Playing The Sims has always been a fast-burning flame.
Exhibit A: thirteen-year-old Cam binge-downloading hundreds of wallpapers, floor tiles, and eye colors.
Exhibit B: thirteen-year-old Cam, two weeks later, uninstalling the game and all the recently acquired add-ons.

It comes with a guilty solace: controlling an animated version of yourself and your friends instead of interacting with one another in real-life, spending hours completing mundane tasks to get that +1 Cleaning skills when your real mother has to remind you seventeen times to empty the real dishwasher.

A once-in-a-lifetime moment of Sims me doing the dishes

But there is always one aspect of which I never seem to tire: World Building. Break open that Build Mode. Sink that entire lot into a pond. Throw in a dozen more windmills. Name that Downtown "Telenovela".

The demands of World Building are seemingly endless: what does the terrain look like? what natural disasters are common? how do people dress? what's the architectural style? what jobs do everyday people have? is there magic?

As both a visual and linguistic artist, trying to keep straight all those images in my head get confusing. I just spent five minutes yesterday trying to remember a character's mom's name because I never got around to making a family tree. But having the opportunity to construct houses for the characters in my story is hands-down one of the best things my tweenage self ever discovered.

One of many houses, exterior. Interiors are (c)

First off, designing a house for your characters gives you a realistic view of space, style, and dimensions. Using The Sims to render a 3D model is vastly more impressive than a simple paper and pencil drawing. I will forever know that my girl Samantha climbs up the stairs and takes a right to walk down a long hallway to get to her bedroom. I'll know the north and east windows let in way too much sunlight every morning, and not even the massive maple tree on the east side can block out that ball of fire.

I'm forced to consider aspects I might have otherwise overlooked, like if characters would keep their bedrooms messy or neat, what colors they like, what clothes they'd own. It becomes obvious that I'm not just building a house, but I'm crafting a home, and I'm exploring the character through the space they live in.

I will spend hours on hours constructing a home before I start designing a Sims family to live there, if ever. You cannot honestly tell me you've considered how many baths & half-baths your protagonist's home has, or what kind of light fixtures there are, or how much counter space is in the kitchen. We just think that stuff is just "there" and worry about our character's love-square about to fly off the tracks. BUT SOMETHING MUST BE SAID FOR DESIGNING EVERY TILE PATTERN, WINDOW CURTAIN, OR WALLPAPER SWATCH.

A diagram showing how you can customize furniture by texture / pattern, layers, and 256 coloring (by Norma Blackburn of Carl's Sims 3 Guide)

One aspect about The Sims 3 that I'm working to death is the ability to customize the color of anything: ever 256 shade/hue/tint is available to you, dozens of patterns/textures/woodgrains. You can get so specific. You can really see if a mahogany wood looks alright with cerulean-painted walls, or if that white leather sofa will look nicer next to that black bookcase or maple-wood door.

You can view the house from 360 degrees, from a bird's eye, a worm's eye. You think about the landscaping, or if there's a 1 or 2-car garage, or what kind of fencing you should have for your fenced-in yard.

Let's end with this so I don't go on for an eternity about The Sims: when the author knows what the environment / building / home looks like for their characters, they are less likely to make simple mistakes describing the layout. In fact, they are more likely to actually describe the layout, which will help your readers better imagine what the world looks like, which means your characters won't just be walking around in a box.

Read the more from Cam Best on Floodmark

The line drawing me closer and closer to the works of French Canadian artist Alexandra Levasseur is first and foremost the color. Her works don’t necessarily overwhelm the senses with bright colors and patterns, but rather nudge a viewer into noticing all the small details. Paintings I otherwise would have labeled too busy and over-stimulating become interesting to look at in their entirety. My eyes first notice the color palette, and secondly, the facial expressions of her human subjects, often colorful themselves to match their environments.  

Temps Transfiguré

Levasseur’s works incorporate elements I enjoy in Januz’s Miralles’ work—a combination of hyperrealism and surrealism that doesn’t translate into fantasy but rather very real emotions pulled out into a physical realm.

Réincarnation Secrète

Allow yourself to look over these selected Levasseur works before free writing. The colors all create a different mood—the lack of expression, of body, and the surplus or repetition of the body, all do different things. This can be done in poetry as well. 

Body of Land

Add color to your writing—whether that mean literal names of colors, or colorful language you aren’t familiar with, or a description of a color without naming it. 

Summer Heat

Imagine if you were larger than your landscape. 

All images courtesy of Alexandra Levasseur

While ornithologists may disagree with me, there is nothing particularly notable about the pewit, also known as the Northern lapwing, the green plover, or as Vanellus vanellus, to have earned it to a spot on our blog. It's a lovely bird to be sure. While neither as fearsome as a raptor nor elegant as a heron, a pewit's would surely look at home on the crest of a noble Eurasian family, or on the shield of a Medieval knight.

V. vanellus is a migratory bird, its arrival in the low countries signaling the onset of spring. Its eggs, mottled and small, which it lays in open fields, have been considered a delicacy my the aristocracy of Europe. The birds defend their eggs bitterly, and are known to feign injury to lure would-be predators away from their nests.

The word "pewit" is personally significant not because of its definition, but because of its daffynition. Daffynitions are a simple sort of pun - a proposed definition of a word based on the words pronunciation rather than its actual definition. Coffee, for example, is the person on whom one coughs. A flatulence is an emergency vehicle that picks someone up who has been run over by a steamroller.

As for the pewit, a "pewit" is somebody who composes "pewitry". If you're reading this pewitry blog, I hazard to guess that you, yourself, might be a pewit.


Prompt:

Chances are, you've come up with daffynitions yourself, perhaps as a child, plucking a dandelion and thinking of large cats in waistcoats. Take some time for levity this week. Take some time for puns. Compose some daffynitions of your own, and if you come up with some good ones, share them with us here at Floodmark!

Read more of Vernon's work on Floodmark

Banner image courtesy of Wikipedia

Wallace Stevens did not concern himself solely with the content of his poetry, nor its emotional impact, but also with how it sounds. This concern shaped Stevens' word choice – not only for meaning, but also for sound – and led him to invent remarkable words, onomatopoeias mostly, for use in his poetry. One such word is "Rattapallax", which appears only in his 1922 poem, “Frogs Eat Butterflies, Snakes Eat Frogs, Hogs Eat Snakes, Men Eat Hogs”:

It is true that the rivers went nosing like swine,

Tugging at banks, until they seemed

Bland belly-sounds in somnolent troughs,

That the air was heavy with the breath of these swine,

The breath of turgid summer, and

Heavy with thunder's rattapallax,

That the man who erected this cabin, planted

This field, and tended it awhile,

Knew not the quirks of imagery,

That the hours of his indolent, arid days,

Grotesque with this nosing in banks,

This somnolence and rattapallax,

Seemed to suckle themselves on his arid being,

As the swine-like rivers suckled themselves

While they went seaward to the sea-mouths. 

"Rattapallax" doesn't have a dictionary definition, nor does it need one. We understand it solely by its sound. It is the sound, the sensation, and the feeling of thunder. The poem leads us to understand rattapallax in contrast to somnolence. Rattapallax is full of energy; it has an alert quality, yet a quintessential summer storm will have both qualities – both somnolence and rattapallax.

Prompt:
Is there are feeling you can't quite capture? A sensation you don't quite have a word for? Make one up! Work it into your works the way Stevens uses "rattapallax" or Hobbes uses "snorky", "brambish," and "brunky". Share your results with Floodmark!

Image courtesy of Bill Watterson, via Arnold Zwicky

Read more from Vernon Meidlinger-Chin on Floodmark
Banner image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

If you were in the continental United States on August 21st, and if you looked skyward during the day, would would have been greeting by a “once in a lifetime” sight: the new moon, passing over the face of the sun, casting a chilling and uncanny shadow over the face of the Earth 

What you have witnessed is a solar eclipse. The great wolf has swallowed the sun! The serpent of days has done battle with the gods! The end of days is upon us! 

Photo courtesy of NASA

Rather, the eclipse is the result of a Syzygy, the conjunction of three celestial bodies in a line. In the case of the 2017 solar eclipse, the Earth, Sun, and Moon moved into syzygy with the Moon in the middle. In the case of a lunar eclipse, the Earth would take the center position in the syzygy, casting its shadow on the face of the full moon.

Photo courtesy of The Los Angeles Times

Syzygies do not happen solely in the Sun-Earth-Moon system though. From time to time, if you observe the sky carefully, you might be treated to a syzygy of multiple bright planets with Earth. The results are always lovely to observe, and if your interests include astrology as well as astronomy, let us at Floodmark know what it means for these planets to be “aligned”!

Prompt:

Consider chance encounters in your life that might not necessarily occur between celestial objects. Have you ever been in syzygy with other people? Consider the mythologies that surround astronomical events. What sort of folklore surrounds eclipses and planetary alignments? And if you witnessed the 2017 solar eclipse over North America, what did you experience? Put pen to paper, and as always, we at Floodmark would love to hear from you!

Read more from Vernon Meidlinger-Chin on Floodmark

At a reading a few months ago, one of my professors was introducing the visiting writer, Bhanu Kapil. I was distracted by a flash of pink from Bhanu's chair. She was ripping the petals off a pale pink rose and cramming them into her mouth, chewing, then spitting them out. She then sank off the chair, crawled towards the podium and rose up from behind it like a sea monster breaching the waves. There were some giggles, but I thought back to the Q&A we'd had with her a few hours ago.


Bhanu Kapil researches through the body. She went through a phase where she did performance art to feed into her writing. She once lay on a table in a red silk sack, while her audience stood outside, the sound of a knife being sharpened echoing from a hidden speaker system. If my memory is correct, that research helped her write about women's bodies often being viewed as pieces of meat.


Researching (and writing) through the body is different from writing about the body (equally valuable; here's a prompt I wrote). When you write about the body, the act of writing is still centered. When you write through the body, writing springs from the body, centering the body instead. Now, this doesn't exactly jive with Descartes' philosophy of "I think, therefore I am," and one that's implicitly gaining increasing popularity as we move from an economy and lifestyle geared around physical labor to one that's geared around mental and intellectual labor, but it can be a source of tremendous creative energy. Given the right topic, in fact, writing through the body can be much more productive than plain old writing.


So, since we here at Floodmark are all about inspiration and endless surprise, give this a try and you might find yourself, well, surprised.

1. Find the right topic. It would be difficult (though not impossible) to write about, say, the color blue through the body. But it's easier to start with a topic that has something to do with the body–sport, sex, race, gender, illness, even gardening.
2. On your own, and without the necessary equipment or partners for your topic, perform an action (or actions) associated with or representative of your topic. Take note of how your body moves and feels, your reactions, your embarrassment, the relation of your body to others while doing this activity. Do this as often or as much as you need to, until you have a store of bodily knowledge.
3. Now, write. But don't forget about what you just did. Make your writing mimic the movement or rhythm or size or shape of your body. Use what you just learned about embarrassment, hitches in movement, sweat, effort. Make the body central in your work.

Read more of Rukmini's work on Floodmark.

SaveSave

Sisyphus, king of Corinth, was known to be the craftiest of mortal men. For his scheming and his dishonesty, the Gods condemned him to the most elegantly sadistic form of punishment in all the great underworld. Sisyphus was condemned to roll a massive boulder to the top of a steep hill, only to have it roll back to the bottom ever time he neared the summit, over and over again for all eternity.

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The myth of Sisyphus gives us the fantastic adjective “Sisyphean”, a word that conveys the futility and difficulty of a seemingly endless task. The conclusion, made by Albert Camus in his essay “The Myth of Sisyphus,” that “we must imagine Sisyphus happy”, has roughly synonymized with the Sisyphean with the absurd and associated the labor of Sisyphus with the absurdity of human life. The protagonists of Franz Kafka, struggling endlessly with vast and incomprehensible bureaucracy, can be said to live Sisyphean lives. The Trix rabbit, it his endless quest to try a little bite of Trix cereal even though, “Trix are for kids,” is a tragic figure of Sisyphean proportions.

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“The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a rabbit’s heart. One must imagine Trix happy” – Albert Camus, “The Myth of Trix” (slightly altered).

Prompt: 

We’ve all undergone experiences that have felt, in some way, Sisyphean. If you’re a writer, the process of writing and editing, revising and rewriting, can feel endless and futile and impossible. Write about such an experience, either your real or imagined. How does associating such a labor with a Greek myth effect how you write your piece? Does Camus’ association with the absurdity of life inform your writing? 

Read more of Vernon's work on Floodmark.

Inspiration through the artwork of Jenny Saville

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In an interview with The Guardian, British artist Jenny Saville states, “I think I’ve accepted that making things that are beautiful is interesting, whereas before I was not interested in beauty at all. I was anti-beauty, I would say. I like that something reveals itself slowly, it doesn’t have to shout it. That’s shocked me.” 

Saville gained fame in the art world young—by her early twenties, her subversions of the ideal female body, signature due to huge canvases containing bloated, overweight, fleshy bodies—were displayed in galleries across the United Kingdom and the United States. 

Fulcrum

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Even in Saville’s portraiture, it is easy to believe she used to be anti-beauty, looking for other means besides contemporary visually appealing standards to create.

Entry

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Bleach

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Stare

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Similar to visual art, I believe poetry also has this underlying expectation of beauty—observations of nature, the elements, placing people on pedestals, sealing lovers in metaphors. And of course, the macabre in poetry has always existed, same with visual art. Maybe I’m alone in this opinion, I’m no art collector—but I wouldn’t describe Saville’s work as macabre, or even really grotesque, either. Most of her pieces don’t have to with death, but life. Blood, motherhood, nudity, sex, womanhood, facial expressions (last time I checked corpses are somewhat limited in that function). There is an in-between idealized beauty and abject horror/death, and this is where life happens. Often mundane. Occasionally charming, crushing. How do we define ourselves in this in-between? How do we recognize the nuances and grey-areas surrounding us in our art? How do we represent them as truthfully as we can? There are target audiences; there is the ever aesthetically pleasing inclination to represent what could be rather than what is.  

While there is nothing wrong setting out to contort reality, often this is a form of escapism and avoidance. Once again, this isn’t wrong, or counterproductive. But today, I challenge you to write your reality. Saville’s artistry may shock—but there are cultural reasons of what is acceptable and unacceptable provoking this reaction. I invite you to think of this as you write. Don’t set out to write beauty, to write death. You could set out to shock—but I would argue life itself, in all of its bloody truth, is unexpected enough. 

Read more of Alyssa's work on Floodmark.

Heat sand hot enough, and you get glass. If you are a glassmaker, you can do this in a kiln. If you are a harbinger of extinction, you can do this with a meteor strike. And if you are J. Robert Oppenheimer, you can do this with a nuclear blast.

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Meet trinitite, a rare, slightly radioactive glass formed when the fireball of a nuclear bomb draws sand up into itself, melts the particles together, and rains molten glass onto the ground below it.

The name “trinitite” derives from the name of the nuclear test site where it was first observed – Trinity, the first atomic test in human history. The site gets its name from nuclear physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer’s love of the poetry of John Donne. “Batter my heart, three person'd God,” Donne wrote, and, centuries later, nuclear history was made.

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Note the shoes worn by Oppenheimer and his crew in the picture; they are specially designed so as not to track trinitite away from the test site.

Prompt: 

You could write a lifetime worth of poetry and never have to use the word trinitite, but consider the way poetry and science and world power come together in this word. There is a certain beauty to the code name of the first nuclear test. Members of the Manhattan project recognized the singular significance of their work, and chose associated words deliberately. So rather than give you a real prompt this time, may I just wish that the words you chose be likewise deliberate and evocative. 

Read more of Vernon's work on Floodmark.

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As my family began packing away Christmas decorations in light of the New Year, I entered my living room to find an old American girl doll box. Peeking through the plastic was not the red headed Felicity as the box label read, but rather the molded clay head of Santa Claus.

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As we locked eyes in a staring contest in which I would always lose and perhaps become cursed from, I remembered something from my distant past. 

From my birth to my childhood days, my maternal grandparents didn’t live near me, as they do now, but in a large house in Raleigh, North Carolina. Every summer my family would drive two days down towards the coast, spending a few nights with Grandma and Grandpa before heading towards Atlantic Beach. Grandma and Grandpa’s house was fun, for many reasons. The house had a grand staircase that my brother and I would drop beanie babies off of (once this resulted in shattering the humble abode of an innocent potted plant). The house had long hallways and multiple spare rooms where we ran, laughed, and tossed more beanie babies. There were beanie babies everywhere. Wait, I’m getting sidetracked. The memory that gripped me as I locked eyes with the sunken Santa head was a specific spare room in the house.

Now, I never once remember thinking this was creepy as a child. But if my memory of the room serves me right, it looked like this:

In the middle of the room, just carpet. The sides of the room contained desk after shelf after desk after shelf. Many of these surfaces contained spool thread racks. Some of these racks contained thread. However, on most of them, mounted in rows of empty, glassy eyes: clay head after clay head, each in a different stage of production. 

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The most horrific detail of this memory is that the only reason I have these 360 degree recollection of the room is I used to go in there, leave the lights off, and just lay in the empty center of the room, meeting all the pairs of eyes, or eye sockets, around me…

My grandma is still a fan of those molded elves or reindeer that plug into the wall and sway back and forth.

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…it gives me the chills.

My prompt for you today is the following…

Write a poem titled “The Room of Dolls.” It doesn’t have to include any details from the room I described; what do you see when you picture a room of dolls? What are you memories surrounding dolls? Sweet, comforting? Something inanimate you swear saw blinking?

Ugh. Merry Belated Krampus to all. And to all a night with no melting doll face nightmares. 

Read more of Alyssa's mostly non-creepy-doll-related work on Floodmark.

There’s a story inside of you crying to get out… but you don’t know how it wants to speak. Does it want the fragmented barking of poetry? The snapping back-and-forth of a play or a screenplay? The roar of prose? The snack of flash-fiction? 

You’ve bitten off more than you can chew - you’re sure of it this time.

When you become a writer of various platforms, part of the labor is deciding which way to share a story. I’ve dabbled with all of the previously mentioned genres, and no doubt there are more to try. But how do you know which fits best?

Well, it entirely depends on what you have to say.

The simplest route is to write, of course. Write without pausing to paragraph break or indent a line… maybe without even punctuation. Christen yourself Faulkner and run like The Sound and the Fury that you are. [Run Ons, Faulkner, Run Ons!] 

Photoshop courtesy of Cam Best.

Sometimes, the writing will find its voice: it will shout “Poetry!” or “Prose!” or the like, and you’ll be able to start revising.

Other times might not be so lucky…

Should that be the case, what I’ll do is let the words stew. Write until the words fail you, then put your laptop or notebook on the stove burner and cover it with a lid … 

Please don’t actually do that.

When you’ve left it alone for long enough, reread it. If no format jumps out to you, now is the time to brandish your axes.

Hack off the legs of dialogue. Sever the toes of dialogue tags. Cut up the character description, the scenic description, the character actions, the environmental actions! Dismember the bastard!

Now what do you see?

If your story’s instinct is to drive forward with dialogue, you’ve likely got a play or screenplay on your hands. I find that both formats allow me to create more “raw” dialogue that doesn’t need to be cushioned and supported with the bra of character and scenic descriptions. It is all natural. The story speaks for itself [get it?] 

Telling the two apart is tricky. WIth my screenplay experience, I feel much more protective over the characters. I want to describe their backstories, I’m already specifically visualizing the story…  I allow myself to be much more creative in my scene directions in screenplays because I often direct my own film projects and laugh at my own jokes.  As for plays, to me, those scene directions manifest as instructions for movement. 

My screenplays also have much shorter, episodic scenes; my plays are typically one setting, one scene. Of course, my style for plays isn’t the same as yours, so take a look at your own writing to identify those distinguishing features.

If your story’s instinct is on character description and evolution, it might focus more towards prose. 

Dialogue might trip you up in this -- it might be necessary to first distinguish between spoken dialogue and internal dialogue. A paragraph heavy with spoken dialogue could suggest a play… a paragraph heavy with internal dialogue suggests prose. Prose tends to boast character more than the others, whereas characters in plays tend to… play nicely with others [my puns are on fire today. Or, as the kids say, lit. Imagine: lit literature… Lit lit!]

Prose allows for layers to unfold over and over for the reader, whereas plays are filtered through the director’s lens and displayed to the spectator. With your audience in mind, prose encourages frequent revisiting, tasting the various spices in a dish. But no platform encourages reinterpretation more frequently than poetry.

Poetry is more than eager to roast the other platforms. It certainly would never stoop so low as to dialogue! And character development? Why, only if your childhood memorabilia of a music box in the deceptive shape of a trombone is a character… 

My own poetry likes to boast its way into epic stories, blending spoken word poetry with traditional. So when I’m trying to decide if I want a poem to read for three minutes into a microphone versus thirty seconds into an ezine, I have to decide how complete my story will be. Traditional poetry will focus on snapshot moments and contain more blank space than blank verse. Spoken word will tell a story in a manner far different from prose, varying in various components. My spoken word poetry focuses greatly on sound: alliteration, assonance, consonance, you name it. It must be heard out loud. But it has a greater spectrum of emotions in those five hundred or so words, more than a short story or piece of flash fiction would reasonably have. Believe it or not, spoken poetry’s voice isn’t just a scream into a microphone.

There are many elements of writing to consider when selecting a genre: character presence, environmental presence, emotional variation, brevity of the moment of the story, dialogue… Experiment with different formats until you find your piece’s voice, for it will speak.

Flow chart courtesy of Cam Best.

Read more of Cam's work on Floodmark.