to lay one more section of the avenue leading from the river to the basilica.

Now, for a moment, no one is working. A rat runs across the road in the distance, and overhead the pigeons start to fly down from their mysterious roosts in readiness for the day. At sunrise the first heels strike the cobblestones, then more, until the bustle of the town returns, step after step, drowning out the history that shimmered while the city slept.

219 words. Super fun.

Also this one:

Prompt: Write about a smell you remember.

Tip: Lead with sensory detail.

Fried Egg

The crackling of the heated olive oil turns your head first. It’s breaking glass, but without the fear—a sound that requires immediate attention without you even knowing why. The aroma follows, a deep, earthy call.

It’s changed from its raw state, which has a grassy, slightly bitter scent, and makes you think of lemon juice and garlic and salt, and all the tastes that surf its sturdy, liquid base. The heated oil is moodier, more intense. There’s a long ramp-up until smoke point, and as it heats it starts to shimmer and move within itself, the acids and invisible particles starting to swirl below the surface. That’s when you add the egg, from as high above the oil as you can drop it without breaking the yolk. The proteins in the white seize, forming a crispy, brown edge all around, bringing up into the scent column a rounded, almost buttery note to the oil’s broad nuttiness. You splash the yolk, tipping the pan with one hand and dousing the center of the egg with a spoon of the sizzling oil, blistering the marigold middle to just cook the top. Now it’s fully there, the warm, full, meaty smell, the fattines of the yolk, the crispiness of the edges adding a sharp hint that offsets the richness of the center.

You lift it out of the oil and add the salt and pepper.

234 words

Did I then go fry an egg? You betcha.

Anyway, my Spanish class starts in an hour, and those two weeks of homework I’m behind - or maybe three - aren’t going to cram themselves.

If you decide to write from the prompts, pop them in the comments if you like!