photo by Maria L. Berg

#OctPoWriMo

Today’s OctPoWriMo theme is Eyes or What do you see? I wrote a post about vision back when I started this blog and did a series on exploring the senses.

A sight

What a sight
a sight for sore eyes
a vision
out of sight
out of mind
in the mind’s eye
or the eye in the sky
the eye is on you

Look
and you will see
seeing is believing
what lies beyond the veil
veiled truth
is veiled lies
in the eye of the beholder
all is but perception

#Writober4

The image for Day 9 on the Pinterest board is another painting by Daniel Richter. This one shows electrified looking human forms falling to earth.

My take: This image makes me think of a terrifying falling dream coming true. You’re suddenly falling from a great height and don’t know when you will land, but you’re sure when you do, you’ll die. It brings to mind the horrible choice to jump from a burning building, or souls descending into eternal damnation. It also makes me think of falling into another dimension. It could also be the opposite: gravity suddenly stops working and nothing holds us to the earth and people float away.

Micro-fiction: James pinched himself, bit his tongue, pulled a nose hair, but he wasn’t asleep, so he couldn’t wake himself up. He had taken his first sip of his morning Americano, burning his tongue, as usual, and then he was here, floating or falling, he couldn’t tell. He thought he was floating, but it could have been an illusion because everyone was falling faster than he was. His mind raced: biblical apocalypse, aliens, the earth stopped rotating? None of those were good for him. He was alone. No more people were falling around him. He felt tingly, light-headed like at the dentist, peaceful, sleepy. He saw stars.

Writing Process and Tools

Hero’s Journey with tarot:

Today, I thought we would look at another plotting technique with the cards (and I found some monster stickers I forgot about, so I’ve got more decorating to do). Two years ago for NaNoWriMo, I got the book Mapping the Hero’s Journey With Tarot: 33 Days To Finish Your Book by Arwen Lynch and went through it step by step.

Recently, I’ve been approaching my short stories as the hero’s journey plot and also finding the Save The Cat! The Last Book on Screenwriting You’ll Ever Need beat sheet a useful plotting tool.

Today, I want to see if these tools will also make my flash stronger. So first, let’s look at our characters. Keeping in mind the image of the figures either falling or rising I pulled:

The first character I pulled was the King of cups. He’s my main character, but when I pulled a card for his past and future, hoping to get an idea of whether he’s falling or floating and why, I pulled two more court cards which made me think more of the figures  were hero’s in my story.

So I drew past and future cards for all three:

This gave me the idea that maybe my main character is rising and the other characters are falling which is a neat idea that I wouldn’t have thought of otherwise. Cool.

Now let’s look at our hero’s journey:

1. Ordinary world:Seven of cups
2. Call to Adventure:The Empress
3. Refusal:The Star
4. Mentor:The Tower
5. Crossing the Threshold:Eight of swords
6. Tests, Allies and Enemies: King of wands
7. Inmost Cave:Four of coins
8. Ordeal:Queen of swords
9. Reward:The Lovers
10. The Road Back:Five of wands
11. Resurrection:King of Swords
12. Return:The hermit

We have a lot to work with now. I’m going to write my draft and see if the hero’s journey works for this flash story.

Creepy verbs: abominate, despise, hate, loathe

Story Cubes Symbols: apple, book, drama masks, shooting star, volcano, light bulb, turtle, postcard, cane

Woodland creature: woodpecker

Horror trope: vampires

Oblique Strategies: Look closely at the most embarrassing details and amplify them

Happy Reading and Writing!