Writing Challenges
This week's Odd Prompts writing challenge at More Odds than Ends was from Becky Jones: The fountain burbled merrily along, oblivious to the chaos surrounding it.
This was particularly interesting because it suggested the fountain was not an inanimate object, but a self-aware being -- but what kind of being? And what was its purpose being there? To observe, or something else?
So which 'verse should it go into? One of my fantasy worlds? Or maybe a fantasy game in the Chaffee Artilect 'verse?
However, as I'm trying to get Shards of Broken Light put together, I've discovered that I have very few stories in several 'verses, and a grossly disproportionate number of the stories belong to the Grissom Timeline 'verse, to the point that everything else looks like an afterthought, tacked on to check the boxes of representing the various 'verses I listed in my Kickstarter Story section. In particular, I didn't have a single story in the Laundry of Souls 'verse (to which "Friendship Doesn't Die" belongs) -- and as I thought about the prompt, I had a vision of a laundromat built around a central courtyard with a fountain, and the long rows of washers radiating out from it, and a bunch of people carrying out various juvenile pranks and antics.
So I started writing a scene, seeing where the idea would take me...
===========================================================================================
Madness at the Laundromat
I swear, I hadn't seen such tomfoolery since my undergrad days, when I was working part-time at a laundromat just off campus. A lot of the kids who used it were going to college on Mom and Dad's dime, and half the time they treated everything like a joke, including our washers and driers. They'd come and toss all their clothes into the machines, pour in some soap, and then head off without a concern to what might happen to unattended laundry, let alone sorting for colors and fabrics. I was constantly having to deal with clothes wrapped around agitators, overloaded machines, unbalanced machines, and that was just their carelessness.
Then there was the crowd who thought it was hilarious to pull pranks on other people who were using the laundromat. Just like the guy right down the row was doing, dumping liquid laundry detergent into a washer that wasn't even his clothes. I'd seen it plenty of times back in those days, and spent way too much time cleaning up the suds that would come vomiting up out of the washing machine once the agitator started going.
Why a certain kind of teen or twenty-something thinks it's fun to watch suds pouring down the front of a washer until it piles up on the floor, I don't know, but they're certainly not thinking about what's going to happen to whoever was washing clothes in that machine. With that much soap, they're going to be lucky if they just need to run it through a second cycle with no soap - and if their finances are as tight as I was in those days, that extra cycle is going to hurt.
This sort of crap had me really hating this laundromat - but here I was yet again, stuffing clothes into one of their washing machines. What kept me coming back? Was it the way all the machines were arranged in long rows radiating outward from the central courtyard with its fountain that splashed merrily no matter the weather?
Time and again I'd looked for any hint of a glass dome or other protective covering, but I'd never been able to see any sign of one. I just knew it was a great place to retreat from all the chaos in here - if I could secure washers I could watch from one of the benches.
Good grief - a fight had just broken out over by the vending machines. On second thought, it didn't look like a real fight, the sort where people will happily beat each other to a pulp over some slight. More like play-fighting, pushing and shoving each other like human bumper cars and see what they can bounce off of - although that could turn ugly if someone took a bad spill.
I'd seen more than a few cuts and bruises, but no, I'd never seen a serious injury. More proof that, wherever I was, it wasn't the world I knew. So it had streets full of houses and apartment buildings and of course this laundromat where I kept coming with my dirty laundry - it still was nowhere in the world I'd known.
And why hasn't this bothered me?
For that matter, just how long had I been here? Events seemed to blur into one another, as if I were sleepwalking through my daily activities. Far easier to just load my washers by rote and get them started.
Yet I couldn't quite slip back into that shambolic state, now that the memories had come back to me of those days - memories that raised more questions, like why should I be back to using a public laundromat when I knew I'd owned a house with my own laundry facilities.
=========================================================================================
The further I went, the more I realized I had no idea where I was going. The idea was supposed to be the POV character realizing just how odd her situation really is, and then she sits by the fountain, realize it's a self-aware entity, and it begins to communicate to her in puzzles and riddles -- but I couldn't figure out how to get to that point. And of course that kind of scene, where conversation isn't an exchange of information, but a sort of verbal fencing match, is one of the hardest things for me to write. Certainly not something I can write on the fly, just letting the words pour out.
But as the leader of my online writing group says, it's words that didn't exist an hour earlier. It's words that I can work with, even if only to use as a jumping-off point, to figure out where the actual story is (rather like I've realized that my initial attempt to write the ending to "Friendship Doesn't Die" is unworkable -- at most, it must be a failed attempt which leads into the actual ending in which the protagonist wins entirely by his comedic talents, without an authority figure putting their imprimatur upon it).
So it may be a bigger project than I planned, and end up being shifted to Daughters of the Whirlwind instead, simply because I don't want to keep my backers waiting indefinitely for SBL.
As always, if you'd like to participate in Odd Prompts, just send your prompt in to oddprompts@gmail.com to be assigned a prompt of your own. Or if you're not up to the commitment of trading prompts, you can always check out the spare prompts and see if any of them tickle your creativity.
In the meantime, keep writing.
This was particularly interesting because it suggested the fountain was not an inanimate object, but a self-aware being -- but what kind of being? And what was its purpose being there? To observe, or something else?
So which 'verse should it go into? One of my fantasy worlds? Or maybe a fantasy game in the Chaffee Artilect 'verse?
However, as I'm trying to get Shards of Broken Light put together, I've discovered that I have very few stories in several 'verses, and a grossly disproportionate number of the stories belong to the Grissom Timeline 'verse, to the point that everything else looks like an afterthought, tacked on to check the boxes of representing the various 'verses I listed in my Kickstarter Story section. In particular, I didn't have a single story in the Laundry of Souls 'verse (to which "Friendship Doesn't Die" belongs) -- and as I thought about the prompt, I had a vision of a laundromat built around a central courtyard with a fountain, and the long rows of washers radiating out from it, and a bunch of people carrying out various juvenile pranks and antics.
So I started writing a scene, seeing where the idea would take me...
===========================================================================================
Madness at the Laundromat
I swear, I hadn't seen such tomfoolery since my undergrad days, when I was working part-time at a laundromat just off campus. A lot of the kids who used it were going to college on Mom and Dad's dime, and half the time they treated everything like a joke, including our washers and driers. They'd come and toss all their clothes into the machines, pour in some soap, and then head off without a concern to what might happen to unattended laundry, let alone sorting for colors and fabrics. I was constantly having to deal with clothes wrapped around agitators, overloaded machines, unbalanced machines, and that was just their carelessness.
Then there was the crowd who thought it was hilarious to pull pranks on other people who were using the laundromat. Just like the guy right down the row was doing, dumping liquid laundry detergent into a washer that wasn't even his clothes. I'd seen it plenty of times back in those days, and spent way too much time cleaning up the suds that would come vomiting up out of the washing machine once the agitator started going.
Why a certain kind of teen or twenty-something thinks it's fun to watch suds pouring down the front of a washer until it piles up on the floor, I don't know, but they're certainly not thinking about what's going to happen to whoever was washing clothes in that machine. With that much soap, they're going to be lucky if they just need to run it through a second cycle with no soap - and if their finances are as tight as I was in those days, that extra cycle is going to hurt.
This sort of crap had me really hating this laundromat - but here I was yet again, stuffing clothes into one of their washing machines. What kept me coming back? Was it the way all the machines were arranged in long rows radiating outward from the central courtyard with its fountain that splashed merrily no matter the weather?
Time and again I'd looked for any hint of a glass dome or other protective covering, but I'd never been able to see any sign of one. I just knew it was a great place to retreat from all the chaos in here - if I could secure washers I could watch from one of the benches.
Good grief - a fight had just broken out over by the vending machines. On second thought, it didn't look like a real fight, the sort where people will happily beat each other to a pulp over some slight. More like play-fighting, pushing and shoving each other like human bumper cars and see what they can bounce off of - although that could turn ugly if someone took a bad spill.
I'd seen more than a few cuts and bruises, but no, I'd never seen a serious injury. More proof that, wherever I was, it wasn't the world I knew. So it had streets full of houses and apartment buildings and of course this laundromat where I kept coming with my dirty laundry - it still was nowhere in the world I'd known.
And why hasn't this bothered me?
For that matter, just how long had I been here? Events seemed to blur into one another, as if I were sleepwalking through my daily activities. Far easier to just load my washers by rote and get them started.
Yet I couldn't quite slip back into that shambolic state, now that the memories had come back to me of those days - memories that raised more questions, like why should I be back to using a public laundromat when I knew I'd owned a house with my own laundry facilities.
=========================================================================================
The further I went, the more I realized I had no idea where I was going. The idea was supposed to be the POV character realizing just how odd her situation really is, and then she sits by the fountain, realize it's a self-aware entity, and it begins to communicate to her in puzzles and riddles -- but I couldn't figure out how to get to that point. And of course that kind of scene, where conversation isn't an exchange of information, but a sort of verbal fencing match, is one of the hardest things for me to write. Certainly not something I can write on the fly, just letting the words pour out.
But as the leader of my online writing group says, it's words that didn't exist an hour earlier. It's words that I can work with, even if only to use as a jumping-off point, to figure out where the actual story is (rather like I've realized that my initial attempt to write the ending to "Friendship Doesn't Die" is unworkable -- at most, it must be a failed attempt which leads into the actual ending in which the protagonist wins entirely by his comedic talents, without an authority figure putting their imprimatur upon it).
So it may be a bigger project than I planned, and end up being shifted to Daughters of the Whirlwind instead, simply because I don't want to keep my backers waiting indefinitely for SBL.
As always, if you'd like to participate in Odd Prompts, just send your prompt in to oddprompts@gmail.com to be assigned a prompt of your own. Or if you're not up to the commitment of trading prompts, you can always check out the spare prompts and see if any of them tickle your creativity.
In the meantime, keep writing.