A Little Less Space on the Wall . . .

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In interviews sometimes  I'm asked if I have any hobbies.  "Yes, writing," I'll say.  At which point, bang, the interviewer writes me off as a smart-aleck.  But it's true.  I write stories which I intend to sell as my business and for relaxation, stories I have no intention of selling.

Cases in point:  Saturday, I went to an art sale and picked up two pieces:  A postcard-sized watercolor for ten dollars, and the above framed print of an out-of-copyright image printed onto a page harvested from an old  dictionary for twenty.  Over the weekend I wrote a piece of flash fiction, "The North Wind Speaks," to go with the watercolor and then pasted them both into the current instance of the Scribbledehobbledehoydenii, my  notebooks.  Then yesterday I wrote "This Is My Body," and (disassembling the framed print, wrote it on the front pane of glass with a diamond-tipped pen.  Today I rubbed red paint in the glass to make the writing stand out, and reassembled the print.

There it is up above, displayed in my garden.

You'll notice that the writing is extremely difficult to read.  I haven't decided yet whether to (a) get a new pane of glass cut and do the story over again, this time with ink designed to be baked onto the glass in the oven, (b) print out the story in very small lettering and paste it to the back of the print, or (c) leave it as it is.

In the meantime, it goes up on the wall of my office, along with other stories you'll have to drop by someday if you want to read.

And originally...

The first draft was titled "Hic Est Meum Corpus," but I changed it to avoid blasphemy.  Which just goes to show you how age mellows us all.  Forty years ago, I would have altered the story to insert blasphemy.

Above:  I'm sorry I can't show you "The North Wind Speaks," but it's a freshly minted image and thus under the artist's copyright.

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