Moorepark Memoir

[emo_snal]

   So the Geelong* Writing Club puts out an annual anthology and recently put the call out for next edition, and the theme this time is... the hardest theme of all ...open topic. ::cue picture of Edvard Munch's the Scream:: *Geelong being my nearest large town. Submissions may be poetry, flash fiction, short story, and memoir. The flash fiction

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[cactus_rs]

After this interlude it was right back to sixty hour weeks in the “bee mines.” Even in summer, sometimes the sun was already setting by the time I'd be headed home. Around 5pm, already the forests were bathed in a warm golden light slanting in from the side. The sun sets over the sea of sugarcane as a giant orangish-red fireball. If I was running the honey extracting machinery I wouldn't emerge from the corrugated metal extracting shed until after 11pm, whereupon I would come into the fresh night air covered from head to foot in honey, to find the world illuminated by the moon as if by a floodlight. Just the cane fields and the metal shed under the moon and stars, I'd contemplate it could be a hundred years earlier and it would look the same.

The repetition of "[introductory clause], already ____________" in the second and third sentences jumped out at me, but it's up to you if you want to change it-or maybe the parallelism/repetition is what you were going for. I'd also take the first half of the last sentence and add it to the end of the preceding sentence, and leave the second half on its own. I'm not sure "contemplate" is the verb I'd go with here, either, but due to the construction of the sentence rather than the connotations of the word itself. Like you need an actual thing to contemplate (or not: "She sat and contemplated.") but it's not quote a synonym for "guess" or "imagine" like it seems you're using it here. ("He thought he was the unluckiest man on Earth. He contemplated his bad luck." You can't switch the verbs in those sentences. Is that a better explanation?)

At night the narrow muddy tracks amid the cane truly do feel like a labyrinth. When I get got home to my empty house, if I were to go online all my friends back home in California would have long since gone to bed, so I'd often make myself something quick to eat and walk out to the beach, where I'd sit in the sand under the stars, watching the lightning on the horizon as I eat. Sometimes I'd think I had it pretty good. Sometimes I thought I might be in hell.

I'm torn between jettisoning this completely or moving it elsewhere. You open with talking about the sun rising and setting; it would be a natural bookend to leave off with a sunset as well. Especially if you could make it about this was a time when you didn't have to swim out to see the sun set on the water because of the flood, but OTOH that destroys the whole timeline of the piece because it ends after the floodwaters have receded so IDEK.

I'm very quiet most times but then suddenly I turn up and go through writing with a fine-tooth comb. It must be very disconcerting and for that I apologize. Despite my nitpicking I enjoyed it-I just enter a sort of fugue state when it comes providing feedback on writing and I (apparently?) get very intense. :)

[emo_snal]

Haha I do appreciate the thorough feedback. I might not respond though until I have a moment to sit down and really go through it again (: