Tag: Psychic

Flash: 50-Word Prompts (7, 8, 10 & 11)

Erin Penn

Image courtesy of wpclipart.com

Third of four postings from the 50-word Flash Friday, where 12 prompts were given to writers for mini-flashes. The prompts were words or photos, and the flashes were limited to fifty words.

Today’s flashes are the stand-alone flashes based on word prompts. I think “Arms” was my favorite prompt; so many different meanings to the word. I tried to go with a non-traditional definition of the word for a romance writer. I wanted to attempt twisting the word away from standard after seeing what other people did with the prompt “Thong(s)”.

 

PROMPT SEVEN: Arms

“That is a lot of guns.” Bambi whispered, staring at the armory. Why on earth had Mason assembled all this? Shaking off the fear-factor, Bambi reached for an automated assault weapon. The zombies were about to get some hurt on. (words 40)

 

PROMPT EIGHT: Casablanca

The next clue was “White House.” George spent hours searching the local video stores political tape selections with no luck. The last store had the great presidential speeches next to classical black and white. Duh! He pulled the Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman movie out and found a new post-it-note. (words 50)

 

PROMPT TEN: Fig Roll

“Fig rolls follow a tradition starting in ancient Egypt with fig-paste stuffed pastries” The professor droned on. Abdul groaned. He needed to update his persona, which meant college in the twenty-first century. He had hoped a culinary degree would avoid the history he had already lived through. (words 47)

 

PROMPT ELEVEN: Myriad

The future. Must be so easy for those who couldn’t see it. Melusine froze. Myriad uncomfortable paths lay ahead. Choosing quickly, she moved on the one denying her love for a year. Staying still would have killed too many people, although it meant meeting Douglas tomorrow. (words 46)

(first published 2/8/2013; republished new blog format 3/19/2017)

Writing Exercise: Ticking Clock

Erin Penn

Parkour Silhouette against Sky

Image copied from Learn About Parkour: http://robertjrgraham.com/learn-about-parkour/

Ticking Clock

You may be familiar with “ticking clocks” from the thriller genre, but they also occur in other genre. A few things to remember with Ticking Clocks:

1. Be precise about the passage of time.
NOT GOOD: “When we talked earlier today” ; “The other day”
GOOD: “When we talked before lunch in second period” ; “The day before yesterday”

The passage of time needs to feel important to everyone. If the clock is ticking off hours, be precise about the hours – if ticking off days, be precise at the day level.

2. Don’t slow down. As the deadline approaches increase the challenges. Torture your characters.

3. Remind your readers of the Ticking Clock through the urgency the main character feels, not reminding the reader by relaying the countdown through the prose.
NOT GOOD: Douglas tore down the sidewalks because he only had moments to meet his true love, according to the street soothsayer.
GOOD: The soothsayer told him he needed to be at the corner of Second and Main at 5:08 sharp. Douglas’ breath burned in his lungs as he ran. He never was good at running, but to meet true love he would arrive gasping.

WRITING EXERCISE: Write a Ticking Clock – At least three sentences and share below. Make us feel the urgency.

Make us feel like we are back in school taking a final of 150 multiple choices in one hour … urgent … and realize the last question is an essay and we have 10 minutes left …. building, racing toward the end, getting more difficult …Then realize that the essay is 25% of the grade. I did mention torturing the characters, right?

*****

Ticking Clock

Douglas rounded the corner to Main, plowing through the professionals pouring out of the Maddox building. He was going to make it; only one city block left and it was a short side.

The bright orange cones would not have stopped him, but the caution tape was at ankle, waist, and eye level. They were repairing the sidewalk and directing foot traffic across the street. He didn’t have time.

His eyes darted for a way as his feet continued to move.

Subway, had two exits, one on Third and the other on Second.

He half-jumped the steps and half-slid the rails down; more a control fall than anything else. God, who would have thought he would be doing parkour? He forgot to breathe during the distance across tiles between the staircases. He gasp a new breath as he faced the second set of stairs, trying to ignore the digital clock above letting the commuters know it was 5:07. He had failed at everything he had ever tried unless it was a total deadend, like his job at the coffee shop.

True love was seconds away, if he made it up the three flights of stairs.

(words 42 +195 = 237 – first published 7/11/2015; republished in new blog format 11/22/2016)

Book Review: The Mussorgsky Riddle

Erin Penn

Book cover from Amazon

BOOK BLURB ON AMAZON
The Mussorgsky Riddle by Darin Kennedy

Psychic Mira Tejedor possesses unique talents that enable her to find anything and anyone, but now she must find a comatose boy wandering lost inside the labyrinth of his own mind. Thirteen-year-old Anthony Faircloth hasn’t spoken a word in almost a month and with each passing day, his near catatonic state worsens. No doctor, test, or scan can tell Anthony’s distraught mother what has happened to her already troubled son. In desperation, she turns to Mira for answers, hoping her unique abilities might succeed where science has failed.

At their first encounter, Mira is pulled into Anthony’s mind and finds the child’s psyche shattered into the various movements of Modest Mussorgsky’s classical music suite, Pictures at an Exhibition. As she navigates this magical dreamscape drawn from Anthony’s twin loves of Russian composers and classical mythology, Mira must contend with gnomes, troubadours, and witches in her search for the truth behind Anthony’s mysterious malady.

The real world, however, holds its own dangers. The onset of Anthony’s condition coincides with the disappearance of his older brother’s girlfriend, a missing persons case that threatens to tear the city apart. Mira discovers that in order to save Anthony, she will have to catch a murderer who will stop at nothing to keep the secrets contained in Anthony’s unique mind from ever seeing the light.

 

MY REVIEW
I am a worldbuilding whore. I want a world as layered as an orchestral movement, as nuanced as a master painting, one that twists and turns and takes you away from the here and now to another world. One you can touch, hear, smell, feel. The Mussorgsky Riddle is one of these books.

Falling into the imprecise category of Urban Fantasy or maybe Paranormal Suspense, the story follows a psychic as she journeys through the mind of a boy trying to find the identity of a killer. But is so much more than that.

The complicated parallel Mr. Kennedy made between Pictures at an Exhibition, both the music and the original inspiring paintings is amazing. And this was just his Debut Novel; if his next is half as good, he has a reader for life.

He is presently in edits of the second book, this one centered around a ballet.