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Writing Exercise: Dear Diary, today was an adventure
Photo 67785157 | © Konstantin Iuganov | Dreamstime.com (picture paid for)
“Dear Diary, Today was an adventure.”
I’ve never personally been much of filling journals or diaries. This blog and the vlog over on TikTok is the closest I get, and I think I miss out on something important with that. Filling a journal keeps track of the amazing things that happen in your life that all blend together over time. An adventure of going to a store you have never visited. Laughter a child shared with you. A near miss on the street. All these peculiar, wonderous, remarkable things. Or you can take the ordinary and mundane and make it extraordinary. The fight to get out of bed. Doing battle with the garden. Drinking the mystical elixir of wakefulness. Life is magic and journals and diaries give a writer a chance to capture it.
Today’s writing exercise is particular helpful if your well is dry or a writer’s block has appeared in your wording road.
WRITING EXERCISE: Create a diary entry taking an ordinary event and making it fantastical. How did you fight gravity today? Any of your drinks containing liquids from other continents? Did you use a tech today that when you really think about it, it becomes amazing (such as running water in the house)? Aim of 100-500 words for your entry. If you are in a writing slump, aim for the higher end.
Book Review: A Fall in Autumn
Amazon Cover
A Fall in Autumn by Michael G. Williams
BOOK BLURB ON AMAZON
**WINNER OF THE 2020 MANLY WADE WELLMAN AWARD**
WELCOME TO THE LAST OF THE GREAT FLYING CITIES
It’s 9172, YE (Year of the Empire), and the future has forgotten its past.
Soaring miles over the Earth, Autumn, the sole surviving flying city, is filled to the brim with the manifold forms of humankind: from Human Plus “floor models” to the oppressed and disfranchised underclasses doing their dirty work and every imaginable variation between.
Valerius Bakhoum is a washed-up private eye and street hustler scraping by in Autumn. Late on his rent, fetishized and reviled for his imperfect genetics, stuck in the quicksand of his own heritage, Valerius is trying desperately to wrap up his too-short life when a mythical relic of humanity’s fog-shrouded past walks in and hires him to do one last job. What starts out as Valerius just taking a stranger’s money quickly turns into the biggest and most dangerous mystery he’s ever tried to crack – and Valerius is running out of time to solve it.
Now Autumn’s abandoned history – and the monsters and heroes that adorn it – are emerging from the shadows to threaten the few remaining things Valerius holds dear. Can the burned-out detective navigate the labyrinth of lies and maze of blind faith around him to save the City of Autumn from its greatest myth and deadliest threat?
MY REVIEW
Full disclosure: I edited this book.
In a future of flying cities, created beings, and limitless potential, Valerius only gets to enjoy one of the three. He is what 2019 would call “heritage stock”; seeds and animals saved from previous times without genetic modifications of any sort, as a bank against potential disaster. So fixing little things like a cut with the wave of a medical wand is unavailable to him as it could damage the historic conservation; people worship his genes for their unmodified purity, and cross to the other side of the road to avoid his person.
Without the boost to brain power enjoyed by so many, jobs are few and far between. Valerius worked his way through everything the street has to offer, finally reaching the pinnacle of his potential careers as a gumshoe. Private eye is a little too upstanding for what he does – Valerius puts foot to pavement investigating the worst for the worst, and hopes to get paid when he shows his employers the results.
This is the best life he could ever grasp for in the flying city of Autumn. Or anywhere on or off Earth.
Then a being walks through his door offering the chance of a lifetime. Unfortunately Valerius is at the end of his.
Initially he was just going to take the money and wait it out, but curiosity gets the better of him. Because there are two things that always made him feel alive, and they are solving a mystery and risking death.
REREAD 2020 August
I reread this book after 18 months. Still is awesome.
What this means is AFTER developmentally editing it, and reading it three times in the process, I read it again after publication. I don’t normally create, let alone publish, book reviews of books I edited, but, dang, I fan-girl over this one.
Flash: The Final Door
Photo by Efe Kurnaz on Unsplash
The blue corridor leads to an illuminated red-orange door. You thought it would be a glowing white tunnel. That is what everyone said it would be. Those that came back. Maybe that is the waiting room version.
The beeps had stopped. So many beeps. Seemed like days. You remember jumping when every muscle in your body contracted while on the bed. Had you been sick? Or was it an accident? Were you young or old? A short life or a filled one? Were family mourning you or waiting on the other side of the door?
The short walk ends with two steps leading up to the bright door. Clearly a front door of some sort, there is no doorbell, no knocker, not even a thrice damn (should you be using that language here?) camera-speaker to explain why you are here.
You knock.
It’s the polite thing to do.
Were you polite before? Things are slippery.
You knock again.
Third time’s the charm. You knock a little harder.
You try the doorknob.
It rattles as you move it, but only moves so far.
The door is locked.
Is the door to the afterlife supposed to be locked?
How long should you wait for someone to answer?
You bang on it hard, but it makes no more noise than the polite knock.
You wait.
Not long. You do remember you don’t have much patience. It was either because you were too young and everything waited for took forever, or you were too old and you felt the press of time. Maybe you were an important person and always had a place to be. Or was it you were always running late?
You look back along the corridor to where you came from. The corridor that direction ends in a neon yellow-green door.
One last knock, just in case.
No answer, you go back the way you came.
Is this why there are ghosts? Or maybe reincarnation? The green door’s knob turns easily.
(words 330; first published 3/2/2025 – – created based on a visual prompt for a Facebook writer’s group, aim is about 50 words)
BookQuotes: Natania Barron
If you haven’t read books by the amazing Natania Baron, I highly recommend seeking out some. Her “Queen of None” is ground-breaking and any of her stories have images that will astound. The below quote is from her Pilgrim of the Sky. I had the privilege of editing her “Rock Revival“.