Hello!
I’ve decided to post some of my older works of fiction and poetry over at my fiction blog. If you’re not already following me there, and you enjoy reading short stories and poems, please click here have a peek.
Love,
Me
Category Archives: fiction
Squirrels: This Time It’s Personal (part 13)
This is the next installment from the epic Community Storyboard’s Chain Story Event.
Continued from Part 12 by the lovely and talented Belle, found here: Squirrels: This Time It’s Personal (part 12)
“Put us on speaker-phone!” The whiny chittering voice grated in Gandalf’s ear.
“What for, you mealy-mouthed-flea-infested-nut-breath’d…”
“Not so fast!” came a shout from the door. “Treebeard! There’s something in your hair!”
Gandalf turned to see the luscious-locked Aragorn, standing in the doorway pointing at Treebeard’s upper branches. Gandalf’s gaze followed the finger. “A spy!” he exclaimed.
The twittering giggles emitting from the speaker of the phone were making his head ache anew. He slammed down the telephone but then remembered it was a cell phone, so he picked it up again, turned it off and threw it over his shoulder. Meanwhile, the emerald clad Ent was flailing around his living room, simultaneously bashing at his own head to squash the intruder, and fighting off Aragorn, who was attempting to climb the less-than-limber fellow.
Just as Gandalf decided it might be a good idea to join in the fray (because Aragorn was making it look like so much fun) the sneaky squirrel reached Treebeard’s topmost limb and squeaked in triumph.
“Ah ha!” he taunted, one stubby finger in the air. “We have Darlene and now we know to get her out of Fangorn Forest!” The unscrupulous creature slapped his hand over his mouth with a muffled, “Oops!” Quickly forgetting his faux pas, (for squirrels have the attention span of, well, a squirrel) he held his scrawny finger up again and exclaimed, “You’ll never catch me now!” and with that he scampered out the door.
Aragorn perched his fists jauntily upon both hips and turned to Treebeard. “Don’t you ever comb your hair, Entwhistle? It’s a man’s glory, after all, to be well-groomed!”
“Don’t you think we have something more important at hand, ranger?”
The future king looked stunned. “Like what?”
“Like catching yon rodent,” Treebeard explained slowly, as though talking to a toddler. “Freakin’ showoff,” he mumbled as he ambled out the Ent-sized hole in Gandalf’s front entrance. “I’ll go find the critter!” He didn’t look back.
“I think you’re barking up the wrong tree, trying to get him to take care of his looks,” Gandalf said. “Did you see that suit?”
They had a chuckle and sat at Gandalf’s kitchen table.
“Coffee?” the wizard offered. “It doesn’t look like I’ll be getting any sleep tonight anyway,” he murmured more to himself.
“Sure, but no sugar. I’m sweet enough.”
Gandalf looked up and winced when he saw a glint shine off Aragorn’s tooth. Damn, but he was handsome.
“It seems we have a problem,” the charming ranger said, flipping his shimmering tresses over his shoulder. “Did you know Gosling and Mc Adams were murdered in cold blood?”
“I heard.”
“Ah, but there’s more of a problem than meets the eye. You see, I anointed Gosling with a mission…”
“What do you mean, ‘anointed’? Did you drop it on his head?” The wizard sat and rested his elbows on the table, across from the man.
“As a matter of fact I did. Don’t interrupt. As I was saying, Gosling was on a mission of my anointment,” he challenged Gandalf with his menacing but well-plucked eyebrows, but Gandalf refused to take up the gauntlet. Aragorn went on. “But now it seems I have forgotten what the mission was. I know it was important.”
“Oh, for the love of…” Gandalf facepalmed.
“But all is not lost!”
“How do you figure?”
“Well, you see, I’m working on resurrecting Gosling. I found his missing kidney and between myself and Legolas I think we can have him up and working on the case within the next few hours.”
“And Mc Adams?”
Aragorn looked sincerely forlorn. “I’m afraid our only hope is to find her missing heels. Those gams…” He stared off into space.
“Ranger!”
“Oh, yes. Sorry. I had Smeagol sift through the rubble at the Burgundy Herring Seafood Shack and Pool Hall. That’s where he found the evidence that they’d taken Darlene. But devastatingly, the second heel was nowhere to be found.”
The old man shook his wizened gray head. “What a shame. I suppose we should get out there and search for the waitress. She might have gathered some information on the ‘Goddess’ since she’s been in the slimy paws of those…” He shuddered.
“After coffee.” Aragorn lifted his cup to his full lower lip and Gandalf couldn’t help notice the rippling of well-toned muscles under the man’s tunic.
Get ahold of yourself man! Gandalf thought. Too much time hanging around with Dumbledore.
“…a shower.” Aragorn had been speaking while he was off on his own little fantasy-tangent.
“What?” he asked the glimmering king-to-be.
“I’d like to have a shower before we go, too. Do you have any Pantene?”
This is going to be a long night, Gandalf grumbled to himself.
And that’s my bit. I’m passing the gauntlet to Briana Vedsted. Take it away, Briana!
Day 27 Prompt – Championship Texting
Day 27 Prompt – Write a story taking place during a sporting event (any sport)
Unluckiest Man Alive, Dies
I wrote this today, on The Community Storyboard. Check out this and more awesome works of fiction by many fantastic writers!
It Isn’t Pretty
I wrote this earlier today. 🙂 Check out ALL the great works of fiction and poetry at The Community Storyboard!
Research laziness
There are so many things I want to know! The minutiae of details I’d like to put into my stories require a vast amount of research. While I enjoy doing most research, it’s not all easy. For instance, I’d dearly love to know enough about horticulture so that I don’t have to search for pictures in order to name the flora I can so easily envision.
Like this:
I’ve been living with this hedge for three and half years and do I know what it is? Not a clue.
I’m good with researching things like diseases, psychology, historical eras and objects, sexuality, (okay, that one’s fun), culture, geography – all kinds of things. But when it comes to botany…
It’s just real purdy.
(I did just look up the difference between horticulture and botany.)
What do you have a hard time researching?
The future of publishing crap
This probably won’t be a very popular post but here I go with it anyway. With the invention of e-publishing new writers are coming out of the woodwork. These days anyone can publish their own work without having to pay money to do so. ANYONE. Who can be held accountable for what goes out there? It used to be that when you bought a book there was at least someone out there who believed in it. Sure, there was still a lot of crappy writing, but at least if you didn’t like a book you could sell it at a garage sale and get some of your money back.
I may not be in a position myself to say what I write is good, or that I won’t eventually go the route of self-publishing, but I’ve been reading long enough to distinguish what’s good and what is crap and I am appalled at how unbalanced it has become in the wrong direction. Up until last year I had never failed to finish reading a novel, no matter how bad it was. This year alone I have thrown up my hands in disgust at no less than three novels on my e-reader. Nowadays everyone thinks they can write. Many of the people self-publishing have long forgotten what they learned in Grade 3 grammar, and I hate to think what novels would look like without spellcheck.
For me it came to the forefront with ’50 Shades of Grey’. The author, E.L. James, actually said in an interview she understands that people who read her books are people who don’t normally read. I can easily believe it. When I read it I thought to myself, great! If this can get published anything can. By God was I right. Everybody and their sister said the same thing! I’m sure editorial slush piles have never been bigger, making it that much harder for talented writers to get noticed.
Will we get to the point eventually where there are more writers than there are readers? The way it’s going now I wouldn’t be surprised. I copied and pasted the following from Kindle’s website. I think I can keep my tongue firmly planted in cheek and let this speak for itself:
Do I need any special skills to publish with Kindle Direct Publishing?
Kindle Direct Publishing does the basic work for you, but if your content contains a lot of special formatting, a bit of knowledge in HTML may come in handy.
In closing, if you’re serious about writing a novel and you want to publish it, take a class or two. Brush up on your skills first. Make more than the effort to learn HTML and learn how to write! Hold yourself accountable for putting out a good product. Perhaps we can keep future of publishing out of the crapper after all.
Lunchtime!
I’m going to eat my last avocado. Wish me luck!
Bored?
For anyone disentranced with content (or lack thereof) of my blog lately (I’m busy finishing up a couple of courses and haven’t had the gray matter for much else) I’d like to remind you that I have a fiction blog here on which I have expended a few spare brain cells to write some amusing and/or dramatic short scenes.
Many of them are unrelated, so they need not be read in order. For your convenience however, I have put the names of the characters in the tags so you can find scenes containing them, should find one or two characters you connect with. My personal favourite is Drommen, a polite pervert who can’t seem to catch a break.
Enjoy. 🙂
New Blog
In the interest of keeping my blog organized I finally went ahead and created a new one just for my fiction. I’ve been hungering to write more but I didn’t want this place to get cluttered.
I’m still organizing things, but I’m up and running at my new location: Get on my plate! Or I’ll eat you right now . Please come and check it out! There’s not much there at the moment except one post and my ‘about’, but I hope to get writing soon. 🙂
I will keep this blog for daily observations, parenting stuff and my life in progress.
Cheers all, and thanks for visiting!
lindaghill.com 