Haus of Rhi

I wanted to preface this impromptu discussion born of a stream of tweets churned out on my Twitter feed. This is not about inexperienced writers snubbing their noses at any sort of editorial effort on their work. This is about knowing the rules and knowing when to break them, and breaking them in a specific sort of way as an artistic technique. Let us not confuse the two, for we have all of us read unedited stories published on Smashwords or Lulu or Amazon that made our brains bleed with the urge to claw out our eyes. This is about the presence of prose poetry in fiction as a writing technique, and about how much of it is damaged or lost in translation through the course of the editorial stage of the publishing process. Prose poetry is a recognized form of art, in that it is  a recognized form of poetry . Sadly, it is not wholly recognized as a form of prose. Or at least, it is not recognized as a form of  fiction  prose. Had an interesting conversation about pro...

American Crow mobbing Red-tailed Hawk. Source: http://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/american_crow/id While driving yesterday, I saw three large crows circling above a winter-bare tree. They took turns dive-bombing at a dark shape in the branches. They were persistent, calculating, and energetic. Thankfully traffic was sparse enough to let me slow down a good bit as I got closer. That dark shape was a red-tailed hawk. It didn't seem terribly disturbed by the mobbing crows, but then, even bare the branches kept them from getting too close so it's possible they'd treed it out of the sky. This time of year, with no nests or juveniles to protect, it's rather curious to see crows being hostile. Defending hunting territorial lines, perhaps. Or did the hawk steal their roadkill, maybe? Or they were just being the intellectual assholes that's earned them notoriety in the avian world. All equally possible. Strange omens. It hasn't been that rough a winter, really. ...