I just realised that everything I've written over 10,000 words started like this

 

The Box

The box under my bed has wooden sides banded with metal and a curved lid secured with an old-fashioned lock, like a pirate chest. The kind that would open with a creak to release a cascade of coins onto the sand of a faraway beach. Except this chest wouldn’t hold anything larger than an orange, so the coins probably wouldn’t pay for the week’s supermarket shop. A thick coating of dust has turned it grey and dull, and makes me cough as I bring it out of its hiding place.

I haven’t known what to do with it for a decade. A wiser head would throw it away. I’ve just tried to forget about it, until now. It took me a week to find the key lost in the detritus of a life lived without quite enough time to do anything properly. Then another week wondering whether I should open it when life has so many other priorities. I locked the box for a reason. But I’m desperate.

The sound of the key in the lock is small and ordinary. A tiny snick of tiny tumblers turning in a tiny lock in a tiny chest.

There are no coins inside. Just a dark grey stone with uneven ridges and folds and a roughened texture that hints at scales. It takes up most of the chest, crammed into a space barely large enough for it to fit. I poke it gently and it’s cold and hard. Just a funny shaped stone. I poke it again and whisper, “I need help.”

If it’s possible for a stone to look even stonier, the box’s occupant achieves it.

“But I remember what it was like and I need it. Just a bit.”

I’m begging a rock. So pathetic.

“Please? Just a little bit. They’re making me write a marketing article for LinkedIn and I don’t know where to start and I need it. Please.”

The stone twitches and shifts, becomes something else without changing shape because somehow what it was had always been there. Then it stills and it’s a stone once more.

“Please?”

A never-ending minute stretches out before it shifts again. One delicate scaly leg appears, followed by another, then two more. Slowly the stone lifts and a fold becomes a head which had been curled into the body. Another fold becomes a tail which had been tucked in tight beneath it. It uncurls and pushes itself up out of the box to perch unsteadily on the edge. Two obsidian chip eyes open and the stony scales gradually suffuse with copper tints as it stretches out one leg at a time and yawns with a mouth full of tiny sharp teeth.

It sinks tiny claws into the timbers of the box and, still wobbling, unfurls bright, iridescent wings. It’s impossible that they ever fitted into a box big enough to hold an orange. It gives them an experimental flap and they cast light into every corner of the room.

And in that light, stories play out. Explorers pass under trees hung with bird skulls and carved masks, while extraterrestrial mothers escort their eight-legged babies across a plain covered with sulphurous yellow bushes. Nixies peek from darkened lakes and sirens practice their song on passing pelicans, and hedges pulse with sullen red flowers and thorns which crave flesh, and paper cats battle with monsters made of smoke and ash. Herds of tiny unicorns the size of a finger nail dance along kitchen counters and leave hoofprints in the butter, and banshee children prepare for their end of school scream test, and tearstained marionettes waltz in a darkened storeroom to save themselves from curious goblins peeking out from behind the boxes all around them. I remember them all and I remember my pencil filling notebook after notebook.

The box’s occupant hops onto my shoulder and wraps a scaly tail around my throat, and new thoughts trail feathery kisses along my neurons. Every one carries an echo of laughter because it doesn’t care about marketing or LinkedIn and it has no intention of ever going back in the box again. It is mine, and I am its, and we left a baby with snakes for hair alone in an unfinished world waiting for its father to find it. It’s time for us to find a pencil.

Waterway life

Beauty and sadness in one day on the waterways. Three juvenile swans having a flying lesson and a goose with angel wing who will never fly because its mama was fed too much bread, 

Bye bye, Rosie

It's ring in the changes time. The Bump became Tiny Boy, who promptly killed off any plans to finish off the book and send it out. I've decided to kill off the whole thing and kick the book under the bed, at least until I start getting at least eight straight hours of sleep a night again.

The pen name is no more as well. My first few writing conferences made me realise quite how ridiculous it was to have one at this stage and how I preferred to use my own name with people I was meeting face to face. I'm taking the opportunity to jettison it and continue this blog with something which is more obviously a screen name rather than the strange dual personality Rosie Lane was becoming.

Right now I feel wonderfully free.

Things I learned at Loch Melfort

1. Small boys exert a strange magnetic field . If you took one to the north pole, he would find another small boy to play with.

2. It's kind of cute when your restaurant waiter tells you that the other small boy is his brother and asks if yours will be out to play again later.

3. The sight of children running down a path to the beach can render adults in the dining room misty eyed.

4. Highland cattle are rather appealing.

5. Comfy hotel beds render your child's chances of sleeping in his own bed again minimal to say the least.

6. Local produce also renders your chances of feeding your child supermarket sausages without complaint even more minimal.

7. A tidal rock pool can be the source of hours of fascination.

8. Southern small boys find the thought of a land without KFC bizarre and horrifying.

9. When planning for hours of exploration, allow for the fact that the Highlands are steep, and that sheep need fences.

10. When planning a trip to a fish farm for book research purposes, just look out of the window. One may be closer than you think.

11. It is an unwritten law of the universe that if you are in a hotel somewhere with no light pollution and there is a telescope in the living room, the nights will be cloudy.

12. When you pack to go home, expect to find every pair of clean underpants your son brought, unworn.

Loch Melfort: lovely place and friendly people who were completely charming to writers with galloping morning sickness and small sons in tow. The Boy is desperate to go back again.

Things I learned at Eastercon

Crawling out of my pit of morning sickness to post, pretty much just to let the world know that I'm still alive. Morning sickness: Best. Diet. Ever.

Coming up to Eastercon I was just mildly nauseous, so I thought, let's do this. It's all booked and paid for, you've been looking forward to it for months, and there's no way you can stiff your room mate, Mhairie Simpson, for the whole hotel bill, so pack a big bag of tummy-settling snacks and let's go.

It worked until day 3, when everything went up a gear and I became intimately acquainted with the lovely bathroom in my hotel room and spent much of the last two days in bed. This was disappointing, since I missed my chance of a ringside seat to the big kerfuffle.

Still, after two weeks of wishing for death, the words finally seem to be stringing together okay and this morning's Rice Krispies are staying put, so hopefully I'm on the downward slope now.

So, things I learned at Eastercon (which aren't to do with pregnancy and vomiting, because these things are only of interest to the poor fool suffering them):

1.  Remember who the guests of honour are. People are friendly and may ask you questions. It isn't meant as a test, but...

2.  You are possibly the only person in the hotel not to have seen Game of Thrones. When this means that you assume the giant replica Iron Throne in pride of place is a random piece of hotel sculpture, it might look like you just arrived from Mars. Resist the urge to produce your battered copy of Fevre Dream by GRR Martin. The damage is already done.

3.  There is nothing jumpier than a person on a budget staying in an expensive hotel for the first time on a special cheap convention rate, where straying from the path could bankrupt you.

4.  Just because the room service menu is in your room, does not mean you are going to be charged £17.50 for breakfast each day. Breathe.

5.  Fancy hotels may prearrange a credit limit on your bill in case you want to put extras on it. This does not mean that you are going to be charged an extra £200, only that you can put an extra £200 of services on your room bill if you want. Breathe.

6.  The minibar is one of those optional services, not a ravening beast which will creep out of the cupboard and maul your credit card while you sleep.

7.  It doesn't matter how much your husband irritates you. In a hotel room on your own, you will miss him.

8.  Ditto your children, although you're still happy that they aren't in the room with the minibar beast. It makes it easier to close your eyes in the dark. Except you think you just heard it whisper something in there.

9.  You realise that if you were a stick of rock, it would say 'daylight consultant' all the way through, because you wish you had your laser tape and computer with you so that you could calculate the Average Daylight Factor of your hotel room.

10. At a science fiction convention, you will not be alone in your stick of rockness. There will be other stick of rock people with scientific disciplines running all the way through.

11.  It's hard to stay cool when a Klingon walks in the bar.

12.  You are never short of a t-shirt to read.

13.  Attending a sci-fi panel on getting to Mars can give you at least three dystopian book scenarios in the first fifteen minutes.

14.  People might want to check for pregnant women before they ask hypothetical questions of the room, such as whether they would be willing to offer their children for body modification to allow them to colonise Mars. Specifically, they might want to check for pregnant women with sharp, pointy objects within reach. Seriously, it's like a doctor tapping below your knee with a little hammer; your hands will slam over your belly and you will start scanning the room for people who might have been brave enough to put their hands up. (I know I promised, but come on, one preggy point out of fourteen isn't bad.)

This was my second convention, and despite having to stay teetotal and a few chats with the big white telephone, it was a ton of fun. I now have to decide whether to try to get to Fantasycon in September despite the fact that I'll be dodging harpoons by then, or to cancel it on the basis that a woman going into labour in one of the panels might be more excitement than anybody wants.

A Boy's visit to the Harry Potter Studio Tour

The Boy was incredibly lucky last week; his school had the opportunity to go to a preview of the Harry Potter Experience at the Leavesden Studios. Our (very) small claim to fame is living within walking distance of the studios. Sadly, they are excellent neighbours and I have never seen or heard anything interesting from the outside.

When The Boy told me about his day, pretty much every other word he used was 'awesome'. So, over to you, Boy:

• We saw  the trolley from the train, and you could eat the sweets, They had snakes to eat that moved in my mouth!
• There were chocolate cauldrons with caramel goo inside them that you could drink, and wands that dropped bits of licorish out of the end. They tasted delicious.
• We went into Fred and George's shop. There were actually fireworks! We saw Peruvian instant darkness powder that makes black smoke go everywhere. My friend went home covered in it. 
• The electric shock hand worked! 
• We met the actors that played Fred and George and they were really funny. They were jokers just like in the films.
• There was a cinema and we thought it was going to be boring but then the wall turned out to be the screen. After the film the screen went up and there were two huge doors. Everybody gasped and didn't move. Behind the doors was the great hall, with no roof. Apparently they only used candles in the first film because they kept falling on the children's food!
• In the tunnel I swear there was magic going on there, because there were lights on the walls and they moved around. You felt like you were walking upside down!
• We went into a huge room with 15 golden snitches to find. Finding the snitches was a lot of fun. They were... Stop! You can't tell people where to find the golden snitches!
• We saw Hagrid's Hut, Professor Dumbledore's office, the night bus, the Griffindor common room, the Slytherin common room, the dormitories for all the houses, the floor network and the Ministry for Magic.
• We got to drink butterbeer! It was really nice.
• There were wands that shot a bright light out of the end. I really, really wanted one to take home.
• There was lots of other stuff but the absolute best thing of all was wearing the quidditch robes and riding the broomsticks! You got to see yourself  on a screen. It was awesome! 
• I still wish our head teacher had let us get autographs from Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, Emma Watson and Ralph Fiennes. She had a load of paper and she wouldn't give it to us.

So, overall, good day out?

One of the best days of my entire life. I would recommend it to every single person in the world, and that includes people on Mars.

Thank you, Boy. The Harry Potter studio tour officially gets the nine-year-old's seal of approval. In fact, he wants me to take him again when it opens so that he can show it all to me. I think I might have to. I want to ride on a broomstick too.

An exercise in the procurement of a child passport:

1. Take child to be photographed. Obtain passport renewal form. Fill in form and append previous passport and two photographs. Give it to husband to take to friend who is deemed official enough to countersign form and photographs declaring that child exists and is not part of terrorist plot. Countersignatory makes mistake in her part of the form. Application rejected.

2. Get new form. Fill in new form, including countersignatory's part so this time all she has to do is sign it. Give it to husband to take to countersignatory. On return, notice that passport and photographs are now missing from envelope and part of her signature is outside the box. Form now invalid as it refers to enclosed passport.

3. Get new form, plus form to declare a lost passport. Fill in both forms. Append two more photographs. Give them to husband to take to countersignatory. On return, notice that form is signed but photographs aren't.

4. Send husband back with photographs to get them signed. Signature is in blue ink. Application rejected.

5. Head explodes.



Duration of exercise: 2 months.


Outcomes:

1. Brain matter everywhere

2. No significant progress in long term goal of reduction in pathological need to maintain excessive levels of control in all things.

3. Still no child passport.

Time to recognise the enemy within and conquer it

I'm rather embarrassed that it took me this long to work it out. I have a little bit of obsessive -compulsive disorder in me to go with the inner control freak that I accepted and embraced a long time ago. I can't tell you how much more I could have gotten done with my time if I'd realised this earlier.

It shows at work in the form of insanely complicated computer models which are far more extensive and detailed than needed. Not necessarily a bad thing, except I spend about three times as long on a job as anybody else. Still, they haven't fired me yet, so I'm going to call that a win.

Online, it shows as a determination to read all the tweets.

Like many newbie writers, I read the blog posts which tell you that you have to have an online presence; start now before you even have something to sell. You get infected with this sense of urgency, because you might be doing it wrong. It's all: Platform! Blog! Tweet! Do it now! And so the plan, devised on a computer with tick boxes and printed out and glued into a diary (because I'm that kind of scary person) includes Join Twitter. Develop an online web presence.

And there the compulsion sinks its claws in, because whenever I'm on the computer, it's nagging me that I haven't read all the tweets yet. It is a task uncompleted. I cannot tick the box and move on. I need to tick a completed box before I can move on. Seriously.

Now I'm not talking about all 200 million tweets per day, or whatever it is now, because I'm just a little bit nuts, not completely off my trolley. Just the tweets from the 270 some people that I follow. But even so, by definition it never ends. It's why I had to quit Farmville and Treasure Madness and make my facebook feed a game free zone. It's why I gave away my Playstation when gaming became more important than food or sleep.  I find I seldom tweet myself, because I'm too busy reading all the tweets. And worse, still, they're not even fun tweets, because most of my feed is from follow backs. I am paralysed into inactivity by a giant wave of I am a writer, buy my book tweets, which I don't even enjoy reading, because the compulsion to read all the tweets is there. I can't tick the box and move on. I need to tick the box.

But this morning, I feel... I don't know, awake. Objective. Looking at my twitter feed, I've noticed that one person tweets exactly every half hour to ask a random question, like 'what's the last colour you painted your toenails?' When I check their page, these questions never result in interaction, never turn into a discussion. So what's their purpose?

I like using twitter to engage with people about their lives. I want to know about the thing their kids did that made them laugh, about their new puppy, about the joke their friend told them. Really, truly, I don't want to hear about the review of someone's book that I haven't read and don't plan to. Not any more. I guess I could buy every single book promoted by every single person that followed me as a means of building their list of followers, but I'd end up in one of those smart white coats with wraparound arms.

I'm not going to quit twitter, because I like following authors whose books I've loved, and I like talking to people like Hagelrat, Mhairie Simpson and Margie McNulty, people who are happy to chat, but I think I'm going to cut right back on the other stuff. People have every right to promote their stuff on twitter, but it isn't for me.

The same as this blog is just a diary that people can read if they want rather than a writer's promotional tool filled with platform building content, my twitter needs to be social and not driven by the great god, Platform. It's the only way to stay sane and enjoy writing enough to want to carry on.

I'll never read all the tweets, but now I know the task ahead of me. I beat Farmville. I beat Treasure Madness. I can beat this. And to that end, this is what it looks like where I live this morning:

Pretty, huh? No doubt my son will be taking his sledge out when he gets home from school. Are your kids having fun in the snow? I really would like to know.

Their day will come

They may be beautiful, but I firmly believe some of these flowers are waiting for the day they will grow up and become triffids.


Life of flowers (Жизнь цветов) from VOROBYOFF PRODUCTION on Vimeo.


One day, when we least expect it, they will strike, and when that happens?

♫ The guy sure looks like plant food to me ♫

Word count will stay my problem up to and including my headstone

I finally pulled my procrastinating thumb out of my arse and did some writing, in that wonderful quiet spot between Christmas and New Year when you can live on leftovers and stay at home while the rest of the world hits the sales. I quite like my tale of satanic paper cats and their reluctant hostess.

Unfortunately, this was supposed to be my entry for an annual writing group competition with a word count of 2,500 to 3,500, and I'm at 4,500 and rising. Oops. It seems the engraved Writer's Block is destined to spend a year on someone else's shelf. It will probably be happier on a shelf that gets dusted more frequently anyway. I wouldn't want to interfere with the dawn of a new dust bunny species which is likely to occur in my house later this year.

Grinch alert

Okay, I have to hold my hands up to it: I'm a grinch.

Which is not to say I hate Christmas, heck no. I love the way The Boy's excitement increases as the open doors on his advent calendar add up. I love our little family walk with the dogs on Christmas morning, and the big family gathering in the evening. I love decorating the tree and baking mince pies with sweet pastry so thin they crumble in your hands.

Nope, it turns out, what I don't love is involuntary exposure to Christmas music. Christmas songs on the radio and in the shops drive everybody nuts, so I'm just going to add myself to the end of a long, long list there, and declare that the only Christmas song I can tolerate is Fairytale of New York. 'Nuff Said, and thanks, Tesco, for using it in your advertising and potentially spoiling that one for me too. If that makes me a grinch, then we are legion.

I might, however, be in a minority when it comes to choirs singing carols.

Now I quite like choral music. A friend sings in a choir and The Old Git and I go to their twice yearly concert. Good stuff. However, I don't expect it in the middle of a crowded restaurant.

It was the occasion of our Writing Group Christmas dinner (I do enjoy having four or five different Christmas dinners), and when the group on the next table broke into a rendition of Ding Dong Merrily on High, I thought it was spontaneous and wonderful.

Then they did another one.

And another one.

And another one.

And another one.

Then they did the first one again, and I looked over and realised that this was not a spontaneous outbreak of song. They all had songbooks in front of them, and they were set up for a night of wobbling their tonsils in public. And I started a slow, irritable burn.

I'm sorry, Pain the Arse Choral Society, but it's the noise inspector in me. It doesn't matter what you are choosing to sing, or how well you sing it. What bothers me is that you decided a crowded restaurant was the place for your singalong, regardless of whether the people around you wanted to hear it or not. It's the fundamental 'up yours' inherent in that decision. One carol, sung off the cuff would have delighted me. Planning it in advance? That's just rude.

I will retire with grinchly dignity to my kitchen, and start baking mince pies. When people open their mouths to sing in inappropriate places, maybe I can just pop mince pies in. I figure with a little bit of planning, I can be both grumpy and Christmassy.

It's Panto Night (oh no it's not!)

What do the following have in common?

• Ripperella, the East End tart whose fairy godfather, Don Corleone, set her up with a man called Jack,
• Jack the Intellectually Challenged, who went to London to become the Lord Mayor with the help of a pig called Trotter,
• Maid Marion, who left Robin to marry Aladdin, the man who could find her hood,
• Silvio, who helped grow the European beanstalk for the Banking Giant by fertilising it with used banknotes.

Answer: They were all characters invented by the deranged imaginations of the Watford Writers and assigned to me to ham-act for Panto Night. So, so much fun.

You guys have strange, warped minds and I love you for it. Poor Chris might not, since you made him be King Kong and ape his way across the 'stage' to have a discussion with Tarzan about loincloths.

The million dollar question now is whether the guy who came for the first time tonight will be back next week or whether he'll run away screaming.

Divine Hell blog challenge - Heresy

I am dying on my arse with this challenge. Just way too busy at work. It's leaving me with a headful of sludge in the evenings. Nearly a week late and 100 words over. Oops.

 

“Hello Steven.” There is infinite sorrow on the Bishop’s face as the guards plant me in a chair on the other side of his desk, my hands spread out on the top. “I had hoped we wouldn’t have to talk again.”

So had I. I thought I’d hidden well enough this time to die and wake up with God instead of the Church’s doctors.

He leans forward and puts a hand over mine, stilling the tremors that rack it. “You can’t keep doing this. Please, repent and walk with us in the footsteps of Jesus.” 

I don’t answer him. My throat is locked with remembered pain of the razor that opened it and spilled my life onto the ground.

“Well?”

I want to spit in his face and tell him he’s wrong, that God never meant us to keep re-animating these tired bodies as we suck the world dry. But the resurrection process has left me weak. All I can do is shake my head. Lights flash behind my eyes as nanobots  falter in their painstaking task to reassemble my thoughts from darkness. 

“Oh, Steven. How many times must we go through this?” He looks over at the doctor who stand in the shadows. “Steven rejects the words of the holy prophet Dr Pearson and his gift of resurrection. Execute him tonight.”

My heart soars. They are going to give up and let me go.

But... no. “Steven, we’ll talk again tomorrow. I pray that you will be thinking more clearly.”

Divine Hell blog challenge - Limbo

Oops. It's past midnight. I wonder if my flash story will turn into a pumpkin? A limbo pumpkin. What would a limbo pumpkin look like? Pale, maybe. Wraithlike. Anyway...

http://ladyantimony.blogspot.com/2011/12/december-blog-challenge.html

The letters on the sheet in front of me swim and ripple into new configurations as I stare at them with stinging eyes. There is nothing here that means anything, nowhere I can insert the crowbar of my mind and twist.

I have not passed. The vehicle of my future will stall here.

But, until I walk out, neither have I failed. I occupy interstitial space, where nothing is decided.

I turn my gaze to the clock and will time to stop, will my mind to have this new power to make up for my failure in mathematics.

Just… stop.

Tuesday Tales - first judging appointment

Judge's word: Twist

I had my first judging appointment today, for the weekly microfic competition at Tuesday Tales. So impressed with the quality of the entries; they did not make my job easy. My winners are up, together with what appealed about each entry.

Check them out.

It was a great experience. Far, far more fun than my one and only agility judging appointment. That one still gives me a nervous twitch. Note to self: If you are ever stupid enough to find yourself judging an agility competition again, do not set the A frame up next to the window to the cafe, so that every armchair critic can second guess your judgements on the contacts.

No, not "everyone has klout". Some of us don't want it

I read an interesting post today, on why someone deleted their Klout profile. I've read several posts over the last few weeks where people have been discussing the algorithm that Klout uses to determine how influential you are on social networks, and thought, "I wouldn't sign up for that mess of social-anxiety-in-a-jar if you held a gun to my head." As a shy person who doesn't make friends easily, to me it represents the same kind of soul crushing popularity contest that made me feel like a worthless waste of oxygen in my teens, and like hell am I am going to subscribe to it as an adult too. Having fun with social networks? Who cares, let's talk how important you are.

How lucky I am, then, that I didn't need to sign up. Those lovely, thoughtful people at Klout, who know nothing of my contempt for popularity contests or concern about things being done in my name without my knowledge, just made me a profile anyway. Thanks, guys.

Now you can damn well delete it again. Now.

Tuesday Tales - because microfic is addictive

I won another round of Tuesday Tales, go me! The fact that I'm posting it now instead of last week has nothing to do with me procrastinating my tail off faced with three books to beta read, my word no. Nothing could be *cough* further from the truth. And I'm not stalling because I can't come up with anything for this week's round either.

No I am not looking shifty. You take that back.

Prompt word: Effervesced

I tip the powder into my water glass with shaking hands. It effervesces with a happy sparkle that promises forgiveness of my sins; a fresh start in one fizzy mouthful.

The wrappers of a dozen chocolate bars surround me, as much a part of the autumn as fallen leaves and fireworks. I bend down to gather them up and hide the evidence of my shame for another year. They disappear in the dustbin, lost among coffee grounds and cardboard. The wrappers are gone but I am left with my belly, as soft and sagging as the rotting pumpkin underneath them.

Genre hopping - choose your destination wisely

One of the best things about Fantasycon was that I found out about a lot of great authors. Thrilled with my new discoveries, I dived in and am just now emerging from a huge reading bender of British urban fantasy, gritty eyed and with a head full of monsters and mayhem. It was wonderful. These are the books I read and I would recommend any of them:

The Sweet Scent of Blood by Suzanne McLeod
The Naming of the Beasts by Mike Carey (I *really* wish I'd read these in order instead of grabbing five before three and four. It would have been even more awesome)
Into the Nightside by Simon R Green (an omnibus of Something from the Nightside and Agents of Light and Darkness)

However, I have learned the hard way not to stay in one genre too long. The corpse of high fantasy lies broken behind me on this path, burned out and lost to me, maybe forever. Can't let that happen again. Time for a change.

I've been meaning to read some of Georgette Heyer's books for a long time, because I've heard so many good things about them. Sarah Rees Brennan has talked about them in glowing terms, and I like her own books so much that I'll read pretty much anything she recommends.

Unfortunately, regency romances: possibly not a good choice of genre coming straight after an urban fantasy marathon. I like me some romance, I really do, but when you've just read books where vampires and demons are threatening everything the world holds dear, it's really hard to get excited about someone risking their position in the echelons of those born rich and entitled just by marrying someone not quite as rich and entitled as they are. None of them seem to work for a living. It's enough to make me come over all Bastille Day.

I don't plan to quit just yet; I'm only a few pages in. However, I might need to pick a different genre first and work my way down to that gentler level of sex and violence, where a bad marriage or being caught with your voluminous knickers down is possibly the worst thing that can happen to you.

Microfic win

I love microfic. It's a great way to keep writing when you're contemplating whether to print off your manuscript just so that you can set fire to it. To keep my fingers away from the matches I've been playing the Tuesday Tales at Glitter Word for a while and it's really good fun. Weekly 100 word microfic competition based on a photograph and a prompt word.

And this week, I won! Yay! Thanks to Stevie for a gorgeous pic and to Lady Antimony for accepting the bri judging. Go read the other entries too. Lots of awesomeness there.  I think the pic brought out the poet in everybody this week.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~



Prompt word: Ensorcell


The girl sits on the opposite bank and watches me through hair that curls like water weed. Her bare skin glistens with the pond water that drips onto the grass.

“Are you a witch?” I ask. “Here to ensorcel me?”

She tilts her head to listen to the sound and smiles at me.

“Will you talk?”

She smiles again, showing needle-sharp teeth made to tear and rend, and slips into the water. I should be running. Instead I lean over to look for her, a pale wraith in the reeds.

Her smile widens as she drags me into her pond.