Writing As You Go

Off with her head.

"Off with her head."

"Flogging the Freelancer" is a blog post a day about freelancing in the gig economy. Browse the archives here.

I've been in Chicago -- butt cheek-clenchingly cold -- for a few days and took the opportunity to do a couple stories while I'm here.

Both pieces rely heavily on deeply sensory experiences, which I find particularly challenging to write about, especially days or even weeks after the fact. You stare at your notes and search for the proper way to resurrect a since-faded feeling. How do you describe what something tastes like, smells like? No easy task. 

For the second story that I worked on, I tried writing the piece while it was happening, on my iPhone. It was a bit of a challenge to construct prose on the fly, but it forced me to better track action as it happened -- and, maybe, better capture sensory responses as they surfaced.

It definitely made me more conspicuous, which isn't ideal for someone whose usually strategy is to assume the pattern of the wallpaper. I had to hide my phone from prying eyes several times. I'd like to do more writing like this. I enjoyed the spiritedness of words generated in medias res. 

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My Bloody Sacrifice

I've got a new personal essay up, this one on The Billfold: "Blood Sacrifice."

I fantasized that if I went, on the night that I was there, by some strange coincidence, Achatz would be there. Achatz, I knew, had had cancer, too, and, in my daydream, Achatz would come by the table, and I would motion to him, and he would bend down low, and I would tell him, in a murmuring voice, that I had had cancer, and I knew that he had had cancer, too. He would smile knowingly at me, and I would smile knowingly at him, and then he would disappear into the kitchen, and he would emerge with a plate of something that looked like a tumor splattered across porcelain, and I would eat it, and whatever it was made of (rhubarb? venison? something else entirely?), it would be delicious, and I would have eaten the tumor that had tried to eat me, metaphorically, of course, and the cycle of life would close upon itself, completing itself, like Ouroboros with his tail in his mouth rolling down a street like a wheel.

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