Vacation finally...

Well, I've finally made it to a week of vacation in March. Very nice. Where am I going did you say? My favorite vacation plans... nowhere...!

So now I get to settle in and rest & relax. One of the biggest things I've been looking forward to on this vacation is a chance to do some writing. I've done so little over the last month or two.

Just a quick report on how the panel went last Saturday. It was marvelous! A lot of work, but it was really worth it to be able to be in a room full of a dozen or more playwrights. To quote Sarah Brock, (who wrote an amazing play about 5 medieval women trying to keep their castle after the Lord dies called "Twist in the Rising") "It's good to be in a room full of people who don't think I'm crazy when I say I hear voices in my head."

The picture above is a shot of some of us speaking on the panel (From the left, Jeanne Beckwith, Sarah Brock, Dana Yeaton, Monica Callan, and James Lantz) - taken by a lovely friend of mine who agreed last minute to take the photos while I stood up and jibber jabbered - Thanks Mary Beth!!!

So far this past few days leading up to vacation I've created some lovely sheets on the panel which I hope to post at the vermontplaywrightscircle.org/ site soon - and I've started a short story which is actually a full blown fantasy based on some words from an exercise that the folks in my fiction writing group do once or twice a year. The exercise is called "Short Story in a Week." and is just that. A list of words is generated and everyone has to write a story using those words in the tense they are giving in.

Not sure what I'll call this yet as the ending's not written yet, but here's a sampling of the opening. (typos & all as you're not supposed to edit during this exercise...)

First, the words given: bray, pendulum, elixir, zealot, apse

Now the opening of the story:

"Start here…" the label on the map said. A drunken arrow lead from the word 'here' across the parchment and down the right side of the map to an almost indecipherable phrase – which had clearly been written by the same hand that drew the arrow – "Pendulum Fault." Alara smiled and sat down at her rickety desk to examine the map more closely. The fire crackled in the overlarge fireplace.

There was nothing she liked better then a mystery, and this map was proving to be just that. Shadows danced on the wall in the dim winter afternoon. Her sister huddled by the warmth of the fire in her gray traveling robes, which she hadn't even taken the time to change out of upon her return home. The drunken line ran from the Gerin Mountains far in the north down through the kingdom of Olikuma and finally to the sea. Through the thin cut window of the castle, a weak afternoon light tried to reach the table, to no avail. Alara moved the lamp closer to the map. Her sister had brought the map back from the Gerin Mountain Monastery where she had spent the past three turnings of the years as an initiate. She had procured the map from the Matron of Initiates, what was her name? Matra Inisthulen. That was it. How long had it sat on some dusty shelf waiting to be handed over to Alara's family?

"And this Matra was clear you were to keep the map a secret from Father and Bonin?" Alara looked up at her sister, who seemed to have blended into the gray rock of the fireplace where she huddled on a low stool.

"The Matra said, 'we have awaited you many generations, Child,' as she handed this to me. The monks were all out in the courtyard with Brother and Father. It seemed to me this map was not meant for the eyes of the men in our family." Ri rubbed her hands together to warm them then shrugged at Alara, "I got a sense of it, anyway, when she slammed the drawer shut as the door to her chambers opened. So I shoved it quickly into my robes and left to join Father and Bonin in the courtyard."



"'Start here…,' seems a bit puerile, don't you think?" Alara ran a gloved hand over the map. She had been out Falconing before the royal entourage arrived. The leather glove was thick. She couldn't feel a thing through it. She took it off and repeated the gesture. "Ahha…" She laughed. "Look," She said. She lifted the map and turned toward the shifting firelight. "Here at the center, embedded in the map, look here."



"What? What could possibly be fit inside of a map? It is only parchment isn't it, I – Oh…" Ri had come over to Alara and placed her hand on the map at center. Alara nodded.



"You feel it? See?" Alara stepped forward a bit so that the map came away from Ri's hand. In the firelight, in the faintest of shadows, the firelight illuminated a small wisp of an object. It could have been a hair or two caught and dried in the ink, or the spine of a feather if one did not know what to look for, but both Ri and Alara had seen such objects before.



"Dragon's breath!" Ri whispered.



***OK - That's all you get so far***