Needs some thinking about

Last summer I set myself a writing challenge – with no particular time limit, but just a way to nudge me into writing regularly. I commanded Google to generate a list of twenty random words and these were what appeared:  spiffy, lumber, taboo, root, heat, carriage, needless, wasteful, way, ruin, comb, purpose, square, books, secretary, lake,  absurd, one. I had set no limits – I hadn’t asked for nouns only I just wanted a completely random choice. I must say some instantly triggered inspiration, however, some, such as the first one, ‘spiffy’, took some thinking about – as did ‘one’ – such a common word, how to make it if not exactly the star of the show then at least significant?

I have completed the first twelve, so only eight to go and I’ve written over 9,000 words, which would mean the complete set would be about fifteen and a half thousand. I’m thinking I might publish it as a small book of short stories – is that called a chap book? I have just looked it up and apparently chap books, or chapbooks, are generally much shorter than that and are usually a collection of poems. It’s still a possibility!

So far:

1. last – a short story about a group of students on their last night together before the summer holidays
2. donkey – I wrote about donkey-stones and donkey-stoning; no cruelty to any animal was involved, a donkey stone was a mineral bar used to clean front doorsteps, windowsills and kerbs.
3. Spiffy – the rather unkind nickname of a student at a polytechnic in the 1970’s
4. lumber – I wrote a one-off story about young Peggy who in this episode is now living with her grandma by the sea; they explore the lumber room, looking for items for the local jumble sale
5. taboo – an imagined club in 1970’s Manchester but a real memory of a very glamorous couple I once saw at a disco
6. root – my roots  back in Cambridge and my connection to the River Cam and the River Granta
7. heat – a memory of camping in the south of France and waking up with the sun already hot on the tent
8. carriage – a romantic proposal from a young man in the late 1940’s to the young lady of his dreams
9. needless  and #10 wasteful – I confess, I sort of cheated by putting two words together to write the story of a young kitchen worker with a monster of a boss
10. wasteful with #9 to make ‘needless wasteful’
11. way – I wrote about Courtney Way in Cambridge, a road near where I lived as a child
12. ruin – ruined dreams

So the next word is comb. Hmmm, needs some thinking about, but no doubt something will occur before too long!