Silliness
Dickery, dickery dock, the mouse ran up the clock…
Then the clock struck twelve, the stars aligned, and the Great Old One shed its mouse-like form to ascend into the aether to do battle with its brethren.
***
Alas, this is all the writing I’ve done this morning, since I slept too late to get in my normal hour. I felt so much better the second time I got up that it was worth it, though!
And hopefully I’ll get in some writing time tonight. 
Happy Friday, everyone!
Scintilla – the voice in her head.
scintilla [sin-til-uh] (noun) 1. A spark; a flash; a trace amount. 2. A small piece of writing intended to inspire wonder, curiosity, or amusement.
***
Once upon a time…
She paused with her pen against the page, wondering what should come next. Her breakfast caught her eye.
there was a happy little sausage…
“Nope, nope. That’s been done before. Try again.”
The voice in her head loved sabotaging her writing efforts. Unfortunately, it was so clear, so much more real than any other voice in her life, that it always succeeded. It couldn’t stop her from trying though.
“Who on earth would write about a happy little sausage?” she asked, not quite believing its assertion.
“Baldric, from the TV show Blackadder. It was his magnum opus.”
She remembered now. She doodled a bit with her pen, wondering what to try writing about next.
“Stop scribbling! You’re just messing up the page.”
Once upon a time, there was a happy little voice in my head.
“Eh? Who are you calling little? Or happy?”
But then a big, cranky voice appeared and started drowning it out.
“Hah! Darn right I did. We don’t need no stinking happy voices around here!”
But why? Why was it so desperately unhappy?
“Well, you see…”
Scintilla – Snippet
In celebration of it being Friday, here’s a non-spoilery snippet from the novel I’m working on:
***
“Welcome!”
I jumped, then turned and tried to smile normally at the man standing behind the counter. At least that made asking for directions easy.
“Thank you,” I said, blinking rapidly to try to adjust my eyes more quickly to the dim lighting. “Actually, I was looking for Uptown Consignments, but my com keeps showing this as the address. I wonder if you could direct me to…”
“That’s Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, my dear,” he interrupted casually. “Friday through Monday, it’s Odds-n-Ends, an altogether more civilized sort of place. Now, what sort of frippery were you looking to buy? I can see that you’re in need of a new frock.” His eyebrows rose, drawing my attention to his perfectly bald and strangely decorated scalp. Were those piercings?
“Uhm… a… business suit?” I jerked my eyes away and looked around, taking in a wide variety of leather, latex, and mixed plaids, but nothing I would call businesslike.
“Ah, but what sort of business?” I swear, he fluttered his eyelashes at me when I glanced back. I looked down – yup, still the formless puce hospital overall. I looked around, then back up at him. “Data farming? I’m the family’s rep.”
He looked me up and down, then rolled his eyes. “How dull. Come back on Tuesday. Uptown Consignments has exactly the boring same-old you’re looking for.” Then he turned his back.
I turned in a circle again, paused to look more closely at a display, blushed, then walked out. I wondered if the barista had known it was an Odds-n-Ends day when she sent me there, and decided not to try out any of the other names she had given me.
***
Have a great day!
Scintilla – Friday Zombies
Happy Friday! If I manage to write today after signing off here, this’ll be my first full work-week of getting up at 5 to write every morning.
I’m hoping it’ll get easier as time goes on.
In celebration, here’s a scintilla of the new zombie story I’m working on:
***
“Bring out yer dead! Bring out yer dead!”
His mother slammed the windows shut in spite of the late summer heat. They cut the voices outside down to an indistinguishable moan, but the bell they rang still cut through clearly.
“It’s time, Mum.”
“He’s not dead.”
Technically she was right. His brother still breathed, drank, ate… Ate everything they could afford to feed him, in fact, and still moaned for more.
“He hasn’t spoken in weeks, Mum, not even right after we feed him. And you know what the paper said.”
“I don’t care what the paper said! Or the government, or the pope. He’s not dead, and we’re not sending him out to be killed. I’d say the same if it was you up there.”
“If it was me, I’d want you to send me out, so you could get on with your life while you still have it!”
Scintilla – Sketching on Napkins
Fridays I stay up late, so I set the alarm for 8:30 this morning instead of 5, and woke up a little before 7. (Actually, I woke up when it was still dark out, and then went back to sleep for a bit.)
Soo… here’s a little warmup, and then I’ll get back to working on the novel at 7:30.
***
Gretchen set the pencil down. She still wasn’t sure why it only worked with pencils, and napkins from Dunkin Donuts. One particular Dunkin Donuts, actually – she had tried it while her family was on vacation, but with the same non-result as anywhere else.
It didn’t work when someone else brought her the napkins, either. She didn’t have to be in the store for the pictures to appear, but she did have to have been there in person when the napkins were taken.
She set the picture aside where she could see it – this time, it was a beautiful sketch of a swallow in flight – and pulled a sheet of sketch paper into position. While the first picture had flowed effortlessly out of her fingers, the second involved a laborious process of looking, then drawing, then looking, then drawing, with a fair bit of erasing in the mix too.
When she finally stopped – she couldn’t call it done, but it was as good as she was going to get it – she had an amateurish mess of pencil on paper that a viewer might have been able to see a bird in if they knew what they were looking at.
She set both aside together, and pulled another napkin in front of her, trying to watch while her hand moved almost on its own accord.
***
And off I go – 7:32, so it’s past time to get to work. Have a great day!
Day Two… and a Scintilla
Well, here I am again. It’s 5:20, so I was a little slow getting moving this morning, but a writing warm-up still seems like a good idea:
It was dark, cold, quiet… too quiet. James sat up silently and peered around the crypt, straining eyes and ears and that sense with no name that he was still getting used to.
Nothing.
Usually, there was all sorts of activity going on, day or night, even in a small graveyard like his. The sound of mice and other small creatures scurrying around, gathering and hiding food and going about the simple business of living, had kept him awake for days in a row at first.
Bit there was still nothing.
No scurry of little mouse feet, no glimpse of eyes in the dark, no pressure of live bodies on that other sense.
He stood silently, glad of the grace and agility of his new form. The mere thought of making noise felt risky, but he couldn’t simply hide and wait. He had to know what had silenced everything.
***
Now, to the novel. Have a great day!
Warm up…
Well, I’m awake. (For a given value of “awake…”) Here’s a writing warm-up.
***
She woke, the transition from dream to waking startling in its suddenness.
Is that the alarm? She strained her ears, trying to tell if it was soft music playing from the alarm, or just some noise in the distance or her imagination. I’d better check.
She rolled out of bed and crossed the room; stagger… stagger… arms outstretched to avoid running into the bureau in the dark.
Her hands touched the bureau edge and she took one more step before lifting up the black shirt that obscured the too-bright LED display of the clock.
4:02am.
Too early. She shook her head, dropping the shirt and staggering back to her side of the bed. Four o’clock was just too early, even if she was awake already. Writing could wait until her planned wake-up time of five.
***
5:25 now. Time to start the day’s writing!
Scintilla – Moving On…
scintilla [sin-til-uh] (noun)
1. A spark; a flash; a trace amount.
2. A small piece of writing intended to inspire wonder, curiosity, or amusement.
(This scintilla is a continuation of the zombie series I was doing earlier, which started with Awake in the Dark.)
On further examination, Lanie thought Keller’s stockpile would last them closer to three weeks than three months. “You lied to me,” she said when she was done going through the last bin.
“No I didn’t.”
“You said you had this place stocked for years when you talked me into coming here with you. Then you said you had it stocked for months. Does this look like three months worth of food to you?”
“Um… yes?”
“So you’re an idiot as well as dishonest. I should have just gone to the official shelter.”
Keller scoffed. “Yeah, like they’re not down to sizing each other up for breakfast by now. If they’re not all zombies themselves… You really think the government is organized enough to deal with this?”
“Maybe. At any rate, I know you’re not.” Lanie kicked the bin. “Stupid. I was so stupid to listen to you!”
“Look,” Keller started, holding his arms out and stepping forward to comfort her. He stopped dead at her glare, and let his arms drop while he went on. “Ok, this hasn’t turned out as well as I thought it would, but it’s not like you had some great plan of your own. Did you?”
Lanie kicked the bin again. “No,” she growled.
“So now we know more. We stop laying blame, and just move forward as best we can. Move on from here, since there’s no telling when they might come back. Next time, they might not leave before we run out of food.”
“But that might be what they want us to do!”
Keller shook his head. “Doesn’t matter. We’re holed up with not enough food to last out a siege and not enough weapons to break one. We get out now, make ourselves a moving target, rather than one they can come back to at their leisure.”
“And when we run right into them?” Lanie sat down and buried her face in her hands. “We’re dead, aren’t we? It doesn’t matter what we do.”
Keller took a few steps and patted her tentatively on the back. “We won’t run into them. Because we’ve got you, right? And you can tell they’re there, even through a cinder block wall. Now come on, and help me load up our packs. I want to get out of here before nightfall.”
Note: Obviously, I have written today. 
I’m planning to work on my novel revision a bit now that I’m warmed up, too!
Scintilla – What Next?
scintilla [sin-til-uh] (noun) 1. A spark; a flash; a trace amount. 2. A small piece of writing intended to inspire wonder, curiosity, or amusement.
I had spent half my life training to find and kill the people who murdered my parents. Now, at last, it was done. Their bodies lay, in various pieces, inside the lodge they had been using as a base to maraud from. I had set a fire, determined to finish the job by shaking their souls loose from their bodies to be eaten by the wind. Such evil people didn’t deserve to be reborn.
Did I?
Watching the flames lick up the sides of the building, I felt like I was watching my own illusions burn away, revealing what I had become. A monster like them. Should I open the burning door and join my victims in the fire, to rid the world of my own evil?
Maybe. The thought appealed to my religious self, the self that had been buried under a decade of obsession. On the other hand, I could take the road back to civilization, back to Madre and the job he kept offering me.
Instead, I turned away from fire and road both, and gave myself up to the deep forest.
Scintilla – Chooooooocolate…
“Think we should chop her head off?”
“Too messy – she might infect us.”
“For the last time, guys – I am not a zombie! I’m just… tired.”
***
I indulged in sugar this weekend (mmm… chocolate…) *and* caffeine (coke) and now I feel more zombific than I have in weeks. Back on the wagon. 
© 2010 Catherine Wechsler, used with permission.
