lindsay's exiled vox

a paragraph a day

They came into the kitchen just as Lois was putting the last of the food into a small brown sack. There were a few loaves of bread wrapped in towels, some jerky and salted meats and a variety of dried fruits. A canteen dangled from one of the straps.
"Ah! There you are." She said when she spotted her daughter and the young man in the doorway. "I've got everything ready for your journey. Oh--!"
She ran into the large pantry and came out a moment later with a small wooden box.
"Can't forget these!" she exclaimed, shaking the box at them before stuffing it into the bag.

(What is this weird little post?)

a paragraph a day

Dinner was sitting on the counter getting cold, but the girl still wasn't home. Lois rested her chin in her hand. Just for a moment, she thought. But a moment became a nap, and Lois was soon snoring loudly. The fire in the hearth flickered and sputtered. As it began to die out, sparks flew out and landed on the flagstone floor. At least, they would seem to be sparks to the common eye. But these were long and skinny, and when they landed, they began to scuttle about.

(What is this weird little post?)

a paragraph a day

The little hogboon was miles away when he heard the earth rumble, but he recognised the sound of that bit of earth. Every rock and every cave had its own unique vibration, and it was his gift to tell them apart. He turned toward the source of that ill-fated sound and took off running as fast as his tiny legs would carry him. Soon enough he came within sight of a plume of dust rising from a cliff in the distance. His home! The creature held back a fearful tear. How could this have happened? It was then that he noticed more than dust coming from the cliff. A strange man, grinning, yet full of malice, strode out of the thick dust and made his way purposefully back toward the town.

(What is this weird little post?)

a paragraph a day

It was then that he spotted her riding down the hill on a black and grey mare. He was mesmerised. She was somehow both beautiful and plain; all at once familiar and mysterious - even more so than the standing stone at the heart of town. He had to know who she was and tried to catch her up, but she breezed right past him, unseeing, as she made her way to the north end of town. He followed on foot, so inexplicably drawn to her. As he rounded the corner, he saw her look all round suspiciously, though her eyes did not land on him. Then she kicked her horse and it exploded at top speed into the vast countryside where he could not follow on foot. He sighed and turned back. An introduction would have to wait. But she had come from the house on the hill. Surely his mother's new friend could tell him who she was.

(What is this weird little post?)

a paragraph a day

One slow step after the next, he carved a circle around the mammoth oddity. Looking it up and down he could not place where he'd seen it before. Here, at the center of town, the giant stone overlooked every aspect of the villagers lives. They shopped, they gossiped, they harvested and held festivals in its shadow, seeing it as a time honoured friend. But, as he paced his ever shrinking circle around the lonely standing stone, he could only see it as a mystery.

(What is this weird little post?)

a sidenote

In regard to my new little experiment 'a paragraph a day' it only took my first attempt for me to realise it wasn't going to work as I'd hoped. You see, I'm the creative type who always feels a need to create, but I am unfortunately not the type that is a fountain of ideas waiting to break forth. Like if you're someone who loves to drive, but has nowhere to go. Or maybe just no gas. You may sit in your car and stare out the window with your hands on the wheel, but you're just not going to get anywhere.

So trying to come up with a whole new narrative idea every day is just too much for me. It just isn't there. Hopefully I will be able to come up with a few prompt based ideas or completely random ideas every now and then. But I think the thing that made NaNo work is that I was just constantly building on the same ideas.

So I've decided to try to use that a bit more, and I'm going to write paragraphs based on my NaNo novel and its associated epic. Expanding on things, showing other characters' perspectives or events not fully described. All without giving too much of my actual story away, of course.

a paragraph a day

The man tread slowly through her garden, pausing every once in a while to inspect a leaf of one of her plants. She grew uncommon things here; things with many names, most of which were long forgotten. Plants with purpose; plants with uses seldom sought or even remembered. But he remembered. And he needed only one. One plant whose magical powers worked tenfold when stolen. As he finally lifted the odiferous blue-green leaves he sought and sliced them off the plant, his face formed a malicious grin. How wonderfully fitting that this plant, made so powerful by his theft, would allow him to forever control the very woman he stole it from.

(What is this weird little post?)

a paragraph a day

The prompt:

He was fond of a lass and fond of a glass, and fond of a ran-dan

His glass bubbled over with frothy perfection, and the ring box was bulging in his pocket. Nothing could ruin this perfect night, he thought, as he spied her in the corner booth, tapping her foot and eying him suspiciously. Paying no mind to the innocent billiards player he mowed over, he staggered toward his girl, winking in a manner he thought quite dashing. She was aglow, sparkling even; gleaming like a diamond even as she pulled a face and turned her back on him. Or maybe it was the booze.

(What is this weird little post?)

must... keep... writing...

Well, it's been one full week since NaNoWriMo. I have thoroughly enjoyed the vacation from churning out two or three thousand words of fiction every single day. And I was fully intending to continue work on my unfinished NaNo book in January after a nice long break from it. But NaNo put me in the habit of writing every day and I realised I need to keep going before that habit vanishes altogether. After all, writers write, right? (har har - bad one, I know) And they write a lot in order to improve themselves.

So I figured, I have this vox blog, right? I never really use it anymore, right? Well, I should. I decided I need to quit worrying about whether or not I have anything worthwhile to post, and just write. Of course I've known that for the last two years, but I still always drew a blank on what to write about. Or just didn't feel like it. And facebook gets all my frivolous internet finds these days.

So here's the thing. I have decided I need to post a paragraph a day. That's five sentences. Sounds easy enough, right? Gee, I hope so. Ideally it would be fiction; a fiction paragraph that can stand on its own. Or perhaps something like this old post that totally dramatised my stinky, icky trash chute. I suppose I could start by looking at the vox question of the day. Never did pay much attention to those. But that's because they never really inspired me in the first place - thousands of other people potentially writing about the same thing and all. Plus - not fiction.

So one thing it occurred to me to try is to pick a random book off my shelf, turn to a random page, point to a random sentence, and then try to expand on that. Not sure if that'll work or not. For one thing, I may still draw a complete blank - working off the words of others and all. For another, I don't have many books here, as the majority are still in storage. The ones that are here will either end up being an excellent trove of ideas or a really really bad suck hole of non-ideas. Most of the books I have here are reference books on cool, obscure or fictional topics like Celtic lore and history, British mythology, or encyclopaedias of fairies or monsters or magic. Quite frankly, I might become intimidated trying to write even just a simple paragraph on such topics without having fully studied up on them. But we shall see.

Now, I no longer have NaNo's invisible guilt monkeys to keep me on task, and even making myself write this post was a challenge only overcome by the fact that I wanted to start this precisely one week after NaNo. Which is right now -  tada! Instant deadline. And I don't honestly expect myself to do it every single day without fail, indefinitely. But if I refer to it as roughly a daily thing, maybe that will help the guilt monkeys come round. You know, when many days go by and I haven't touched the vox compose page and I start to feel guilty for allowing "daily" to turn into "weekly" to turn into "occasionally" or worse.

So that's my spiel. But I want you to help me too. I want you to throw ideas at me. If the book thing isn't working it might be nice to have ideas to fall back on, to choose between when nothing else sparks a single sentence. (Seriously. You'd be surprised just how empty my head can become when I sit down to write for the sake of writing. Remember journaling in junior high? Yeah, I hated that more than gym, I think. I could never think of anything to write in the moment.)

But more than the benefit of having the ideas themselves, if you are sending them to me, I'll know you're reading. And expecting something from me. Nothing gets me going like knowing someone is expecting me to do something I've set out to do. In essence you become my invisible guilt monkeys. Invisible, of course, only because I can't see you through the interwebs.

So, wish me luck. And I hope my paragraphs don't bore you to pieces! (like this post undoubtedly has ~__^)

love-love. lindsay

NaNo update #10: I did it!

Woohoo! Why yes, Virginia, I can write 50,000 words worth of fiction in thirty days. However crappy those words may be, they are mine all mine.

Of course, I may only be a third of the way through the book. And I am certainly ready for a vacation from it, so I won't be finishing it this year. But then, I did leave off in a rather nice place - just as my group of three sets off on their journey. I may go back and add a bit more today to make sure it's a nice tightly wrapped pseudo ending. That'll make it easier to pick up again and finish later.

But now, here's my gratuitous winner's page screen shot:

NaNo Winners page

And my official winner's certificate:

Nano_09_winner_certificate

And, because it's one of the things I was doing when I ought to have been working on my novel, here's my crummy lovely makeshift mock up book cover.:

Earth Guardian

Hooray hooray! Now I can sleep and do other things.