Jeff Coleman

What’s Friday Freewrite? Find out here.

Even among so many people, I feel alone. A million voices scattered clumsily about, clamoring over one another, competing for attention, and mine sits still and silent, huddled up against the wall in a lone booth.

The soul inside of me cries without sound, a silent weeping that sets my heart aflame with a searing loneliness that scours me to the bone.

I don’t even really know what to write now¹, but I’ll let association and the the abscent² ramblings of the pen do their magic.

A blinding brilliant azure flash, from which all was created ex nihilo, a vast sprawling universe of stars, clustered into galaxies, of planets, thought, sense and purpose. All these, which sprang unbidden from the pen, a conduit through which the Creator has done his handiwork.

Write a flash fiction story³, about God creating the universe, but doubles as a writer. And when the writer is done, he looks at last upon the world of his creation, and concludes that it was good (Bible parallel.)

“…ink, the lifeblood of creation.”

Footnotes

1. Whenever I don’t know what to write about, I continue on anyway. The idea behind freewriting is to keep the pen moving. Eventually, something will pour into your head, and you’ll start generating ideas again. Even writing about a lack of ideas can sometimes yield a fruitful harvest.

2. This should be spelled absent.

3. You never know when a random freewrite will turn into a story. It’s always a happy accident 🙂

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What’s Friday Freewrite? Find out here.

The bathroom as a place of silent reflection.¹

“The bathroom makes a philosopher of us all.”

OR

“He was the great bathroom philosopher.”

And tie philosophy into excrement in the toilet.

I wish I could experience the fullness of my being in a brief moment that lasts forever.

Christmas². He’d tallied up the cost one day, and determined that, in general, one breaks even; you tend to receive in value what you’ve given to others. Well, he thought, why go through all that effort to break even when you could just do nothing and wind up in exactly the same state.

Luck is merely the perception of a pattern in the midst of chaos, the one-in-a-million favorable outcome already predicted by the cold hard numbers of statistics.

For anyone who’s had a bad year³, I’d like you to remember the Phoenix, for, just as the mythical bird is borne of its own dying ashes, so too can you hope that 2014 will be a good year, born from the painful ashes of 2013. Happy New Year, everyone!

Story⁴ about a guy who, in waking and sleeping, jumps about through various stages of his life, and maybe how this ultimately serves some purpose, makes it so he can do something synchronized across different times.

Light fractured along the surface of the glass⁵ like shards of stained glass⁵.

Golden light sparkled like needles, making Jared squint.

Long jagged crystals of light jutted through the glass surface.

He stared at the sun until the light began to hurt his eyes, then returned his gaze to the computer, where a shifting inkblot followed him wherever he looked.

Footnotes

1. I think I was just being silly here.

2. I was fleshing out a potential character, not expressing my own views about Christmas. I’m not this miserly, I promise!

3. I ultimately intended to post this on Facebook for New Year’s Day, then promptly forgot to do so. Oh well, now I can post it here instead.

4. Sometimes, I know right off the bat that what I’m freewriting is going to be a potential story.

5. Not my proudest moment as a writer… I guess my subconscious was feeling redundant that day. When I wrote this, I was attending a celebratory dinner with co-workers and had decided to pull out my notebook, zone out and focus on the way the light was reflecting off the glass table (doh, I said that word again!)

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©2014 Jeff Coleman. All rights reserved. For reproduction rights, please contact the author (who happens to be a kind and eminently reasonable man.) Unless otherwise stated, images are copyrighted by various artists and licensed by Shutterstock.