Writing Challenges
This week's Odd Prompts writing challenge at More Odds than Ends is from Becky Jones: The cat popped up from behind the dryer. Clinging desperately to its collar was a small fairy.
The image was cute, and if I'd had time to get back to drawing, I might've done a few sketches. But I'm busy, and my mind's firmly in the Grissom timeline right now -- and I could see it as a lesson in the various kinds of fantasy. Maybe Elaine shortly after she's delivered to California and the Alandales take her in.
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A Lesson in Fantasy Literature
Samantha Alandale could never get over how the house she'd shared with five other girls during her senior year in college had always felt crowded, while sharing a house about the same size with another couple and a teenage refugee from out East didn't. Was it something in the layout of the two houses, or was it a matter of how she and her roommates had so carefully divvied up everything, from the refrigerator and the pantry to the toiletry shelves in the bathroom, while here everyone went with the flow and didn't stress about details as long as everyone pitched in?
Of course it was easier to share supplies so informally when one considered that her husband and Roger Blake were clone-brothers, making them all one big extended family at the genomic level. And Elaine could be considered a foster daughter rather than a roommate, so count her right alongside their own kids.
Speaking of whom, all four of them were crowding around the kitchen table, busy with some kind of homework. Elaine was enough older that sometimes it was almost like they were playing school, with her as the teacher and Jessie, Phil and Bob as the students.
Like right now. Samantha wasn't sure which of the younger kids had a lesson in fantasy literature, but Elaine was taking it and running with it.
"You've got your four basic kinds of fantasy. High fantasy is sweeping conflicts of good and evil, like Tolkien and his imitators.There's usually elves and dwarves and a Dark Lord to fight. Heroic fantasy would be Robert E. Howard's Conan and stuff like that. Big, brawny dudes wandering through a landscape of scattered kingdoms and fighting a lot. Maybe there'll be some dark sorcerers here and there, but there's no elves or stuff like that. Whimsical fantasy is stuff like Alice in Wonderland or the Oz books. If there's elves, they're going to be little people with pointed ears like the ones that helped the shoemaker or a fairy the size of an action figure clinging to the cat's collar," a pointed glance over to the boys' GI Joe figures scattered across the floor, "not tall and super-beautiful elves fighting millennia-long wars against a monstrous tyrant that's almost supernatural. And dark fantasy's stuff like HP Lovecraft's dreamworlds, where the world isn't just bigger than we know, it's bigger than we can know. Stuff that edges onto cosmic horror, but uses the language of folklore rather than space travel and evolution the way the Cthulhu Mythos does."
Samantha wasn't quite sure it was a good idea to be talking about the Cthulhu Mythos in front of grade school kids, especially considering that Bob and Phil's intellectual development was racing well ahead of their emotional maturity. Given their aptitude with the Web, they'd be likely to find some stuff they weren't ready to handle yet.
Maybe better to redirect the discussion before either of them asked questions that would lead them into an awkward search-engine crawl. "You've certainly got your fantasy literature down, Elaine. Did you study it back in Iowa?"
Elaine was visibly taken back by that question, to the point she seemed to be groping for an acceptable answer. "Actually, it was mostly from long talks with my cousins and some of their cousins, late nights out at their folks' dachas--" She stopped short, as if she'd said something she wasn't supposed to, then relaunched, talking really fast as if she could thus distract from the slip: "It still feels really weird to actually have classes in fantasy, like it's real literature. Back in Iowa, it was 'escapist,' and therefore unworthy of serious attention. In fact, Mrs. Wellstone believed that adding fantastical elements to a story diminishes anything it touches, and trivializes serious topics. I still remember when she caught me reading a zombie story one of my cousins had sent me, about a militsioner, a civil police officer, during the Siege of Leningrad finding that someone had reanimated a neighbor's corpse to commit ration fraud. She was all upset, like it was offensive and disrespectful to the real history and the real suffering."
Elaine's voice caught, and Samantha could tell there was a lot of pain there. Better to just make some sympathetic noises. "That sounds a lot like the attitudes I remember from high school, except my teachers actually used the word 'trash' instead of just implying it."
Still, Samantha wondered just what was going on with these cousins of Elaine's, who were apparently Russian. It would be so much easier if they just had better information on the teen's background, but this was still America, where your private life was just that, and the government didn't keep fat dossiers on everyone's actions.
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I also got a story done for this week's Indies Unlimited Flash Fiction Writing Challenge. My effort was another bit with Elaine, although after she's settled in at Sparta Point and Marshal Gruzinsky's returned to recover from his injuries. Like the earlier one I did of her after she's awakened in the empty dacha, it's in first person, like the earliest versions of her story.
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.
There will be a new word and picture prompt up at Indies Unlimited on Saturday. Until then, the polls will open tomorrow for voting on the Readers' Choice Award, and will close at 5PM on Thursday.
In the meantime, keep writing.
The image was cute, and if I'd had time to get back to drawing, I might've done a few sketches. But I'm busy, and my mind's firmly in the Grissom timeline right now -- and I could see it as a lesson in the various kinds of fantasy. Maybe Elaine shortly after she's delivered to California and the Alandales take her in.
==========================================================================================
A Lesson in Fantasy Literature
Samantha Alandale could never get over how the house she'd shared with five other girls during her senior year in college had always felt crowded, while sharing a house about the same size with another couple and a teenage refugee from out East didn't. Was it something in the layout of the two houses, or was it a matter of how she and her roommates had so carefully divvied up everything, from the refrigerator and the pantry to the toiletry shelves in the bathroom, while here everyone went with the flow and didn't stress about details as long as everyone pitched in?
Of course it was easier to share supplies so informally when one considered that her husband and Roger Blake were clone-brothers, making them all one big extended family at the genomic level. And Elaine could be considered a foster daughter rather than a roommate, so count her right alongside their own kids.
Speaking of whom, all four of them were crowding around the kitchen table, busy with some kind of homework. Elaine was enough older that sometimes it was almost like they were playing school, with her as the teacher and Jessie, Phil and Bob as the students.
Like right now. Samantha wasn't sure which of the younger kids had a lesson in fantasy literature, but Elaine was taking it and running with it.
"You've got your four basic kinds of fantasy. High fantasy is sweeping conflicts of good and evil, like Tolkien and his imitators.There's usually elves and dwarves and a Dark Lord to fight. Heroic fantasy would be Robert E. Howard's Conan and stuff like that. Big, brawny dudes wandering through a landscape of scattered kingdoms and fighting a lot. Maybe there'll be some dark sorcerers here and there, but there's no elves or stuff like that. Whimsical fantasy is stuff like Alice in Wonderland or the Oz books. If there's elves, they're going to be little people with pointed ears like the ones that helped the shoemaker or a fairy the size of an action figure clinging to the cat's collar," a pointed glance over to the boys' GI Joe figures scattered across the floor, "not tall and super-beautiful elves fighting millennia-long wars against a monstrous tyrant that's almost supernatural. And dark fantasy's stuff like HP Lovecraft's dreamworlds, where the world isn't just bigger than we know, it's bigger than we can know. Stuff that edges onto cosmic horror, but uses the language of folklore rather than space travel and evolution the way the Cthulhu Mythos does."
Samantha wasn't quite sure it was a good idea to be talking about the Cthulhu Mythos in front of grade school kids, especially considering that Bob and Phil's intellectual development was racing well ahead of their emotional maturity. Given their aptitude with the Web, they'd be likely to find some stuff they weren't ready to handle yet.
Maybe better to redirect the discussion before either of them asked questions that would lead them into an awkward search-engine crawl. "You've certainly got your fantasy literature down, Elaine. Did you study it back in Iowa?"
Elaine was visibly taken back by that question, to the point she seemed to be groping for an acceptable answer. "Actually, it was mostly from long talks with my cousins and some of their cousins, late nights out at their folks' dachas--" She stopped short, as if she'd said something she wasn't supposed to, then relaunched, talking really fast as if she could thus distract from the slip: "It still feels really weird to actually have classes in fantasy, like it's real literature. Back in Iowa, it was 'escapist,' and therefore unworthy of serious attention. In fact, Mrs. Wellstone believed that adding fantastical elements to a story diminishes anything it touches, and trivializes serious topics. I still remember when she caught me reading a zombie story one of my cousins had sent me, about a militsioner, a civil police officer, during the Siege of Leningrad finding that someone had reanimated a neighbor's corpse to commit ration fraud. She was all upset, like it was offensive and disrespectful to the real history and the real suffering."
Elaine's voice caught, and Samantha could tell there was a lot of pain there. Better to just make some sympathetic noises. "That sounds a lot like the attitudes I remember from high school, except my teachers actually used the word 'trash' instead of just implying it."
Still, Samantha wondered just what was going on with these cousins of Elaine's, who were apparently Russian. It would be so much easier if they just had better information on the teen's background, but this was still America, where your private life was just that, and the government didn't keep fat dossiers on everyone's actions.
===========================================================================================
I also got a story done for this week's Indies Unlimited Flash Fiction Writing Challenge. My effort was another bit with Elaine, although after she's settled in at Sparta Point and Marshal Gruzinsky's returned to recover from his injuries. Like the earlier one I did of her after she's awakened in the empty dacha, it's in first person, like the earliest versions of her story.
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.
There will be a new word and picture prompt up at Indies Unlimited on Saturday. Until then, the polls will open tomorrow for voting on the Readers' Choice Award, and will close at 5PM on Thursday.
In the meantime, keep writing.