Searching For Inspiration

It's been a splendid little morning here in California.  I slept well last night.  If I dreamed I have no memory of the dreams.  I woke before dawn and lay there in bed, reading on the iPad, then, a bit later, talking with TR who was starting her day as well.  It was very nice to get up and pad around my own apartment, small and simple as it is.

Breakfast was a pair of waffles and a cup of coffee. I followed it with the latest episode of BBC America's "Copper".  It is a truly outstanding show, brilliantly written and acted.  I wish all television could hit that quality.  Heck, I would be happy if all other television simply aspired to that level of quality.

I wrapped up the night yesterday with a spot of creativity.  Based on a conversation with TR and several books I've been reading, I have been thinking about starting an alternative blog.  Well, an alternative to this one that is.  I want to take a different approach. I want to put together a blog where I tell the stories of the world I live in.  I draw my inspiration from TR (who writes excellent flash and frag*), and some addition inspiration from several books I've recently been reading, including the Tiny Book of Tiny Stories.

So, last night, I spent about an hour brainstorming a potential title for the blog. (Since it's not ready to go I won't share it with you let.)  I found a title I like that wasn't taken and got the site set up on blogger, just the bare bones of it.  I want to go into some more detail in the design and I plan on doing that creative work over the next couple of days.

What I want to do in the space is, very similar to what I enjoy doing here, which is writing about simple and ordinary things, about life itself. Except, I want to do it in the form of small stories. Instead of telling you about the event, I want to tell you a story about the event.  As I envision it, the stories will verge from non-fiction to fiction and all of the space on the spectrum in between.

I enjoy stories.  I enjoy telling stories and I enjoy hearing stories, so the venue will be a natural for me.  I may even revisit some of my older stories, giving them new exposure and a new home.  Every person I have ever known has thousands of stories. I love it when they share them.  So, it is at the fountain of inspiration that I am drinking today.

*Flash Fiction:  A style of fiction known for it's extreme brevity.  It is a complete story (beginning, middle, end) told in anywhere between 300 to 1000 words.

*Frag:  A style of fiction where the author writes a fragment of a larger piece, but the fragment (be it a single line, a couple of lines, a paragraph) reveals a tiny and provocative portion of the larger story, even if the larger story is left to the readers imagination.