Silver Tongue

I’ve just recently stumbled onto the Monday Mixer, which due to time-zones is a productive way to spend my Tuesday mornings. The idea is to pick one word from each of the three lists: location, thing, adjective and do a piece of flash fiction that's exactly 150 words. You can be a sucker for punishment and try and jam all nine prompt words in, but I figure that's a bit much when I'm trying to mark tests.

Picture from Wikimedia

The wind howled over the remnants of the battlefield causing banners to flutter listlessly. The moor was littered with the dead and dying. Broken shields, hacked limbs and viscera were scattered about, the bulk of them displaying the insignia of the Renegades.

Victory was not yet secured though, as Silver Tongue was yet to be accounted for. With luck, his corpse would be amongst the fallen, and this miscarriage of a revolution would finally end. Inspecting the dead was gristly work, but the reward posted for his head more than made up for it.

Behind a clump of furze a pair of boots kicked feebly as their owner tried to rise. Teeth gritted and a bandana pressed against his side in a futile attempt to staunch the flow of blood, Silver Tongue looked up at my approach. “Not so loquacious now, ye bloody bastard!”

The land would know peace once more.

Bandimals

It's been a while since I've done one of the 100 Word Challenges, because I kept getting sidetracked. The one for this week was the notes from the piano. After finding an awesome picture that suited the story, I went back and changed it slightly. I love the rabbit's martini. 

Picture from here, I'm going to go through the rest later as I love the style

Bandimals

"For the finale, the fireworks will be timed to go off with the final notes from your guitar -"
"I play piano!"
"Whatever, the fireworks will go off with the notes from the piano. Then you walk off, lead by the duck with the tuba -"
"It’s a saxophone!"
"And for something different, there won't be an encore. The fans will hate it at first, but I reckon they'll learn to love it. Trust me, I was in marketing!"
We look uneasily at each other knowing it's time to have the talk. "We think it might be time for Bandimals to get a different manager..."

The Five Sentence Fiction prompt for this week is Inspire. While I'm not really one for poetry, there are a few pieces I like, and I got my idea from one by Shelley. Though I might have come away with a different lesson than the one intended.

Picture from here

They always say "Think big!" but they never really mean it. My imagination is fueled by Golden Age Science Fiction and B-Movies. In my dreams, I am not bound to merely this ball of mud. Ozymandias was on the right track, but he had too much humility. My monument will be made of stars, wrenched from their orbits in a design of my choosing.

Love

The prompt for the first January Business Card Fiction Challenge is a picture with a sentence. I got the inspiration for this story last week, when Madeline was crying late at night because she was crook. It fitted the tone of it well, so I shoe-horned it into my entry. The original seed was a bit longer and more detailed, but I think the brevity suits it better.

The prompt

For design purposes, you can squish a lot more in the card space if you paste in sentences individually so that you can rejig the spacing between them - especially if you have some paragraphs. I wanted my card to look sexy not just with font, but with a nice background too, so I grabbed a chunk of this picture. Font is good old Impact. I've got all these lovely fonts I'm gagging to use, but a lot of them don't look so flash in small sizes.

(I'm thinking I should start limiting my introduction to a business card size as well, that might have to be for next weeks challenge).

State of the Empire

All things considered, 2012 went pretty well. Could have had more typing in it, but I did get more words down, more stories completed, and do more effective editing. But more importantly (with the aid of Super Better), there's been a bigger change in my thinking about writing. Mentally, I'm more geared towards doing it. I spent some of the downtime in Dong Anh working out ways I can be more focused, and I think this time it will stick.

On the baby front, things are also progressing nicely. As expected, everyone else seems to have a better idea than us on how to raise our daughter, but we're figuring things out fairly well. We listen to all advice, and ignore what doesn't seem to suit us. She's going great guns, and while its still early days yet, Madeline seems to have a very sweet temperament - that's not just the proud father speaking, other people say it too, even random strangers. I do realise though she will enter the terrible twos sooner rather than later. And eventually she will become a teenager. But hopefully she'll emerge from that chrysalis and become just as wonderful as she is now. No teeth yet, but they can't be far off.

I do feel a bit silly nattering on here, as I'm not sure that there's anyone reading this but me, but if you are out there, I hope that 2013 is off to an even better start than you imagined it would be, and your happily ever after is progressing in a manner that makes others jealous.