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fictional

THE MIDNIGHT EDITION

Tag: story ideas

  • To Sow, Perchance To Reap

    To Sow, Perchance To Reap

    book-honbachi2

    The world is full of folks who appreciate nature and the great outdoors to the point of creating a mental happy place of some idyllic green pasture.

    That ain’t me.

    City boy born and bred. Concrete, glass and steel comprise my Garden of Eden. Yet, despite not being blessed with a green thumb, I planted something today.

    An idea.

    Okay, idea is a bit of a stretch. It’s more like a plot germ. As it stands, it’s a weak and feeble thing prematurely delivered into the world that requires incubation, so I decided to commit it to the ground at the back of beyond in my mind and ignore it until it has the strength to claw its way out of the story grave.

    But don’t feel too sorry for it, though. It’s not alone. It’s planted beside random bits of cool dialogue that I’ll never be able to work into a real-world conversation and nebulous set pieces that don’t quite mesh with any of my existing stories. They’re all tucked away in my own personal mental pet cemetery.

    The soil of a writer’s mind is stonier; a writer grows what they can imagine and scribes it.

    Apologies for the bastardization of your quote, Mr. King.

    And no, I won’t tell you what the plot germ is. Not out of fear of it being stolen but simply because:

    1. You wouldn’t understand it in its present form, and
    2. I’m not superstitious but I firmly believe in the dreaded jinx. If I tell you what it is, it’ll never grow.

    So, I will go about my business and occupy my mind with trivialities and allow my subconscious to absently weed my preemie idea seed.

    I’ll wait until it breaks free of its chrysalis as a brain-soil stained vision with roots that encircle the heart of a story that I cannot wait to write.

    Until then, I’ll follow the sage advice of Mssr. Ron Popeil, hawker of the infamous Showtime Rotisserie Oven and, “Set it and forget it.”

    ©2018 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

    Creative Commons License

     

  • Micro-Fiction Corner: To Sow, Perchance To Reap

    Micro-Fiction Corner: To Sow, Perchance To Reap

    The seed catalog arrived unsolicited, wedged into the mailbox between bills and coupon flyers, no return address, no company name printed anywhere on its glossy cover, just a single line of script promising a harvest beyond anything conventional soil could produce.

    Most people would have tossed it straight into the recycling bin, and most people, in fact, did exactly that, but every town seems to have at least one gardener desperate enough for something to finally take, and this town had hers, a woman who’d lost three seasons in a row to blight and drought and a rabbit infestation that ate through every fence she built.

    The seeds inside were labeled in that same unfamiliar script, names that sounded almost like vegetables and almost like something else, and the instructions asked for things no seed packet had ever asked for before. 

    Plant at the hour between dusk and true dark.
    Water only with something that had once been warm.
    Speak to the rows nightly, and mean what you say to them.

    She followed the instructions with the specific devotion of someone who had run out of other options, and within two weeks the rows were thick with growth unlike anything she’d planted before, dark green and glossy, heavy with fruit that smelled faintly of copper.

    The harvest, when it came, fed her better than any season had in years, and she told the neighbors who asked that she’d finally found the right fertilizer, laughing it off the way you laugh off good luck you don’t fully trust.

    What she didn’t mention, because she’d only half admitted it to herself, was the sense that the garden was listening back now, that the rows seemed to lean toward her before she’d finished speaking, that the vegetables on her table had started to taste like things she remembered rather than things she’d grown.

    She kept planting anyway, every season after, because the harvest never failed again, and because by then she’d stopped being entirely sure the choice was still hers to make.

    ©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys