Writer's Block: If Wishes Were Horses
Well, the main character of the book I'm writing for NaNoWriMo this year makes the wish that starts the book on his own breath:
... and when you laugh at the bus stop about how silly you were to think the ice wouldn't be hard enough on Christmas Day, you notice that if you concentrate real hard you can actually see the words you speak crystallize in the plume of breath right in front of your eyes. Before they can drift away to become parts of clouds, you quietly make a Christmas wish when no-one else is paying attention, and you hope as it drifts away that it will work its magic. Even if you don't really believe in that kind of magic anymore.
Colin McCann was doing just that. Standing alone at the very edge of the neatly-plowed but still slick blacktop playground of the Shore Road Elementary School while the rest of the kids played kickball or made snowpeople or just rolled around in the snowpiles. This was serious business, this wishing on crystallized breath. Not as serious as wishing on the first leaf to change color in autumn or the first bud to open in spring, both of which were far more serious and rare occasions than crystallized breath, but at least as serious as wishing on the first star to reveal itself at night.
So there -- I mentioned three unique ways of asking the universe for favors, all in the same paragraph!
... and when you laugh at the bus stop about how silly you were to think the ice wouldn't be hard enough on Christmas Day, you notice that if you concentrate real hard you can actually see the words you speak crystallize in the plume of breath right in front of your eyes. Before they can drift away to become parts of clouds, you quietly make a Christmas wish when no-one else is paying attention, and you hope as it drifts away that it will work its magic. Even if you don't really believe in that kind of magic anymore.
Colin McCann was doing just that. Standing alone at the very edge of the neatly-plowed but still slick blacktop playground of the Shore Road Elementary School while the rest of the kids played kickball or made snowpeople or just rolled around in the snowpiles. This was serious business, this wishing on crystallized breath. Not as serious as wishing on the first leaf to change color in autumn or the first bud to open in spring, both of which were far more serious and rare occasions than crystallized breath, but at least as serious as wishing on the first star to reveal itself at night.
So there -- I mentioned three unique ways of asking the universe for favors, all in the same paragraph!