Ever since I was little, I thought I wanted to write standard stories--fiction, a novel. But I've almost never written fiction, aside from a few pieces of fan-fiction.
I could have known I was more non-fictiony, judging from what I wrote when I was a horse-crazy eleven year old:
never a story about a girl and her horse.
I produced three issues of a magazine, Horsemans Monthly, on construction paper and Scotch tape, with newspaper clippings, reports, and my own drawings and observations about horses and culture.
After being on the rocky shore of Lake Superior this September, I tried
to write a fan-fic about lovers on the rocks, but it turned into a prose
poem about the lichen there.
It was thought to be a symbiosis of two life forms--one fungus and one alga.
Microscopy shows it's more variable than previously thought:
"The fungi and algae that make lichens are doing very interesting things
in a confined space.... There might not be
any one way to pigeonhole the relationship...."
--"Individual lichens can have up to three fungi, study shows"
Very interesting things in a confined space--like a sonnet!
So, now I want to write a sonnet about lichen.
I've never written a sonnet.
Penny Cooper looked it up, and she's all excited because it involves counting (14 lines, 10 syllables each, a rhyme scheme), and she's good at counting.
She doesn't care about lichen and will leave that part to me.
I guess I'm symbiotic too--part human, part girlette.
