So, the writer in my attic, K Orion Fray, sends out a weekly writing inspiration e-mail, which includes a writing prompt.
A prompt from several weeks ago:
Take a ten minute chunk and write something new coming into your scene. If you described a person, make them notice their setting. If you wrote about a place, have someone walk into it. If you described an object, make something interact with it. The trick here is to not duplicate what you did before–so don’t write two people yet! Be sure to keep yourself to ten minutes this time around. Here’s a timer you can use, if you need help with that!
Description in line is something I still need work at. So I kept on from the last description prompt and here we go.
“If you can’t tell me, show me.” Sergeant Allise, again, didn’t seem to change her tone, but her voice still seemed more gentle.
“Yessir, right away, sir.” Kira coughed. The last thing she wanted to do was show… Ket was staring at her. All right. She could do this. “Sir, we have what is clearly an anomalous event happening between South and Main.” She clicked three buttons on her far-too-universal remote and lit up the screen.
Their cramped ready room was not by any means state of the art. They were a small team in a very small precinct, one classically overworked and underfunded. But the projector (and the remote), Kira had paid for out of pocket. It was the best set-up available. It made you feel like you were in the scene.
That was exactly what Kira didn’t want with this scene. She squinted her eyes shut, but she already knew what she was going to see. “Okay, this is what the Mayflower apartment building looked like yesterday. I’m sure you know it -“
“I used to live there.” Ket’s whisper was harsh; he’d never gotten the hang of being quiet.
The Mayflower was a standard downtown apartment building, eight stories tall, with a sandstone facade and a bit of carving over the double-doored entrance to give it that proper feeling. This city being what it was, of course, it didn’t pay to look too closely at the carvings. The apartments were cheap, passably-well-maintained, and almost everyone who’d gone to college here had spent at least a night in one of them.
“Brace yourselves.” She lifted the remote up. “This is the Mayflower today.” Click.
The back half of the Mayflower – which, from the street, they shouldn’t have been able to see anyway – was missing about a third of itself, in a big pac-man style bite that should have (Again with the shoulds, and Kira should know better by now) knocked the building over.
The front had melted, and twisted. In places the sandstone had shifted into dune-like piles of sand. In other places, it had fused into glass – glass that had formed into a disturbingly eye-like shape.
Through that eye, you could see the bite out of the back of the building. You could also see what had happened to some of the people.
A Scene Description
A Place Description
A Deletion
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Eek. The description at the end is particularly evocative. I love watching authors paint pictures with their words–even when they are kinda scary ones like this!
🙂 thank you. Of course, I have no idea where this piece is going.
Oooo intriguing!
😀