Since undertaking my desk time audit earlier this summer, I’m hyper-conscious of time spent away from fiction. It’s especially pertinent right now as I’m on a roll with yet another draft of my currently nameless WIP, about a brother and sister separated for fifty years. But with an event to prepare for recently, I thought it would be a good opportunity to make some videos about my novels. Was it? |
December’s challenge to write a 99-word story featuring a performance brought me back to this post. I thought I’d write about my own performance anxieties until I recalled a short story I wrote some years ago ”Yoko Sits Silently Onstage While the Audience Snips off Her Clothes”. However, when I went back to this, it wasn’t how I’d remembered it. Which is fine, affording me to approach the same material from another angle, incorporating the theme of another recent post on the ubiquity of misogyny. |
Come, you know you want to! Haven’t you done this a thousand times in your mind? Forget it’s me up here, under the lights, with the power of my reputation. My name. Imagine a moonless night, a drunken stagger in a too-short skirt; she can’t remember where she left her friends, her bank card, her phone. She’s asking for it, can’t you see? As I am, now. Look how easy I’ve made it for you with the scissors. No need for savage clawing with your hands. I won’t struggle. I won’t protest. Won’t speak. Come, cut away my clothes!