Describe place

This week's assignment is to write descriptively, with all the senses,  about place.

She slips from the house as the family dozes, the afternoon sweltering. Her playground is a washed out place of greens and dappled greys. Tall gums, she-oaks and a huge Christmas bush of deepest olive, no longer speckled red, compose her ceiling and her walls. Bark crunches under bare feet as she climbs sandy solid rocks to play, to jump, and to dream. Her mother’s voice, a memory, echoes, “where are your shoes?” Spinning around in the dappled light she spots the green-tinged cream of flannel flowers. She picks one and slips its velvet behind her ear. Rustles in the undergrowth as her passing shadow alarms the under dwellers. A loud whip and scrabble announces a cold-eyed goanna who scales an angled trunk and watches warily. Far off bell-chimes of crimson rosellas break through the pulsing quiet. A complexity of bush smells comforts as her imagination drifts.

“Lion Rock” she says, “ yes you are my Lion”. Soft feet seek toe grips and she climbs lithely to perch atop. She reaches her small arms around his scratchy lichened neck. Resting her cheek to his cool mane, the bush heat throbs around her.

One liner

And I had so many plans to write, write, write over the Christmas break, but too much "stuff"  got in the way!

But I'm back on track, starting slowly!

Write On Wednesdays Exercise 13 - A Great One Liner...This week you need to come up with one good line to describe a part of your day. It can be 'real life' or fiction. But it must tell us 'who did what'. It has to be an amazing line, like a tiny little paper plane that must travel a big distance (figuratively speaking) with only a few folds ... Every word in that line must earn its place, or be cut as excess baggage. Let's get thinking about each sentence as though every word counts, like working one group of muscles to show how much weight they can carry.

Caught mid-snarl by the bleep of her i-phone she turned from her tired mother, and reading the message, a glow of delight shone from her gold-blue eyes.

WoW - Notre Dame de Paris

Write On Wednesdays Exercise 26 - Look at the photo at the top of this post. What does it inspire in you? Set your timer for 5 minutes. With the photo in mind, write the first words that come into your head until the buzzer rings. If you aren't a visual person, you could try lighting a few candles and writing by candlelight. Different sensory experiences can be useful for inspiring creative writing so please play around to make the prompt suit your writing needs. If you do try writing by candlelight, let us know. I'd love to know how it works for you!


Link here for this week's WoW Notre Dame de Paris

I don't know why such a grim story came to mind...

She slid into her head, dredging memories from her past as she gazed at the flickering flames . The thick sandstone walls were cold and still, she shivered slightly and wrapped her arms around her shoulders. The world had changed – what had once been condoned by silence was no longer ignored, but that was of little consolation to her. As she knelt, she wondered why she had – kneeling felt like what she should do in such a place, but prayer would not come to her.

She saw her young self, innocent earnest face above white robes as she followed the holy man, walking in his footsteps and self opened in trust. She fleetingly felt the confusion again, before she closed down the memory.

She stood slowly and turned toward the back of the church. For the last time, she gazed at the beautiful glass windows, bathed in candlelight. She thought of the implications of her next move, of the telling and the consequences. Wondering if she had the courage to go through with it, she knew that she must.

Bring me a cup of sunshine...

Write On Wednesdays Exercise 19 - Sunshine in a cup. Write the words of Emily Dickinson: "Bring me sunshine in a cup" at the top of your page. Set a timer for 5 minutes. Write the first words that come into your head after the prompt. Don't take you pen off the page (or fingers off the keyboard). Stop only when the buzzer rings! Do this exercise over and over if you wish. Write beyond 5 minutes if you like, you can link it up as an extra post.

This is the first time I've really tried to stick to the time, to let the thoughts flow rather than concentrate on structure and grammar.

She runs on soft tippy toes through the grass.

‘Mummy, come and play with me!”

Bounding into her playhouse she giggles at a private internal joke.

“Come and play, come and play!”

I watch her sunstreaked hair, shiny, her cut still ruined by her last week’s effort with her scissors. Full of life, full of energy, full of ideas, they tumble out of her as rapidly as the speech from her mouth.

“Mummy come play, I’ll make you a picnic”

"What shall we eat my sweet?", I say

“Sandwiches of course, my mummy”

“What will we drink?”

She holds out pudgy hands and tips her buttercup face to me “for you, a cup of sunshine”