Episode 4 - Aaaaand Time To Go!

Don't worry, it's just a title. I'm not going anywhere.

Anyway, another day, another short fiction practice. Here's the prompts. Character, from https://bardotbrush.com/character-generator/ :

Scenario, from https://writingexercises.co.uk/plotgenerator.php :

Let's gogogogogogogogogo

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My first thought when I hung up the phone was, shit.

My second was shit shit shit. My third was equally unhelpful.

Sorry, I should say hi. My name is Caedex, I'm forty-three, I am an advanced sommelier for an excellent vintner in the Napa Valley. I'm five feet and nine inches tall, my hair is purple and annoying, my pronouns are they/them, and at that moment, I believed I was going to die within the next twelve to forty-eight hours.

Now you can picture me as I slowly lowered my phone from my ear and leaned hard against the kitchen counter, forcing myself to breathe slowly, steadily, to review the facts and what I could do about it.

It was twenty years ago, I told myself.

He doesn't remember, I told myself.

How would he even know, I told myself.

None of that made any difference. Greg Turpen was being released tomorrow morning, I was the one who put him there, and unless he'd had a real come-to-jesus in Folsom, I was fucked.

"Molly," I called. "Molly! Where are you, I need you!"

"What is it, Caed?" I followed the sound of her voice as Molly's precious head appeared around the corner of the second-floor hallway, looking down at me over the railing. Her hair was mussed in that adorable way, and her tall frame and brown freckles flattened me almost as much as they do whenever I'm not in mortal peril.

"I've decided to join you on vacation," I told her. Better to make it a happy occasion.

Except she wasn't happy. She got that are you fucking with me right now look she gets whenever I have one of my grand ideas that screws up her entire plans.

"Now? You decided this now?"

"Yes, I did," I said. "You've been wanting me to meet more people; this is a perfect opportunity."

She leaned against the wall, staring down at me with a flat expression. "You hate people, Cae."

"I'm turning over a new leaf."

"There's gonna be a ton of new people all at once."

"And they're gonna be sitting around chanting 'Om' and comparing patchouli brands, come on, Moll, I can do this."

She stared more, and I tried not to let the adrenaline vibrate my body into visible nerves. A two-week trip to a spiritual retreat outside Portland was exactly what I needed. A nice cleanse, a bit of peace and quiet, no psycho gang-member exes coming after me, the sound of birds, the smell of pinecones or whatever they had up there...

It would be great. Relaxing. And far the fuck away from here.

Eventually, I saw the corners of Molly's mouth twitch. I knew her annoyance was being pushed to the side by thoughts of us alone in the mountains, connecting with... nature. I flashed her a grind and a wink, and the twitch became a grin that she immediately ducked behind the wall to hide.

I can be persuasive when I want to be.

"Fine, you dick, you can come."

"Yes," I said, "Molly you will not regret this."

"Fuck you," she said, still behind the wall, her voice giving away exactly how wide her grin still was. "Get packing, we leave in two hours."

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I did it.

So I had an idea. I keep putting up these essentially rough drafts that I shit out over the course of 30-120 minutes over a mug of tea, and some of them I'd love a chance to go back and tweak. Like yesterday's story— where the hell did the knife come from? Yeah, sure, Heracles had it on him the whole time, but nobody (not even me!) knew that until the climax of the scene.

I don't want to go back and edit the post itself, because this blog is meant to be a record of my writing practice, and it should show the bad with the good. But part of writing is revision, and that needs practice, too. So, I'm going to dedicate weekends to revision. Instead of daily short fiction, Saturday and Sunday will be spent revising my pieces from the week and posting them in a master round-up post.

I think it's a good idea. Should give me a chance to go back and make dialogue more natural, give more emotional weight to scenes, vaporize terrible metaphors, and hand some knives over the mantlepiece.

See you Sunday!