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@patrickjohanneson.comOct 11, 2026, 4:17 PM

#WIPSnips Oct. 11: "cousin"

A wintry interlude at the family farm.

#WriteSky #WritingCommunity #WritingPrompts #PrairieSFf

Christmas at the farm was a sedate affair. My Grandpa Ormansson, Mom's dad, cleared the land and broke it for farming in the early 1930s. He married Grandma in 1935 and they farmed till sometime around 1982, when Uncle Charlie—Mom's brother-in-law, Auntie Janet's husband—bought the place. But I always thought of the place as Grandma and Grandpa's place, and it never seemed to bother Uncle Charlie to hear it called that. Mom, for her part, always just called it "home". "We're going home for Christmas," she'd say, or "home for the weekend." The whole world was white. Snow covered everything. My cousins John and Lori (Janet and Charlie's kids) and I were expected to spend a certain amount of time outside each day. We crunched through snow, past evergreens with their boughs bent nearly to the ground, wandering through the yard. We rested our forearms on the weather-silvered top rail of the barnyard fence, watching the cows walking between the three-walled shelter and the feed trough. We tried to throw snowballs at each other but knew it wasn't going to work because it was too cold and the snow was too dry to pack.
@patrickjohanneson.comSep 29, 2026, 3:36 AM

#WIPSnips Sept. 28: "prime"

#WriteSky #WritingCommunity #WritingPrompts #PrairieSFF

She took a deep breath, held it a few seconds, let it out. Again, and again. She remembered her father, teaching her and her brother George how to swim, telling them that this was the way to prime yourself for a long submersion, that it would help your lungs get every atom of oxygen they could. Who knew if it was true. One more deep breath. Holding her eyes open, she plunged under the water again. She dove through layers of colour: at first the water was clear, then bluish, glassy green, and—at the limits of her air—brown. She passed beyond the point of no return, kicking hard, lungs burning. She wanted to gasp, to take a breath, but the water was still all around her, darkening, darker now than the indigo above. She was aware that she had made a mistake, that she was still making that mistake, and that it was perhaps the last mistake she had left. Sorry, Edwin. Was the water darkening, or was her vision?
@patrickjohanneson.comSep 18, 2026, 1:05 AM

just looked up the phase of the moon (3rd quarter) and moonrise time (11:30pm) for Sept. 3, 1988

thank goodness for the internet

www.timeanddate.com/moon/canada/...

#AmWriting #PrairieSFF

@patrickjohanneson.comSep 16, 2026, 5:11 AM

Writing Retreat, day 2: Reading, writing, and astrophotography.

patrickjohanneson.com/2026/09/16/w...

#AmWriting #PrairieSFF

@patrickjohanneson.comSep 14, 2026, 8:29 PM

Finally: It's retreat time.

patrickjohanneson.com/2026/09/14/w...

#AmWriting #PrairieSFF

@patrickjohanneson.comSep 10, 2026, 5:33 PM

#WIPSnips Sept. 10: "teeth"

#WriteSky #WritingCommunity #WritingPrompts #PrairieSFF

I very much remember thinking, as I sat on the tiles at the centre of the roof, If this is a dream, I'd like to wake up. # I wrote that last sentence this morning, when I was still half-awake, having only half-read last night's epic. I got awfully *writerly* there, didn't I? I think I *want* someone to read this. Maybe they can help # I lost my train of thought there, I think. I remember the oven buzzed right as I wrote—or let's be honest, *scrawled*—the word "help", and between eating supper, and feeding and then walking Fizzgig, and brushing my teeth, I forgot I was in the middle of a sentence. Sorry about that, hypothetical reader.
@patrickjohanneson.comSep 9, 2026, 4:59 PM

From a short story currently making the rounds about the lists you make when you're trying to sell a house; the list you give to the realtor and the list no one ever sees.

#AmWriting #PrairieSFF

I didn't say anything about the ghost on the third floor, the one who looked like my older sister Sally. She was eleven when she fell down the stairs and fell asleep. That's how Mom explained to me and Ivan what had happened. I was six, Ivan would have been three, and Zinnia had just begun to grow unseen under the skin of Mom's belly. She fell down the stairs, Mom said, and fell asleep. She didn't wake up. But she must have woken up, I'd protest later, because I saw her on the third floor. She had a doll wih her, and when she came near me my skin went cold. "I saw her," I said. "I played with her." Mom burst into tears and fled from the room. Dad told me not to tell such terrible goddamn lies. That was the first time I heard him curse, and the first and only time I saw his eyes go so dark. After that I stopped telling anyone when I saw the girl who might be Sally. I aged, and she didn't, and eventually I moved away.