National Paragraph Writing Month

To gear up for November's National Novel Writing Month, founded by Oaklander Chris Baty, we're calling for submissions to our own October, pre-event celebration— National Paragraph Writing Month.

Do whatever it takes to create one paragraph—skip work, forego showers, unplug the TV—and email it to us. If it's publishable on a rated-PG website, we'll post it here and put your name into a hat for one of five gift certificates (with which you might buy No Plot? No Problem! by Chris Baty.)

Submit paragraph at the store or email us at admin "at" pegasusbookstore.com, and please write “paragraph” in the subject line. By submitting your entry, you agree to allow your paragraph to be posted to the Pegasus website.

Paragraph winners( chosen by random drawing) have an asterisk next to their name:

It is not correct to say "ordinary lives" or "just an average person" while trying to create a comfortable place of designation. A house or a chair can be ordinary. The results of a test can be average. The person living in the house, or sitting in the chair cannot. --Beem*

***

People walk past. They are so terribly, awfully loud. To others it seems silent – but it is overwhelming and blaring with immense emotion. The screeching feelings pierce my ears and I wince, sometimes doubling over in pain with the force of a single thought. I can hear their screams and fears and they burrow into my mind so deeply to ensure my mind will never know rest. Those unlike me would call it a gift, but I assure you, so much information that can never be shared is dangerous and painful, and I feel an eternal loneliness. It is only and ever a curse. --Alia Kabir*

***

He always felt as though someone were watching him. He could feel the strange, piercing eyes judging him, pressing against him, sometimes so strong he could hardly breathe. Was it paranoia? No. He could feel the tangibility of the presence that was more than what his mind alone could conjure. It was there, but his eyes were blurry and his senses too weak. Why won’t it leave me? He thought. However, in a way he was comforted. In its obscure way, it helped him and breathed with him and talked with him and moved with him – and stared at him. It never stopped staring. But when the night grew cold and dark and there was no one else, he embraced it, and it held him during the fierce, ever-raging storms.-Alia Kabir

***

I fear my Muse has hung and eviscerated herself – her entrails scattered about my office, existing now only in bloody fragments – fragments that serve no higher purpose, simply useless fragments of something greater, something tenaciously inspiring and terribly ellusive. The antique chandelier that hangs above my desk sways to and fro during my frequent bouts of mental unrest. My beloved Muse, once vibrant and full of color and untapped imagination – now reduced to gnawed metaphorical limbs and a jumping light fixture. My greatest fear is that my mind is among the ruins of my creativity, my abandoned search for golden impulse. Where did it slip away? When was it lost? I’d sit and ask myself these questions for what seemed like weeks without end – but what was in reality only a good number of hours, perhaps a short day. I was blocked, you see? Hopeless, alone, blocked – hopelessly blocked. A moveable product can open many doors, but without the voucher of a comparable follow-up, one might as well be engaged in conversation with a city pigeon. A deaf city pigeon. --J. M. Ruiz

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Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming Ginger, our very own Awards Model. Ginger hails from Eastern Manitoba, where she grew up fishing with her father and making plaster molds of anthills. Ginger wants to one day attend college and maybe even find a real job. In her spare time, Ginger likes to play mindgames with harmless voice actors and tells them she’ll be at a club last Saturday night but never showed. She’s only in it for herself, and doesn’t care how many hearts she breaks or how many voicemails she ignores. --Hattie Smith

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Gurgle. Gurgle and pop. High-chair acrobatics, sippy straw saloon, breadsticks up-the-nose, more on the floor. You want a good wine for dinner, obviously, you want wine.

--Morgan Jackson

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Occupy ‘bama. Creating slaves ain’t the way to say “I’m free.” --Herb W.

***

Standing over the man’s body, Bran shook his head and muttered softly, within moments the body disappeared leaving only a fine layer of dust in its place. Another death, another body. Bran should be used to it by now, over a millennium of life and countless bodies had passed by him. The war fields of Europe alone had given him bodies plenty when he was younger. This was different though, it was still war, but it wasn’t the same. It wasn’t honorable. –J Staley*

***

Shoelaces come untied, that’s just the way it is. I think there ought to be a better way to tie them, and when I’m grown I may invent a shoelace tie-er that works for the whole day. A blond lady and a man coming down the sidewalk don’t even look at me, they’re walking fast, not talking, the man is a little behind the woman, kind of pressed up against her. I’m squatting here minding my own business, tying the shoe, and as they pass me, a crumpled piece of paper falls from the lady’s hand, right beside me. Did she mean to drop it? I don’t know, but I pick it up and unfold it. Written on it in smeary lipstick, it says “HELP ME.”

--S Stuart

***

He was not an honest man. Though there was scarcely an angle from which his brilliance failed to dazzle, the strange and mysterious amalgam of protean qualities he at once possessed and inhabited were tenuously held together by virtue of the uncertain exile of a truth whose impending, though constantly deferred, return threatened his being with dissolution. Resisting the lure of objecting to this one thing--the only thing to which he could object without mock prudery--energized the performance of his lies. —Angela*

***

A vigorous looking man wearing a brown robe is crouched in a boat shaped like a deep walnut shell. There is no room for anything but him in the boat, and he is hanging on, gripping the front of it as it plunges headlong on a roiling, fast-flowing river. His eyes are turned toward me, on his face a look somewhere between concentration, longing and alarm. Other similar boats crowd the river, in clusters or alone, all with people in them, and their expressions range a gamut of exhilaration, interest, indifference, resignation, happiness, sadness, but all are isolated and self-absorbed. Some boats drift against a shoreline choked with trees and vines, and some are overturned, floating derelict on the surface. Nothing stops the surge of the river, and its destination is vague, unclear, glistening with power and mystery. I know that the river is time. I see it all in my mind's eye and wish that I could paint it, but I am not an artist and I lack the skill. —S Stuart*

***

Through the blowing and rainy streets come the horses, galloping, galloping. Hooves strike the stones like gunshots. I listen, shuttered inside the house of night. The highwaymen pass by. —Greacian Goeke*

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