GYPSY_BEWARE WHAT YOU WISH FOR

Food Guy is still waging mortal combat with bronchitis ...

So I, Gypsy, warrior princess, must save the day yet again.

I have to ask you humans ... why do you do this to yourselves?

Fiction has got to be the roughest trade in prose. No textbooks. No reference. No quotes. Just your imaginations.

You have to invent something that is truer than true. Life doesn't have to make internal sense. Fiction does and still come across as life anyway.

Writing is something you can never do as well as it can be done. Always a challenge.

Jospeh Conrad suffered when he wrote. Called writing "un metier du chien" (a dog's trade)! I bristle and hump my back just writing those words. I have you know, Joe, that writing is NOT a dog's trade. And Food Guy only suffers when he does NOT write.

How about you, guys? Don't you itch and ache if you can't write? Let this feline know, all right?

Food Guy and I were just talking about the magic of short words :

I am the granddaughter of Bast, and I know that the most ancient of words are the short ones. Such words tend to be concrete and emotive :

sky, star, earth, cloud, sun, taste, food, drink, sight.

If an ancient word is a "concept" word, its concept is eternal and heart-stirring rather than abstract : life, war, love, death, peace, and friend.

The most ancient of those words have to do with us :skin, bone, blood, head, toe. The things we know best usually have a simple name.

My point?

To stir the blood and heart and mind of your reader : be simple -- use short, to the marrow words.

Short words don't war with one another in a paragraph like longer ones do. They mesh like a well-worn fighting unit.

In the beginning was the Word. And the end will mumur with one word as well.

Shakespeare could bruise your eye and mind with his arcane and showy phrases. But when he wanted to hit your heart, he used short words :

"My heart is turned to stone. I strike it, and it hurts my hand."

"As flies to cruel boys, are we to the gods. They kill us for sport."

In another incarnation, I sat beside Chief Joseph and wept as he said,

"No one knows where my People are. No food, no blankets, perhaps freezing to death. I want to have time to look for my children. Maybe I can find them among the dead. My heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever."

If you would touch the heart, be simple, be short.
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