randomly generated

I’m going to attack the next word on my randomly generated word list which I’ve been using to spur me on to write. The next word is ‘Books’ so my self-challenge is to write something, anything – story, memoir, review, excerpt from something else, anything which at some point mentions the challenge-word. Some of the words have indeed been very challenging – kicking off with ‘last’ was tricky! Last as in a shoe last? Last as in the final something? last as the latest in a series? In the end I wrote a story about a group of students who were going out to celebrate their last night of their course, knowing it might be the final time they were together as well as it being the end of their studies.

Donkey was a pretty feeble attempt and ended up rambling about donkey-stones which were an old cleaning tool, a rough stone you could scrub things with. Spiffy was the nick-name of a character, lumber was a lumber room and taboo was a night club. Root was another ramble, about my own life story, and heat was a memoir. I was very pleased with carriage, it was a proper story about a young man who had thought of an unusual, and hopefully successful way of proposing to his sweetheart, but I cheated with the next two, needless and wasteful and pulled them together in a drama in a busy and very hot restaurant kitchen. Way was another ramble, a reminiscence of somewhere I used to live, very dull, but ruin was a bit more dramatic with a violent row in a beautiful garden between two people who had been business and life-partners until it went wrong in every way.

Comb was another dull, factual piece, and purpose was a ramble of something which might have been a story about a person going through passport control, but instead was a dreary explanation of the difference between porpoises and dolphins. #15 was a fictional story, and really deserves to be made into something longer, about a person who unexpectedly inherits a fantastic property in a posh city square, and the fortune to live there and maintain it.

So, # books… sounds dull but I must put my mind to making it interesting, unexpected and a satisfactory read which will also mean it’s a satisfactory write! Then the final four – secretary, lake, absurd, one. I have a few thoughts about these, I’ve already written a different story about when my mum was a secretary working for a professor in a laboratory where she met my dad, and a story about a couple and their friend who move to live in a house by a lake, a lake which proves to be a very creepy place! Absurd – well, I have had so many completely absurd things which have happened in my life I shouldn’t be short of inspiration! As for ‘one’… hmmm, needs some thought.

My next and possibly final Radwinter novel, starts with Thomas Radwinter in a truly absurd situation:

All I could hear was the car alarm almost deafening me. I was engulfed by the airbag and so shocked I could barely think what to do.
Then the door was opened and someone was shouting was I alright. Yes, actually I do believe I was. I managed to take the key out of the ignition and undo the seatbelt and crawl out of the car. I was on my hands and knees and someone was helping me up asking again if I was alright. Winded and a bit shocked but yes, unharmed… and my car? Yes, that also was completely unscratched unbumped undamaged… which was more than could be said for the deceased beast which lay in the carriageway, it’s dead legs stiffly in the air, its dead eyes looking accusingly at me.
I was in no way responsible, I assured it silently.

… and the list: