Author: Douglas

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The 800 Pound Gorilla

I’d hoped to make post 800 special in some way. That probably won’t happen.

In the main character’s attempt to get back home, his friends abandon him at the outset, the authorities almost catch him, he nearly drowns eluding those authorities, they almost catch him a second time, he nearly falls from a precipice, he loses control of a vehicle which promptly malfunctions and leaves him unable to resist when another character captures him and takes him to her base.

That’s barely more than five minutes of a movie I recently watched. Despite my summarization it’s entirely believable and exactly like the book I’m reading tells me I should write fiction, yet I still struggle to pour on the conflict when I begin to compose. Shit, maybe I should just write down a list of bad things that could happen and roll dice every 500 words.

146 words on day 800

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Recalling Professor Palmer’s Admonitions

“She gestured in a timer and left the ankle to cool for a bit while she thought about how to apply compression…”

Recalling Professor Palmer’s admonitions to look for non-magical solutions to problems first, Karen looked around for anything she might wrap her ankle with. If there was a compression bandage or even just a strap of cloth to be found among the roadside detritus, the rest area was keeping them secret. She wondered if she could shred her pajamas into strips, but it seemed unlikely and unappealing. Her ankle hurt but not badly enough to end up topless at a roadside picnic table, so she inventoried her familiar spells. She had a bursting spell she’d used on water balloons, but nothing in that incantation suggested to her that she could invert the effect to squeeze instead. Heat, no. Cold, no. Fire, no! Illumination, no. Levitation, hmmm…no. Translocation, no…wait.

Karen incanted a spell to move her foot to the right and held it in reserve while incanting another to move it to the left. Imagining an ankle sandwich, she slowly released the two, but her foot lurched to one side then bounced back to the other skipping back and forth on the heel till she quit both spells.

“Yaieee, that hurt.”

She thought if she’d just worn socks she might have been able to shrink one and create enough compression to stop the swelling. Maybe four translocation spells—like a box—would work, she wondered. Karen cringed thinking how painful that might be having her foot bounce around in four directions and not just two.

[Bleah. This is not at all interesting.]

Finished fucking around with the ankle, the author now directed Karen to give some thought to unwarding her phone…

…but tomorrow.

[running out of time so I’ll just list a few things as notes for later:]
– looks for something non-magical for compression first because of Professor Carrol’s training about avoiding magic if you can
– cant find anything so she tweaks a ‘push’ spell into the shape of a C, but ultimately can’t keep it in place
– next she works on breaking the ward on her phone. She can’t but she does discover a timer there and has to decide between calling 911 and waiting for and explaining it all to a Highway Patrol officer or just waiting
-eventually she gets back home where she puts her decision to protect herself in to action

406 words on day 798

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A Little Rice

I’ll resist the urge to double back to edit the previous two days’ work as a lead in to this third. I think we all know how that would go if I did. I will note that there are a few things I’d like to clean up back there that I’ll pretend are emended as I move forward.

“The trill of an incoming text startled her. It read: He warded your phone…”

Her anger at being left behind seethed and she tried to throw her phone into the road—to hear it crack into the pavement and splash glass and circuitry over the gravel—but she couldn’t make her hand let go of the thing. She made a couple more incomplete casts before dropping it roughly, but safely, into her lap.

“Well, shit,” she echoed.

Karen assumed that if Malachi warded her phone he’d probably hidden her too. There was no use flagging down an unlikely passing car for help, so she grabbed up her phone and searched for how to treat a sprained ankle. Between HEM—which sounded like marketing—and RICE (rest, ice, compression, elevation) she knew she could handle the latter.

Once she pulled herself up to the bench and out of the dirt, she brushed off her gritty palms and began the short incantation to cool her ankle. She’d both frozen and boiled glasses of water and been commended for her quickness, but she’d never practiced precise control of either. She didn’t want to turn her ankle to ice, so she aimed the spell at her slipper first to cool it slowly then carefully moved her focus over to her ankle. The chill immediately brought relief to her hot flesh and swelling joint. She chanted in a timer and left the ankle cool for a bit while she thought about how to apply compression.

[running out of time so I’ll just list a few things as notes for later:]
– looks for something non-magical for compression first because of Professor Carrol’s training about avoiding magic if you can
– cant find anything so she tweaks a ‘push’ spell into the shape of a C, but ultimately can’t keep it in place
– next she works on breaking the ward on her phone. She can’t but she does discover a timer there and has to decide between calling 911 and waiting for and explaining it all to a Highway Patrol officer or just waiting
-eventually she gets back home where she puts her decision to protect herself in to action

419 words on day 797