Practice Series 4

This might be my favorite practice series, the Brewer's series. It started when Heather and I would go to the local Border's on Saturdays to write. Heather went into the reference section and found this great large book, Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. It had crazy listings for folklore, first lines, history, just a crazy mix of everything. Cool reference. She would check on the copy every time we went to Borders. Eventually we bought it. Huge book. Bigger than my first apartment.

So a vacation week was coming and I just said "Heather, flip through the Brewer's read me a random entry and I will write a piece." She did. I think that one was on the Greek or Roman guy Cato (that one was not an eventual keeper as you can tell from my strong memory of it) but it was fun to write and with the vacation starting I said I would have her randomly pick an entry a day, I would write it and then at the end of vacation I would have enough for a chap book.

I didn't do that, but I did write 8 pieces. Some were hard. Some I hated the weird entries I was given. But some came out quite well. Three of them were published. One of them was the first story I sold to Every Day Fiction. That one was based on an entry on Irish Rats, which was rats would be killed by reciting poetry to them. Here is the piece I wrote http://www.everydayfiction.com/the-exterminator-by-dave-macpherson/

My favorite story from this series was one called Spaghetti Bolognese. It is not available on line but I did sell it twice. I found the entry myself because Heather was driving and I read it out loud "A pasta dish favored by children." Heather was shocked, "What, did you say that it s flavored by children? That's crazy. That's Hansel and Gretel." Wow. She said that and I had the whole story in my head. I sat down in a Panera's and wrote it. If only all writing could be that easy and fun.

But of course its not that easy. There were some in that series that felt like pulling teeth. There is one story based on a british kids game that was a disaster from start to finish. But I finished it, and that's important to note. Just get the writing done. That's the lesson I learned from this practice. You take the assignment from the practice series and you just sludge through.