Links to the earlier parts of this collaborative tale written with Jolene Rice can be found: Part I, Part II, Parts III & IV, Part V and Part VI. And now you have Part VII in your grubby little fingers.
I’d forgotten how far we’d taken this before I flaked out. Good thing Jolene is around to (finally) put it to bed. This is getting into the territory of where I get to be surprised by where she decided to take this.😄
Links to the earlier parts of this collaborative tale written with Jolene Rice can be found: Part I, Part II, and Parts III & IV, and Part V.
Funny thing: I did my field trip downtown Minneapolis today and one of the street people started singing “Jolene, Jolene, Jolene, Jo-leeeeene” as I walked by. I didn’t understand a word he said but it sounded like he was telling to write a song like that again.
I forgot that crowd. Always worth a few laughs when one of them gets it in their head to give a full performance.
Chico’s Mom (Jolene Rice) went to some lengths to make this collaborative short story ready for primetime: dusting it off, sanding off the the rough edges, finishing it (!), while tempering all of my frequently questionable, sad attempts at humor and my editing skills.
The original idea asked:
What would happen if the modern cunning woman (or “witch of the woods”, if you prefer) set up shop in a tiny home just outside of the city, and advertised her potions and charms on the internet.
And then, what would happen if someone feeling insecure about aging or appearances (and on a tight budget) went to her for a potion to “be seen” like she was back in her heyday. Procuring the potion was as easy as asking for it.
“Here’s your solution, deary.”
However, there was a minor hurdle for the customer to overcome.
This is a story that Jolene and I started collaborating on a while back. Then life got in the way for me and we didn’t see the story to completion at the time. Part I is here.
She also got to see the hidden dark side of my editing processes and probably wanted to run away screaming. I once shared a strikethrough version of such a process on this site or the earlier iteration and the lasting comment from readers was, “Wow, that is lot of red text.”
Add side comments in the margin along with those redlines and my process quickly appears more madness than method.
No one would blame a collaborator if they scooted. Quickly.
A few months back, Jolene mentioned off hand that I should run with it and, once again, I had too much on my plate. I said something to the effect of “that goes both ways, feel free to resurrect it.”
So she did.
So far, we’re in familiar territory for me.
While we blocked things out with some rough notes, I’m sure she’s soon going to go less familiar territories.
This should be fun.
A cautionary tale with a modern twist? Written by: Jolene Rice Michael Raven Judy sat in her car looking at the address her GPS sent her to with disgust. Not only at the appearance of the rundown structure; at herself. Now she knew how Sarai or Elizabeth felt in the Bible. That feeling of crying […]
Be careful what you wish for
Jolene decided to finish something we started together and I had to bail on when I got busy with life. Three kids and seven cats apparently have that effect at times. And a job where emergencies crop up without warning…
Anyways… While we never got around to collaborating on it after the first couple of brainstorms and paired writing sessions over Google Docs, Jolene went back and finished what we’d started a couple of years back.
Most of the credit should go to her. My writing DNA might be in it but she took ownership of the tale and saw it through. It really is her story, although she’s been kind enough to credit me for my meagre contributions.
She asked if I wanted to read the final story before it went live and I declined. I want to see where she decided to go with it and be surprised as much as her readers are. It’s more fun that way.
If you’ve not visited Jolene’s site before, I encourage you to give it a gander. Maybe stay for a while.
Good evening all. I wanted to circle back on this to give people incentive to play along with me and experiment with songwriting. While there were two Brave and Hearty Souls who joined in on my little bit of play last week, I would really like to give others an opportunity to jump in and show the world they lyrical writing chops.
The idea was to give you a rough idea of the sound and see what you might come up with if you were the lyricist for a band without actually having heard the song. In this case, I asked folks to think like Andrew Eldritch from Sisters of Mercy, bored in some dark nightclub wishing you hadn’t used up all of your amphetamine while the night was so young. He had a some new catchy lyrics that he wanted to write, but no music to write them to. Well, maybe it was not exactly that, but you get the idea…
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In case you were unaware and sat there wondering, “I wonder if this Michael Raven chap is up for a bit of collaborative something or another…” — let it be known that I generally am up for combining energies to make something bigger than I can do on my own, provided the chemistry is there.
There are a ton of possibilities:
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