365 Ficlets - #61 ~ "Old and Constant Flame"

Felix crouched down by the tree, aware of the fact that if the rain started to come down any harder he would not be safe from it even there. It was not so much that he was bothered about receiving a good drenching at the hands of random chance and more that he was far from home with his camera and no waterproof bag to protect it from this unforseen, heavy shower.

Left and right, across the park, he could see people running for shelter, bags and newspapers held over their heads, and then he saw her and the rest of the world fell away.

Felix had always loved Serena. From when they were four years old, playing in the sandpit in her garden, to her being his date for his leavers’ ball after A-Levels and onward. Even after she had left him for the dreaded Jonas, he had still loved her. He had not expected to see her on this trip to see his folks, he did not even know that she was back in Marlow. He watched her, enchanted that as others dashed to ‘safety’ she pranced gaily through the rain, playing with her hair.

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You can see the original post on Ficlets.com by clicking here.

Time marches ever on…

It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything here, so I though that I might use this arena as a place to discuss this year’s ‘thing-a-day’ project.  Today is the sixth of the way there mark; sixty-one days of writing between 100 and 1024 characters every single day.  Already I am finding it to be both more and less challenging than the daily portrait project, but despite that I am loveing every moment of it.  Not only is there the creation / creative aspect of it, but there is the ability to use fiction to bare my soul a little; sometimes very obviously, and sometimes in much more subtle ways, and then there is the discourse that is wonderful and more often than not prompted by stories that I least expect!

I have been working to a pattern over the last sixty-one days, and although I am going to work out the week in this vein, I am then going to free myself to be more flexible and more creative with what I do.  Up until now the Saturday of each week (day one of each week if you will) has been a first person narration that sounds believeably my voice, and then the other six days have all been third person episodes, each beginning with a name.  As I have revealed already to people who have asked, this was entirely calculated.  Although I am still very much learning my craft here, I am comfortable with the first person narration that my Saturday pieces have used.  It is relatively easy for me to imagine a scenario that has either happened or might happen in my life and drop into the character of a narrator who is seventy percent ‘me’ and and just go from there.  In fact the novel I have been working on for far too long now is written very much in that vein, and so when embarking on this new project I wanted to ‘keep my hand in’ with that ‘voice’, but not simply fall back on it as a way to easily hit my daily quota.  Instead I wanted to force myself to do something that I am not comfortable with, and that was and still is to write in the third person about other characters, a fairly traditional floating, omniscient voice that knows the hearts and minds of the people that populate the stories that it tells.  I have really enjoyed writing this way, far more than I expected to, and although I think that I am still better at first person narration I have found a pleasure in writing in this other way that I never expected to be able to harness.

The problem is that I can sense that this is going to become dull if I drag it out for too long; dull for me and perhaps more importantly dull for my readers.  So I have decided to remove the restrictions that I had placed on my daily writing as of this coming Sunday, and introduce two new ideas to the project and return to another old one, as a way of keeping things fresh.

First of all I would like to ask you, my readers, to challenge me each week by suggesting:

1. A location
2. An object
3. An activity

in time for me to write a Ficlet on each Thursday that will incorporate all three.  I will put the call out on Monday at some point, and will then put up a poll on Wednesday so that you can choose the ‘package’ that will be the bones of Thursday’s Ficlet.

Secondly, I am going to write Monday’s Ficlet by choosing something to write about from either the Wikipedia ‘on this day in history’ page, or the daily page on the same site.

Thirdly I am going to go back to writing a story based on, or inspired by a photograph from Flickr that is on there under the same license as Ficlets are published under.  If you find a cool picture on Flickr that you think I would like, or that you’d like to see what I will do with it, then please feel free to email me a link (address is on my LJ profile page, or you can use the email link on this blog, on the About Page), or leave me a comment on one of my blogs, or send me a Twitter Tweet or an SMS or whatever, and I will start a list of photos that I am going to work through.

So, thanks to everyone who has commented on LJ, Ficlets, or to my face for your feedback and support, and having got to milestone number one I am feeling more confident that I can see this project through as well.

Originally published at TechnoMage. You can comment here or there.