Frozen peas and story starts
Since finishing PLPP I've been expecting to suddenly find myself awash with enthusiasm about writing a new story. Alas, alack, this does not appear to be the case. I've written so many different starts to His Saving Grace I've turned myself back round in a circle and I'm not sure which one I want to go with. Plus, I've been writing beginnings all over the place as different ideas suddenly pop into my head. I was trying to force myself to be disciplined, but I've given that up as a stupid idea as it clearly wasn't working. Basically what I'm saying, in an incredibly convoluted way, is that the start of His Saving Grace might be a little while in coming as I sort my head out and decide which way it's going to go.
In other news, I was trying to buy peas in the supermarket on the weekend and I’ve come to the conclusion that peas are the prime example of all that is bad about consumerism in this modern world we live in. I just wanted to buy frozen peas. Simple, just peas, frozen peas. Do you think I could find them though? No! There were peas with mint flavour, peas with corn, peas with carrot, peas with corn AND carrot, peas with butter added, peas in a pod, baby peas… I JUST WANT NORMAL FROZEN PEAS!!! Obviously I went with baby peas as they are just normal peas, but they didn’t need to add baby, that makes it creepy in my opinion. The whole thing made me very cross and exasperated as I’m sure you can tell.
Now then, peas rant aside, I thought I'd post one of the random story starts as a sort of example of how all over the place my writing thoughts have been lately. It has some very mild swearing, so just be warned. It's down below and I'd love to know what you think.
As an aside, if anyone has a moment and would like to randomly throw some ideas at me and see if I can turn it into a short story I'd love that. I want to write another one shot, but I can't decide which idea to follow so something coming from someone else could be just the ticket. It's my birthday month, humour me!
Hope you're all having a brilliant week.
Cheers, Jess
Okay, yes, so wearing a white dress, a blonde curly wig, drawing on a mole and going to a fancy dress party as Marilyn Monroe has been done. More than done, it’s been overdone. But, hey, at least I didn’t don a Mickey Mouse mask and pull a gun.
As crimes go, mine was the lesser, so why was I the one being so thoroughly punished?
I shifted slightly and winced as the handcuffs chafed against my already bruised wrists. Oh, don’t worry, this wasn’t a kinky thing. I mean, I wish! Not that I had much experience with that kind of thing, but from what I’d seen in movies kinky handcuffs were usually fluffy and cute with an easy release system. There was nothing fluffy, cute, or easy release about my restraints. In fact I wasn’t even sure they were the usual police force approved type because surely something this uncomfortable shouldn’t be legal?
I slumped back against the wall and sighed. Being kidnapped was so boring! That was something they never mentioned on TV in those stupid cop dramas. Sure, I was so terrified that I had a constant gag in my throat as if I was about to be sick, but that really wasn’t enough to entertain me. I’d spent 6 hours staring at the same four, grey walls and it was getting seriously old.
I mean, what was the point? I didn’t have any information they could torture, or, more accurately, bore, out of me and the way I’d been bashed about in the van on the way here I doubted my organs would have a particularly high resale value. So what did they want?
I snorted and wished I had a mirror so I could direct my rolled eyes at myself.
Who was I kidding? I knew what they were after. $100 million and boy were they going to be annoyed when they found out it was gone.
The gagging feeling in my throat intensified at this thought and it was only by clamping my lips tightly together and breathing heavily through my nose that I was able to stop myself vomiting. It was a small, dank cell, after all, there was no way I wanted to add the smell of sick to the already fairly unpleasant aroma of the place.
As I moved again, trying to find that elusive comfortable position, I caught sight of my sensible running shoes. The ones that he had insisted I always wear, even to bed. Fat lot of good they’d done me. How was that supposed to have gone down, anyway? ‘Ah, I see your gun, big scary man, and I raise you… a pair of comfortable shoes!’
Oh for Gods sake! I’d just noticed that one of my shoe laces was untied. The previously, pristine, white lace now a mottled grey brown colour and trailing miserably across the bare cement floor, as limp and pale as me. Staring intensely at the lace it suddenly occurred to me that this was the last straw, the last ignominy in a long trail of pride-reducing screw ups and that I wasn’t going to take it anymore.
“Bloody hell!” I screamed at the top of my voice, the verbal assault bouncing and ricocheting off the close walls and echoing all around me, “Bloody, stupid, bloody hell!”
The last reverberation from my outburst was still hovering in the air when there was a sudden scraping noise and the small door in the wall to my right was suddenly thrown open. I expected light to flood in my dark cell, but the massive hulk of a man in the doorway stopped all but tiny chinks of light that shone in like the cracks of sunlight that crept through when you held your hand up against the glare.
I knew that build; I recognised those shoulders from when I’d been trussed up and thrown so unceremoniously over them on the way here. I hadn’t heard him speak then, apart from a short grunt when one of my kicks had caught him in the stomach, but his voice when he spoke now was exactly as I’d imagined it. Deep, gravely, rough, and hacked off.
“What the hell?” He demanded, in a tone that suggested he wasn’t having a good day in the first place and my insanely screeched profanity was not helping any.
Looking up at him in all his bloodcurdling hugeness I felt the boredom slip away to be properly replaced with, let’s face it, the more appropriate feeling of pure horror.
“My shoelace has come undone.” I said, and then I burst into tears.