A selected collection of my writing.
Created on one of “those” days where the brain would not shut up with its usual negative BS.
I guess this might be considered a prose poem? More like just a way to get that crap out of my head.
56 KB Adobe PDF:
B E R Zero Four Twenty-five Twenty-five
poem? © Jeffrey Beaty
March 28, 2022 — 3 AM
I felt the need to write this… thing. Technically not a poem. I question whether it can even be classified free verse. But the act of pulling it out of me resulted in a weird combination of pseudo meter and pseudo structured lines, mixed with long run-on bits of normal prose. Anyway, it had that feeling I occasionally get when I find myself turning poetic whether or not the results qualify as that — an intense need to express something that I can’t quite communicate even to myself. I cropped, simplified, reordered and structured a little making it at least a little more poetic, in form if not fact, until it felt at least in part like what I needed to say.
Another short bit of fiction that sprung from a writing workshop’s prompt. This writing prompt was simply to write a 500-word story that begins: “And then the wolves came.”
For whatever reason I immediately wanted the word “wolves” to become an acronym. I’ve been trying to vent a lot of frustration and downright ill feeling towards radical extremism, and the incredibly polarized world in which we have come to live when it comes to politics, opinion, and every extreme cause you can imagine; all refusing to let go of history, to live and let live, and instead turning everything into a witch hunt, public shaming campaign intent on destroying the “other” guy (whoever that may be) for simply having different opinions, political leanings, sex, gender, race, whatever. Lot of it recently has been a lot of back spin. Hey, you’re older than 40, male and white? Clearly you’re the devil. 🙄
I managed to keep much of what I had envisioned out of the story, (easy to do when they are this short). So a lot of the current-event specifics I intended to poke some jabs at never made it in. Which I guess keeps this from becoming out-dated. Only the core feelings remain. Maybe that’s better. Regardless, I REALLY like the result.
Download Then the W.O.L.V.E.S. Came
42kb Adobe PDF, 2 pages, about 500 words.
Just a VERY short story I wrote for an exercise for a Writing Workshop I attend when I can. I like the group leader’s writing prompts.
This workshop was titled, (you guessed it,) “Loved To Death”, and instructed us to: “Write a 500-word tragicomedy: romantic comedy WITH a tragic ending.”
After thinking about it briefly I really liked the idea of the scene that sprang to mind and became the story below. I had actually planned more to the story, but fitting it into the word count limit caused me to cut all but the first scene, and even truncating that some. The short approach was my sister’s idea actually. She mentioned a way I could avoid those later scenes at least for the exercise and go for an alternate quick ending. The result may be MORE powerful.
I originally thought I might go back and write the whole thing, but now I’m not so sure, as I increasingly like the effect of this short short. I think the longer, more sentimental idea kind of cheapens the premise, though it may communicate the narrator’s growing love and ultimate tragedy far better than this short version. Hmmm… Maybe I need to write that long version after all, just to see if I can pull the longer format off. We’ll see.
Download Loved To Death
52kb Adobe PDF, 2 pages, about 500 words.
The Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction is pretty great. It provides lists of newly created words and ideas that appeared in science fiction with examples of when asked by whom they were first used, and others who used and helped popularize the words.
This dictionary and its creation and some of the many interesting things it has helped reveal about the history of the genre and our language’s evolution are discussed in detail in this great Wired Magazine post too!
https://www.wired.com/story/historical-dictionary-of-science-fiction/
It’s taken me FAR longer than I had planned, but I finally hit the twenty pounds mark on my weight loss goals. Still a long way to go. With some issues taken care of over this slow process the last couple of months, I hope I can now concentrate on reaching my goals a little faster by stepping up the exercising and being strict again with my diet, which I had to slack off on for a bit due to some medical issues.
But even with all that keeping a slow but gradual loss, or at least not gaining again, was an accomplishment I should be proud of. Now let’s see if I can step it up some.
I’ve been analyzing the way I write and speak a lot recently for some reason. One of the reasons is stumbling on an article about a group that has developed an AI that can read the way we communicate in writing to statistically predict whether the subject will develop Alzheimer’s, all with surprising accuracy.
Then there is this computer program which was published in the Harvard Business Review which analyzes the use of pronouns and sentence structural elements (detached from the main content words of the sentence,) as a statistically significant indicator of things like the writer’s or speaker’s honesty, personality, social standing, and current psychology. Continue reading Language is a Virus: Sentence Structure Reveals Brain’s Secrets
I saw the cool animated gif of lightning showing through the clouds of Hurricane Laura in the Tweet below, visible from space via weather satellites.
For this #WednesdayMorning, take a look at #HurricaneLaura with @NOAA's #GOESEast satellite as the hurricane's convection bursts with lightning. As of 8 a.m. EDT, #Laura had winds of 115 mph and was rapidly intensifying in the Gulf of Mexico.
— NOAA Satellites (@NOAASatellites) August 26, 2020
Latest: https://t.co/1L8q1zg4eW pic.twitter.com/yyxJkmlfnj
That by the way is NOT what frightened me. No, that made me feel inspired by nature, its power and beauty, and how we can never entirely control it (nor should we).
Continue reading What Really Frightens MeI remember a guy named Chick. I honestly don’t know if that was his real name or nickname. And his gal named Deloris. A married couple whose first names were Chick and Deloris. I don’t think I ever knew their last names. To me though Chick and Deloris was never their name. To me they were Chicken ‘Loris, and always will be.
Apparently as a wee rugrat I had once misheard “Chick and Deloris” and combined it in my head, morphing it into “Chicken ‘Loris”… A single animal in two parts. They and the family just adopted my version of their names, and they all came to use that among themselves, at least when we were together.
Continue reading Chicken ‘Lorispoem © Jeffrey Beaty
February 1, 2019 — 1:30 AM
16 lines
Late night into early morning urge to purge the words that were building up inside.
