Pink Flamingos: Final Days Of 2017 Day 17

I received these at a white elephant gift exchange. I think every tree needs some thoughtful pink flamingos.

#vss very short story

The reindeer became skittish as they got closer to Florida. A crew of pink flamingos were vying for their jobs and were always trying to show off for Santa. Trying not to kick a flamingo had become a hazard of delivering presents.

Today’s Poetry and Poem

Write about inheritances. The real, the imagined, the wished for, the cursed…

Her Mother’s Pink Flamingos

Her mother’s pink flamingos
Were all she ever wanted
She spent hours playing with them
As a child while she waited
For her mother to get home
Day or night, in the heat or cold
She imagined the flamingos hopping
And flying around the trailer park
She imagined them lifting her up
On a multitude of soft feathers
And landing on candy-floss clouds
Where they watched the sunset
But when her mother kicked her out
She took a bat to those flamingos
They had left her there to rot
Now she had nothing and nowhere to go
She instantly regretted her actions
But she couldn’t bring back
Her mother’s flamingos.

Editing Focus

Chapter 16 of Revision And Self-Editing (Write Great Fiction) by James Scott Bell is The Ultimate Revision Checklist. Starting tomorrow, I plan to begin following the checklist on my draft for Throwing Stones while also creating a Story Grid following the guidelines in The Story Grid: What Good Editors Know by Shawn Coyne.

To prepare for this intense editing practice, today I’m going to follow Mr. Coyne’s suggestion and separate my novel into each scene, print out the scenes and staple each one into a short piece of writing. Then I’ll start a spreadsheet for Throwing Stones with a SCENE column, WORD COUNT column and a STORY EVENT column. Then I’ll be ready to dive in, first thing tomorrow.

#FlashFicHive

Since I didn’t find the prompt for #FlashFicHive yesterday, I thought I would combine it with the prompt for today. And that means, there will be pink flamingos. Oh yes, there will be pink flamingos.

I have two options for my pink flamingos in the fill in the blanks sentence:

The pink flamingos lived in a bright place with cryptids.
The dogs lived in a hairy place with pink flamingos.

I used this as a short mad libs game with a friend and those are the words I got. Let’s try a couple more to fill out the idea:

1. The pink flamingos lived in a dark place with helicopters.
2. The tree lived in a fiery place with pink flamingos.

So this place, with at least of tree, full of pink flamingos, dogs and cryptids could be dark and hairy but becomes bright when set on fire. Luckily the helicopters were already there, so they put out the fires quickly.

Don’t Forget To Read!

I thought I would keep with today’s theme and look for some books on Pink Flamingos.

There is a surprisingly small selection of books to choose from. There are exactly two books in the King County Library System with the words “Pink Flamingos” in the title:
The Pink Flamingo Murders by Elaine Viets and Pink Flamingos by Carlo Mari.