Monday, April 07, 2008

For Future Use

If I ever decide to write a novel about the city in which I work, I would like to incorporate the following sentence:

It was spring, and the tax-help businesses in Webster Square were proliferating again, like mushrooms after several days of rain.

I'm not sure exactly in what context I would use this, but it just sort of came to me this evening as I was driving home from work . . .

8 comments:

Scott R. Davis said...

rain is appropriate since taxes are due in april and mushrooms is a good analogy since the hr blocks and other outfits that answer questions via newspapers pop up around tax time. scott

Annelise said...

That sentence reminds me of F. Scott Fitzgerald--especially The Great Gatsby.

Anonymous said...

It makes me wonder if the tax-help people are some sort of human mushrooms that only bloom once a year to do taxes. Then they fold themselves back up or crawl up into a closet for the next 300 or so days...
Is the image of vampire-like tax man kind-of funny or simply redundant?

jasdye said...

H&R Block Month is the cruelest month....

Jennwith2ns said...

Scott--good point; I hadn't considered the whole "April Showers" thing (although I had indeed thought of the other parallels). And yes, it has been raining a lot.

Mom--wow. That's high praise! I have a sneaking suspicion that actually, "proliferating like mushrooms" might have ended up in my subconscious from some previously written (not by me) source. But until I find out where . . . ! ;)

Jeff--this is a question which I will defer to the reader.

Jasdye--indeed. Except when you make so little money and have so many withholdings that you get a ton of it back. Then . . . it pretty much rocks. Nice new icon, dude.

L.L. Barkat said...

Reminds me of Fitzgerald's notebooks. Full of great one and two liners.

Some got used; some not. (And some, like the one I used for my epigraph, got used far later by other writers. Maybe you'll be quoted in the future! :)

dot said...

I think that is just as good, if not better than, "It was a dark and stormy night"!

Jennwith2ns said...

LL--again--high praise! Only I have a sneaking suspicion I once read about things "proliferating like mushrooms" myself, and it sneaked into my subconscious and lodged there. Ah well.

Dot--welcome! And--thanks. I think. ;)