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Monster Media 1993 #2
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S&M-01
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Wrap
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1993-05-30
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3KB
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54 lines
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The Muse░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░Who, Me?░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░by Michael Hahn
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Huh? My turn? Okay. (Clears throat.)
Hi. My name's Michael Hahn, and I'm supposed to tell you nice
folks how I inspire myself to write the little vignettes I fire
off to Del Freeman and Lucia Chambers on a regular basis.
How do I bring on the Muse? I just call her. See, I have a
dog named Thalia. When I need a story, I whistle for her. The
hardest part was teaching the dog to type . . .
Okay, so that's not true. Fact is, Michael Hahn is the house
name for a group of starving college English majors who scribble
by candlelight in the basement of the Sterling Public Library.
When one of them dies, we just get a new one . . .
Ow!! Oh, okay, Lucia--I'll be serious. Let's look in the
dictionary; reference materials are always serious. Hmmm . . .
muse: to think or meditate in silence, to gaze meditatively
or wonderingly, or to say or think meditatively.
Wrong one?!? Not in my case. My stories are daydreams in ASCII.
Life happens on a daily basis, common people and places and things
get juxtaposed in strange ways. Things like that strike me funny.
Whole scenes play themselves out in my head, and occasionally I
write a few down.
I have a file in the \WRITING\FICTION directory of my hard
drive called ANECDOTE.FIL. JUNKHEAP.FIL would be a better name--
in it I dump oddities, single words, phrases, paragraphs, little
ironies, dumb jokes, character sketches. When I write a story, I
often browse this file to see if anything jumps out at me.
One of the items in ANECDOTE.FIL is about a real sign I saw
one day on Chain Bridge Road near Vienna. The sign sat in a yard
along the road. It said, "Yard Sale", and was leaning against a
bulldozer. I began laughing so hard I nearly ran off the road.
"This," I thought, "is someone who's serious about selling a
yard." About a year later, I wrote "Just An Expression"--a story
about a boy who takes things too literally.
"But Michael, how do you write?" Little scraps like that one
wander about in my head, occasionally attaching themselves to
other scraps. When the scrap-conglomeration gets big enough, it
slides down out of my head through my fingertips and comes to rest
in a pile of bytes on my hard disk. I stir vigorously, making
sure the nouns and verbs are evenly mixed, sprinkle with commas,
and add a dash of sly humor. I pour the result into a .ZIP, place
it in my \UPLOAD directory, and a few weeks later you have a
Table of Contents entry in RUBY'S PEARLS or "Smoke and Mirrors".
No mysterious alternate states of consciousness, I'm afraid.
I just have a mind that says, "Mikie--tell me a story . . ."
-end-
Copyright (c) 1993 Michael Hahn