Aim of the Game

It started with a little whisper of an idea and my fingers were able to spin it out into a story. Nearly 10,000 words on my first day of NaNoWriMo. All spun out by my muse.

Yesterday I wrote nothing and lay under a mantle of icky feelings. Today I have turned back to it and it is a different ball game altogether. I made the mistake of allowing my eyes to linger on what had previously been written and someone how it doesn't seem to shine so bright. The effect of the morning after. We lose the moment.

I also have the problem that that tiny idea has taken me far further than I had expected. My main character has, within those 10,000 words, changed the world completely and utterly and also by accident. Now she has to figure out to live in it. I don't have much idea where she is going or how she is going to get there and the words no longer feel alive as i write them.

What do you do when you lose the plot? You keep going, one word at a time because even the plot just doesn't matter, all that matters is writing those 50,000 words. One word at a time... How slow it will be if they don't start to flow again...

I guess it is kind of appropriate that my main character is a lost soul too.

Footsteps in Ink

It probably is no surprise that I have started a new blog. This one is for stories and a new installment of my sea gull story awaits any who wish to read it....

You can see my efforts of so far there...

Souls Fly Free

OK, I decided now was a good time to follow the sea gulls to see where they took me. They took me to a sad place and now I have to go do something else....

***

Sally paused and ran her fingers down her apron, turning the fabric white and dusty with flour. She looked out of the window at the grey sky. White smudges wheeled against a canvas of clouds. Dramatic and bright, they swooped and turned.

She didn't want to look out towards the sea. She didn't want to not see a red hull tumbling over the waves. She didn't want to think about storms battling fragile wood. She didn't want to imagine hands of water winkling the prize from a pretty shell.

The gulls wheeled above the house, sometimes in view, sometimes not, but always calling. Loud and coarse they were but they spoke of freedom and loneliness. Calling forever, away from here, calling her home.

Home? Here was home. The place she hoped to raise a family in years to come. Beside her man, united in the love of her children to be. How could her home be away from here? If she left, how would he find her?

Absentmindedly she had shaped the bread into near oblongs but with a broadening towards one end. She felt a growing sense of disquiet and the need to run from the stifling heat of the house. Up onto the cliffs she went. Drawn into the air by the freesom of the gulls flying around her.

They said that sea gulls were the soul of fishermen lost at sea. They were drawn to land to see their families but the call of the sea drew them out with the boats at the turn of the tide to hunt for fish. Because a fisherman can never be truly happy on land, no matter how much love they have.

The sea gulls wheeled and danced, quiet now. They almost seemed to create a vortex around her and she could feel the world slip. As quickly as the feeling began it left as one caught her eye. Snared by the intelligence in it's gaze and some connection, she gasped and turned away.

Something in the waves caught her gaze. A flash of red. Too small. Too close. The gull showed her the way home as she stepped forward to find her wings.