IT BEATS CHRISTMAS CARDS...

For the past couple years, a friend of mine has put together a small booklet of stories, poems, and pictures and mailed it out as a combination Christmas card/present. The people whose work is in the book do not necessarily know each other, but we all know her, and it makes for an interesting collection of work and people. I think that the whole idea trumps any kind of form letter or standard Christmas card. The deadline for getting stuff to her is in a few days and I just sent off my submission. If having deadlines and things like that sounds a little draconian for this sort of thing, well, she's smart enough to realize she won't get anything without them (to say nothing of the logistics of printing all of the booklets up and mailing them out to all the contributors). She's also involved in more serious publication of creative work here, if you are so inclined.

I'm not by any stretch of the imagination--and I'll never claim to be--a creative writer, and this is probably about the exact level to which anything I write should be shared: among friends and without any pretensions toward being "art."* Anyway, this is what I submitted. No points for guessing what it's a description of (the title is a pretty big tip-off):

Pleasures

A crack in the void.

Then, sound:

a balloon in the darkness,

four taut wires,

spectral hands pulling a crinkled sheet flat,

snaps, frozen.

The myth of the world in black and white

before the movies invented colour.

Like I said, I labour under no illusions re: the ultimate value of this little piece, but writing it was a fun half hour. Thankfully, there's nothing that requires the submission to be cheerful or to be about Christmas or anything like that. 

*For those who would make the argument that all writing is creative writing, I will respectfully disagree. I see what I do as inherently different from creative writing (I would be happier, though still not satisfied, with critical writing as a descriptor), and the distinction is, in fact, quite important to me in terms of purpose and goals.