Image Inspiration: Smeg

 I could always tell when Smeg was miffed at someone, or something. She’d let these tendrils of smoke escape from her nostrils, just like she’d done that day. If she had been a full sized dragon it’d be intimidating but since she was little more then the size of a mouse, it was just plain cute. Which was kinda creating this loop. The more she blew smoke, the more the kid squealed that irritating, ear bursting high pitched noise of delight which annoyed Smeg, so Smeg blew more smoke, thus more squealing, and more smoke and… yeah you get the idea.
I held my hand real steady as the kid approached, trying not to laugh outright at the way Smeg wiggled her shoulders like some cat preparing to pounce on its prey. Her feet tickled the palm of my hand a little as she shifted her weight around. I never realised how fast little kids could move when they wanted to. I thought I’d be able to pull Smeg away real quick as soon as I saw the kid reach for her, but no. That tiny pudgy hand shot forth as quick as lightning and Smeg pounced!
The squeals turned pain and fright as tiny teeth dug into soft pliable flesh. With that sound came a world of grief. I didn’t know what they were all yelping about. If you ask me, the kid just learnt himself a really valuable lesson, don’t try to touch a smoking dragonett, they bite. That’s not how they saw it though. Adults, especially those surrounding royal brats, are so ready to spring into action with reprimands and finger waving, blame thrown left and right and never at the kid, ‘cause the royal chit is never to be blamed.
The result of this display was that all of a sudden I found myself kicked down to the kitchen and some stupid bane against dragonetts in the castle was being announced.
I’d roll my eyes at the whole stupid affair except that now I was in a bit of a bind. You see, once you’ve bonded with a dragonett, just like it’s giant cousins, you were stuck with it. Most people didn’t give a hoot about the damn decree ‘cause most people don’t have dragonetts, in fact, as far as I knew, there was only two other dragonetts, aside from Smeg, in the whole city, and they lived outside the castle grounds.
I lived in the castle grounds, I worked in the castle. Smeg was too young to leave her alone all day, and she needed to eat constantly while she was growing but she couldn’t hunt on her own. None of this had mattered before, no one cared that I caught the mice and bugs lurking around the library while I worked. Most folks liked to spend at least a few minutes of their visit watching the baby dragonett learn to fly, or attempt to catch a bug or just marvel at her curled up asleep in the sunshine on the windowsill.
I’d never get away with trying to hide her in my clothes or anything, she was too curious to stay put and there was no chance I was going to put her in a cage! Damn. There was really only one choice I could make, a choice I’d been putting off for about a year now. Surrendering to fate, I tucked Smeg into the inside pocket of my vest with a fat bug to keep her quite, and crept up the servants stairs, making my way to the library.
“Master James?” The old scholar was sitting cross legged in a far corner of the library, a tomb of a book cradled in his lap.
“Yes Meeka?”
“Its time,” I didn’t need to elaborate. He and I both knew it was past time for a journeyman of my age to have left home and seek my way in the world. It was just so hard to leave. How did you go from being an apprentice in the largest library in the kingdom, under the master of all scholarly masters, to wondering the country side seeking, what exactly? But that was tradition and you couldn’t be a journeyman if you didn’t journey.

WORDS: 707

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More stories by Tracey Ambrose @ traceyambrose.com
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Nothing to Prove – Geek Girls & The Doubleclicks

I couldn’t resist sharing this video. I love being a geek girl and I don’t care what other people think. The truth is, I’m not too geeky or not geeky enough, not geeky about the right things or whatever else you want to think, I’m the geek I want to be so suck it.

I screamed!

I screamed! I screamed! I didn’t think about it, it wasn’t a well thought out rational reaction, but it felt good.

Hmmm, about that…

So last month was a washout. I could say that the week of no childcare and seriously over planned activities followed by the week of recovery was at fault. Or maybe the new job I’m trying to take on plus the trip to Wellington it involved was the problem, but the truth is, I’m suffering from a lack of self esteem.

I’ve not written anything for weeks. I just can’t see anything I’m writing as being worth reading and I’m struggling to put an entire story together with a plot that it gripping or even vaguely interesting. The fact that the people (family, friends, Scribophile and NaNo) I had thought would help me out b being good beta readers have all gone silent.

I’m not sure what to do about it all just now. I did however just find a blog I’d forgotten about with some of my old writing on and so I thought I might repost a few things here, just for fun.

The Sharp Angle: Keep Writing and Finishing New Stories

This post by Lydia Sharp is really worth a read by would-be writers.

The Sharp Angle: Keep Writing and Finishing New Stories.

Expanding on “Blogging with Scrivener”

Back in April I wrote a post about blogging with Scrivener. Since then I’ve expanded on this a little more. Previously I had just broken down each month into it’s respective days. Well now I’ve gone further and added the following folders to the months:

• Days
• To-Do’s
• Focus
• Reviews & Giveaways
• Notes
• Stats
• Social Media

I’ve also added a couple of general folders to cover the entire blog:

• Ideas
• Monetary

I’m not actually using the last two, but thought they were worth including for future possible planning. I’ve used tables and pretty colours to make it all look a little stylish.

I also spent a little time changing the icons to make things a little clearer to find (and yes, a little prettier). I really like having everything in one convenient place. Although, I still wish I could link to files inside other projects and push finished blog post directly to wordpress.

I’m only just starting to enter data into my lovely new folders and files. I’ve just finished setting up the planning really and I still find a few things that don’t work for me or need a little tweaking to fit my needs, but still I thought you might all like to see my current thought processes on this.

To be honest, Scrivener needs to do more work on the ‘tables’ feature. It’s unpredictable at times, the cell’s will change size unexpectedly or you will have to tab or Shift-tab through cells to actually be able to select and write in the cell you want at times, but there’s always a work around that you can find pretty quickly, and although a little annoying, it doesn’t slow me down.

A feature that comes in really handy for planning is the duel screen mode.

It’s great to be able to see both your To-Do list and say your Reviews planning screen  at the same time. Or perhaps you want to see your To-Do list and your year planner:

Obviously you can add as many folders or files to cover whatever information you want to plan for on your blog, get creative or just plan crazy. Happy blogging and planning.

Cockney Slay

 (a little late, but couldn’t be helped since I didn’t  get to bed till midnight last night and even that happened after hanging out a load of washing on my way through)

 

 

 

 

This weeks challenge at Creativitygames.net is dedicated to Cockney Slay. The words we’ve been given are:

• tray
• sunrise
• piano
• lunatic
• race

Go to the post for more details. I’m avoiding the linkage on their site for more examples of this kind of rhyming slay, just in case I see one of my own brilliant ideas already in use.

I grew up with a few of these types of rhyming, never knowing that it was called Cockney slay, being Australian myself. But you were pretty much guaranteed to have someone say to you over lunch at least once in your life “pass me the dead horse for eye in the sky” (translation, pass me the tomato sauce for my meat pie”.

Golden ray – tray

Loudly cries – sunrise

Fallen grace – race

Black and white volcano – piano

Wacky acrostic – lunatic

I could see how playing around with this idea could be useful in creating a unique dialogue for a story. Referring to a crying sky perhaps, the louder she cries, the more brilliant the sunrise, for example.

The vagary of the internets

I was going to write a post about how I really had no excuse for not having written anything this week, how I’ve totally failed my first week of Camp NaNo July and blah blah whine whine. Then, I thought, ‘no, I’ll see if I can find a random word generator and use it to get a bunch of words and actually write something’. Only to discover something even cooler, and creative procrastination fun.

It’s a website called Creativity Games.net. On Monday’s they release a new game where you play along by leaving a comment for that days game. So this week it was The Heaviest. They give you three random words and you have to explain which and why one of them is heavier then the others and you can’t use the same word as the comment before yours. The week before was A Murder Mystery.

They do actually have a random word generator too, with some cool features I’m yet to fully explore, I kind got distracted with the rest of the site.

On Wednesday’s they post resources for honing your creative skills. The last one was using CodeBreaker to predict ability. Now, this brings us to Fridays on their blog, Creative Challenges day. They use hieroglyphs and you have to guess what the object is. This week it was an animal you might find at the zoo. I’m not sure that I’m so interested in this part of the site, but the rest is awesome and I think I might dedicate the rest of July (shhh, don’t mention Camp NaNo) to Creativity Games.net.

I’ll try to do their Monday and Wednesday challenges but Friday I might use the generator or their prompts tool instead of the hieroglyphs. That’s if I can manage to organise my life so that I can fit in all my current projects. Meep!

Anyways, go check out the website and have some creative writing fun.

That question

How does one ever really answer that question?

Honestly?

No. That’s not what they want to hear.

They don’t want to know what it is going to cost you to appear before them right now.

They don’t need to know.

It won’t change them, won’t help improve their day or their lives in anyway, and it won’t do any thing for you either.

So you smile tightly and dissemble or avoid it all together.

And yet, the question is still there.

It could hang there all day between you, waiting for a response, for release and relief.

A politeness given and received.

A desire for neutral common ground, to connect and relate with another acquaintance. Someone who lies just beyond stranger, but not, and possibly never, friend.

The sentence is uttered thoughtlessly, commonly, empty, un-expectant, meaningless in its usual banality.

Unless it is given, ad nauseam, to someone who feels its line of enquiry like a scalpel slicing into expectant flesh.

You know it’s coming.

It’s inevitable.

Unavoidable.

It’s painful and leaves a precise wound that the recipient must wear along with the other, matching, scares, all coming in rapid succession from other unwary wielders of the question.

So, how are you? you look well.

 

Oxford English Thesaurus: a chronic illness: persistent, long-standing, long-term, constantly recurring; incurable; rare immedicable. ANTONYMS acute.

Character Sheet – Madra’s Chair

I’ve used the following image to inspire a very short scene, a reaction from three characters to a single object, an old chair.

Madra Flemming

Madra walks around the lone chair, examining it’s flaws and assets, how she can use it to full effect or replace it with something more suitable to her needs. She deems it unsuitable and dismisses it, turning her attention to the houses other assets.

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More stories by Tracey Ambrose @ traceyambrose.com
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