Wednesday, April 10, 2013

Fairy Tale

Today I met with Jen Violi for an hour of encouragement, being nurtured and giggling.  This is pretty much Jen's job, btw, (besides writing fantastic ya fiction) and you can find out more at her website.


Anyway, Jen is helping me through a bit of a stalled place in a writing project.  So for a writing prompt, she brought along this awesome game which is a box of dice covered on all sides with pictures - some are archetypal characters, some are super powers.  You roll the dice and that is your storytelling or writing prompt.  I got a gnome and a witch for the characters and the super power of duplication.
By day, I would find a pile of leaves and curl up to sleep under it.  It could have gone on like that for a long time if not for the gnome.  For a woodland creature, he was surprisingly noisy, his whistling throwing little clouds of breathy smoke up into the dawn sky.  Although he was noisy, I was tired from another long night of aimless flying and I didn't hear him until he nearly stepped on me, hidden there with the worms and potato bugs under the pile of leaves.
Then he did step on me, or over me.  The whistle caught in his throat as he tripped.
"Hello!  What's this?"
I tried to scramble away.  Surely a real witch would cast a spell at this point, but I couldn't reach my wand tucked in its secret pocket.  No particular words came to mind anyway.  His hand found my ankle and held on tight. I blinked up at him, leaves in my hair, hat all bent off to one side.
He did not, then, do what most everyone does when confronted with the green face, the central casting wart on the absurd nose.  He did not recoil, fait or scream.  Instead, he said the thing I least expected.
"Well.  I never saw someone who needed a cup of coffee more than you.  My cave's not far.  Whaddya say?"
The magic was not what I thought it would be.  It was not in the oath, the terror, the stinking potion.  The magic is this.  That one plus one can make so much more than two.
x



Here is the little story I wrote during our ten minute write.  When I read it aloud, I thought of this long-neglected blog and how unlike anything I usually would write this is, and thought it would be fun to share it with you all.  Hope whatever you are creating these days is bringing you joy!

Once upon a time, there was only me.  Night by night I climbed wearily unto my broom and zoomed across the sky.  I supposed I was supposed to be looking for something, or doing something, but I did not know what.  I tried to keep my hat out of my eyes.  I tried to keep my cape from getting tangled in the broom's bristles.  The air whistled in my ears, and they aches.  When I looked down - well, I just didn't look down, that was for the best.  









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