Green

"They were a curious green, a bright, luminous green, like wet lichen"
Edna O'Brien, The Country Girls

Blue

"with eyes the color of glacial melt"
After the Plague, TC Boyle

Beige

". . . her face the color of a dirty pillowcase"
Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

Yellow

"His skin looked yellow, like he was turning into old paper."
Abby Bardi, The Book of Fred

Beige

". . . your hands the color of a savage harvest"
Pablo Neruda, Love Sonnet XI

Grey

"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel."
William Gibson, Neuromancer

Black

"Ketchum had the blackest beard--the charred-black color of charcoal, blacker than a black bear's fur."
- John Irving, Last Night in Twisted River

What It All Means

A Welcome (and an Invitation)

Anyone here a writer? That is, anyone here ever try to write creatively? Creative non-fiction? Anyone here have a (digital, paper, other) stack of short stories, poems, and/or novels or novel fragments cluttering up a drawer or hard drive somewhere?

I do. And in my intermittent stabs at being a real, live writer (as opposed to the kind I am, the kind that writes business proposals for a living), one of my favorite bits of writerly business was describing colors. ". . . dark brown eyes the color of fresh wood chips just out of the bag." That's one from a short novel I wrote a few years back.

I love the ways writers convey color. The metaphors, the similes, the allusions, the poetry of it. It's striking to me that such a black-and-white form, that of plain text, can convey color, that most visual of elements, so beautifully. One example that, for some unknowable reason, has always stuck with me gives us our blog name - "The linoleum was the color of tired old limes." Very nice, Stephen King.

So - the purpose of this blog. As simple as could be. To highlight color descriptions from writers new and old. They could be yours. They could be Shakespeare's. As long as they describe a color, and as long as you love them - for whatever reason - I want to post them.

The e-mail addy is tosyandcosh@hotmail.com. Send your submissions - properly attributed, of course, and I will post them. Let me know if you don't want to be recognized as the sendee and you will remain anonymous. Otherwise I will give credit to all submitters. And, of course, if you have your own blog, or other outpost on the web, make sure and let me know so I can include that link as well.

Who knows? This could be fun.