Rethinking The Monday-Tuesday Bridge

As I wrote the title to last night awesome post I realized I wasted a good title on an insubstantial post. “The Monday-Tuesday Bridge” conceals a plot by mixing a few common words unexpectedly.

Maybe the title and the mystery are quite literal. The city in which the story takes place named their streets after days of the week, similar to how sections of Denver are named in alphabetical order or Topeka after states. The bridge may rise over a river or train tracks to connect Monday Avenue to Tuesday Avenue.

Potentially it’s only half literal. There are no streets named Monday or Tuesday but there is a bridge with such bad traffic locals dubbed it the Monday-Tuesday Bridge because traversing the structure takes so long.

Both of those would work out nicely without much torquing of the plot. I am left to figure out how a bridge of any kind plays into that plot. I suppose there’s plenty of ways to clumsily insert a bridge or location of any kind into a story. Characters met there, died there, it was built, it fell down, it blew up, it meant different things to different people…

Where does that leave me with the less literal possibilities? Symbolic bridgey-ness seems the way to go for the bridge part, but where do you roll in the days of the week?

Consider this: there was a bridge so hastily constructed and then torn down that it “went up on a Monday and was down by late Tuesday afternoon”. The hyperbole being trimmed down to a Monday-Tuesday bridge and now meaning any action taken too quickly with no judgment, poor planning, and laughable results.

Something like that could be applied to relationships or business venture or any other ill advised undertaking a character might strive towards. I could even have a theme: futility on one end or perseverance on the other.

I haven’t exposed any of my titles here, but sometimes I think write kick-ass titles. Maybe I could get someone else to do that book part?

Word count: 324
Day 227

The 200 Day Hump

It is fair to say that a fourth daughter is taking it’s toll on my daily writing habit. When I haven’t been writing short things or bad things or reworking old things, I’ve been writing nothing. While the first three styles don’t conflict with what I do here at 1000 Days that last one directly opposes my goal to write every day. Incidentally I’m not normally pleased by short, bad, or reworked writing.

I didn’t assign this new habit to any particular hour of the day. Initially I wrote in the mornings with the occasional effort falling late in the evening. My longest runs and most interesting content occurred in the early stages when I focused in the morning. Not all the encouragement on the Internet insists on a specifying a time of the day along with their admonishment to write daily. Those that do, put such specifications on par with frequency as part of a successful strategy to form a writing habit. I’ll rededicate the 8 o’clock to 9 o’clock hour to this purpose in order to get over this hump.

Let me make explicit what I feel my be only implicit to some readers. This morning hour isn’t just a range to start in, it will be a duration to write for. Stick around to see what part fails first.

Word count: 221
Day 190

Down by the Memory Banks

I enjoy writing in second person. They say that reading first person feels intimate, I’m sure I haven’t noticed. But I am here to say that writing second person sure feels intimate. Maybe as a long time educator and former classroom teacher I like the instructional character of the language.

Maybe I am doing it wrong but it has the flow of a guide tour or a shared exploration. The eminently more popular third person is just telling. Even when you’re ‘showing, not tell’ it’s still telling. With second person its more like discovery.

And I like the voice I’ve been taking with the wasp posts. A rah rah sort of edgy coach.

Yesterday I wrote ‘memory banks’. I just wanted to say to anyone savvy enough to know that we no longer call them memory banks that I know that too. The ambiance of the phrase appeals to me. Now I’ll have to dig up similar phrases to compliment the piece. Maybe I could ‘cross reference’ something.

Word count: 167
Day 165