Bust out your bugles, everyone, because the last Platform Building Campaign challenge deadline has arrived ... and I'm just barely gonna make it! This time, the focus was on the classic idea of showing vs. telling.
"Write a blog post in 300 words or less, excluding the title. The post can be in any format, whether flash fiction, non-fiction, humorous blog musings, poem, etc. The blog post should show:
- that it’s morning,
- that a man or a woman (or both) is at the beach
- that the MC (main character) is bored
- that something stinks behind where he/she is sitting
- that something surprising happens.
Just for fun, see if you can involve all five senses AND include these random words: "synbatec," "wastopaneer," and "tacise." (NB. these words are completely made up and are not intended to have any meaning other than the one you give them)."
And here's my pansting write-up:
Prime Time
Luann dug her fingers into the sand on both sides of her, still damp from the high tide. The grains rolled under her fingernails. What a long night, waiting for the morning. She’d begun to hate time. It always took so long to get it where she wanted it, took so long to get the synabatec rays of post-dawn light to fall into her studio just so. Deep in the sand, her fingers grew cool, calm. But there was no way to do with her mind what she did with her hands, no way to tacise it into stillness.
Even on the beach, with its salt-bleached driftwood and the sea still awash with muted ceruleans and viridians, she still hated the wait. She twiddled her toes, shifting her weight from one side to the other.
Ughh. What was that? Suddenly the colors around her seemed tinged with an ochre gone all sorts of wrong, awful and rotten like the pears still in her fruit bowl, on the counter in her cottage. Accidental splashes of black and orange, stale tasting, putrid. She looked over her shoulder, up the embankment’s sharp ridge of ferns. Nothing. Nothing she could see, anyways.
“A-rraugh!”
Luann toppled with the joyful impact of her spaniel, Mister Bierstadt, who continued to bark, rolling clumsily onto Luann. A mess of legs, paws and tongue, the sick, rotten-ombre-colored smell rolled off him in waves; dead fish and wet dog.
“Now I stink too,” she laughed, pushing herself upright. Bierstadt jumped the embankment, disappearing. Guess she’d shower while she waited.
Soon the sun would be risen, and the world might be primed. Might be. Then she could finish the experimental wastopaneer she’d spent so long developing into the painting it needed to be. Smiling finally, Luann walked back to the cottage.
