What I Did On My Vacation

I had the week off from babysitting last week, and even though I didn’t go anywhere, it was still pretty darn nice.

I spent more time in my office than I normally do, although some days it got rather steamy in there, and I don’t mean what I was writing – there’s no a/c in my office. It was kind of a pain because I’d have to carry all my stuff out to the living/dining room area, and find a new place to plug in the lap top. It wasn’t so bad going from the dining room to the office or back again, but it’s a big pain when I relocate to my chair in the living room.

As you may recall from a previous post, last year I replaced my recliner with a cuddle chair. A cuddle chair I bought online from Costco so I didn’t realize how truly big it was until it was delivered.

See that light at the back? That’s where the power bar is, which means I have to crawl over the chair and hang off the back to plug the lap top in. I knew there was a reason why I meant to go for the lap top with the super big battery instead of the one with the pretty lit up keyboard. ;-)

But I digress . . .

The writing got off to a very slow start – I kept finding other stuff that I had to do first. Sadly, it took me until Friday to run out of distractions. But then I sat myself down in my reading chair in my office, whipped out my Alphasmart Neo, and pretended it was NaNo time. I didn’t quite get 1667 words (which is what you need to write daily for the NaNo challenge) but it was well over 1,000 – and I got more writing done on something else that evening.

Saturday the grandbaby came over for the day but surprisingly I still managed to get a fair amount of writing done. If you’re able to see the side bar on the right, you’ll see that the word count for Wandering Wizards jumped by a little over 5,000 words last week, and most of that was written on Friday and Saturday.

All in all, I’d say my vacation was a pretty good one!

Prompt of the Week

Woot! The Story Shack is back! Well, I guess technically it never left, but the security glitch seems to be resolved and I’m able to access it again. And here’s my prompt:

Word count: 600
Genre: Magical Realism Character: An art therapist
Material: A very old sofa
Sentence: "We can repair this."
Bonus: The story takes place two-hundred years from now.

While I do love that it gives me a word count and a little more leeway for creating, I kind of liked all the detail from The Plot Generator. So . . . I decided to give it a whirl as well. This time I clicked on Story Idea and then Horror:

Your main character –name – Elizabeth Chan
An adjective to describe him or her - adorable
Somebody who might try to help your main character – Sarah Gloop
His or her relationship to the main character - sister
Jobs – doctor, gardener, fishmonger
An object - book
An adjective that could describe an object - crumpled
A number between 2 and 400 - 3
A location - Devon
Three more adjectives – feathery, backward, worrying
Three animals, singular – frog, fox, badger
Something a ghost might appear when photographed – skeletal
Two body parts, plural – fingers, legs
A type of accident – dancing
An adjective that could be used to describe a place – noisy

Hopefully if I don’t come up with something for one of the prompts I’ll come up with something for the other. Guess you’ll have to come back Saturday to see which.

In the meantime, why don’t you play along?

Field of Corn

Once again my week got away from me. I did get a few hundred words on that pesky scene for Wandering Wizards, but that was pretty much it. I didn’t even give my prompt story a second thought until today (once I realized it was Saturday and I hadn’t done it yet).

This was actually a lot of fun. And I did the story in under an hour, including editing time to get the word count down. I'm still six words over, but that's pretty darn close! This prompt came from a site called The Story Shack. Every time you click on the button you get a different prompt so the challenge is to stick with the first one you get.

Word count: 250
Genre: Seasonal
Character: A lonely farmer
Material: A pillow
Sentence: "It's too warm."
Bonus: There seems to be no one left on the planet.

Jake looked out over the acres of ripening corn and bit back a sigh. Best crop he’d had in years, and no one left to see it. No one left to sell it to. No one left to eat it. He hated corn.

Shifting the pillow he carried, he turned and checked on the vegetable garden his wife had planted. The beans and peas needed to be picked again, but he wasn’t even finished eating the ones from two days ago. And he had no idea how to preserve them – that was Laura’s job.

There was a bumper crop of squash ripening on the vine, and the cabbages looked as perfect as ever. Stooping, he picked one – he’d have it with his supper tonight. He’d always loved Laura’s boiled cabbage, she had a real knack for it.

A warm breeze came from the north and made him shiver, and remember. The last thing Laura had said to him was, “It’s too warm,” and then she vanished, along with everyone else in the world. All he had left was the farm with its perfect crops and the pillow with her scent still on it.

The animals were gone too, and the birds. Jake didn’t know why he’d been spared; none of it made sense. The season never changed and the crops kept producing more than enough to keep him well fed. In his darker days he thought maybe he hadn’t been spared at all. Maybe this was a punishment for some past transgression. He’d probably never know.