Dear Readers

Dear Readers,

You have probably noticed that I am posting excerpts from stories instead of posting my poems. I have always wanted to write short stories and novels. An instructor of mine told me about Nanowrimo. What is Nanowrimo? It is a website http://www.nanowrimo.org/ that is free for writers. It offers a writing contest for the month of November. Anyone who finishes the challenge wins. The challenge is to write 50,000 in a month (November). The writing doesn’t have to be polished. My instructor told me that she wrote 50,000 words of crap. The focus of the writing is about practice not perfection. She also advised me to have a general idea of what I would like to write. A writing buddy of mine told me that she never has an idea of what she’s going to write she just writes. I did think of a general story line that I wanted to work with.

The recent posting that I have made, “Robin’s Story,” “Work,” “The Long Walk Home,” and “The Bus” all come from my Nanowrimo writings. All of these excerpts come from a short story that I was working on for Nanowrimo. And of coarse I took the time to polish what I published on this website. I never did figure out a good title for it and I was calling it “Tessa.” Tessa is one of the main characters in this story. The genre of the story is futuristic fantasy. The time, that the story takes place is 2275. There has been a terrible nuclear war. Why did I pick to write about a civilization after a nuclear war? A non-fiction novel that I was reading for one of my classes, Rebecca Solnit’s, “Savage Dreams”, inspired me. Solnit is an anti-nuclear activist. She writes about visiting the Nevada nuclear test site, which she has visited on several occasions. She gives accounts of individuals and groups, who have been affected by the testing. This inspired me to write about a society struggling to survive in the aftermath of a nuclear war. I also wove into my story that the form of government that the characters in my story are living under is a Theocracy. I read Gary Hart’s essay “God and Caesar in America,” for a class that I took. I decided to add the element of religious control as a form of government and used my own upbringing in a fundamentalist Christian religion to help create this piece. I hope you enjoy my short story excerpts.

Cheers