The next in my parade of mischief, this one was inspired by a catalogue, as you certainly can imagine, from a local company called Sow True Seeds. The protagonists in these tales all yield in one way or another. (As the cover indicates this one has a record-breaking 378 footnotes!)
From the opening story
Sew True Cedes
I don’t think there ever are. True ones, I mean. They’re inherently reluctant. Anything ceded is, ipso facto, something that someone didn’t want to yield, else it would be “gifted.”
Does that make sense? What I’m driving at here is that if a person truly gives something up it suggests a heartfelt letting go, which one does with a gift but not a concession. A concession is extracted, like a tooth, and face it: No one goes into a serious dental procedure full of glee. (Well, maybe after nitrous?)
But here I’ve set myself up (see story title above) with the task of stitching together some sort of fictional quilt out of whole cloth regarding the up-giving of something or another. That’s the name game I play, starting with a title for a book that forces my hand—or my pixels, I guess—demanding something like 200 pages devoted to the beast thus conjured.
It’s a difficult task, to be sure. But someone has to do it.
Truth be told, I don’t honestly believe very many are up to the job. I mean to say, “I’ve been around the block a few times.”
Here I’m throwing myself into the breach. Think of me as a sacrificial lamb fed raw to the ravenous muse of fiction.
Or, hey, a scapegoat. Whatever gets ceded from here on in? Blame me. I can handle it.