November 25th, 2008

Be very, very quiet. There’s an actual story unfolding in my head. I thought it was just a flash thing, but it’s trying to be bigger than 1k words and trying to have more than one scene. When I went down to eat lunch it pestered me to jot things down on paper. I know, paper! How peculiar, that urgency, and the paper has a green broccoli stain on it because I was eating. I haven’t been inside a story like this for quite some time. I’d forgotten how absorbing and delightful it is. I’m not taking back any of the good things I said about teaching or anything, but yeah, love this part of writing. Seven different things collided in my head and then poof there was a story place with a story in it and I was also standing nearby.

Here’s the (mostly uninspiring, subject to change) first line, because I feel like I got to give you something for reading this far: “The class has eleven students in it on the first day it meets.” Yes, there’s a countdown, how clever of you to notice. And yeah, I know, present tense. How funny, right? I reserve the right to change it, but it’s working for the time being. Maybe because it’s ‘in conversation’, as Bujold would say, with horror? I dunno. I’m not sure whether anyone dies yet.

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