Writing About Boys

My mom just shared with me some writing exercises that come from writer Abigail Thomas, and I’m going to practice some of them here. Basically, I’ll list a topic set forth by Thomas, and I’ll write. I’ll relate my stories to boys, because, well, this is a boy blog. And while Thomas recommends writing on topic for two pages, I’ll adapt that to post length. Here goes:

Write one post on fighting about food.

We have fought about food in our house since the very day I fed Joey his first spoonful of baby mush — rice cereal, I think it was. I put it in; he spit it out. And it’s gone pretty much just like that for the eight years he’s been alive. Now, there are some foods he’ll happily eat — candy, cakes, brownies, ice cream — but for the most part, he rejects what we give him. He might like it at first — he loved salmon the first few times he ate it — but in short time, he’ll start gagging over the mere mention of foods he could once list as favorites. A big fan of steak for a long time, Joey now has no urge to eat the stuff. Pasta and meat sauce: He liked it so much a while back, we added it to our dinner rotation. Now he frowns when I bring out the jar of pasta sauce, because it has little green things in it, and chunks of tomatoes. And he doesn’t like turkey burgers (beef is OK), he refuses to eat any sort of sandwich, apples are a thing of the past, watermelon has too many seeds (even the seedless ones) and I could go on and on — which incidentally, is another one of Thomas’ exercises:

Write two pages (one post for me) that end, “I could go on and on.”