DrabbleWriMo 1: Gem

[igenlode]

I have no intention of ever doing 'NaNoWriMo' (it's not my nation anyway :-p) since I've never been in the business of writing as much as possible as fast as possible in order to avoid 'the inner editor'; my inner editor comes into action the moment after I've set pen to paper, and before I get to the next sentence.

But the suggestion of doing 'DrabbleWriMo' -- a drabble-writing month, where you are set the task of writing exactly 100 words a day -- seemed something that might actually be useful, given that of late I feel I've been more productive in editing other people's work than in making progress on my own. Maybe some arbitrary prompts for something completely different would be a source of accomplishment, if nothing else. And it's a form of challenge that not only permits but requires incredibly detailed word-by-word editing in order to achieve the target!

So here's the first prompt out of thirty: "Gem". (Which happens to fit very precisely into what I've just been reading...)

The phoenix on the signet emerald mocked him in memory.

The Marquis de Kersaint had worn that ring when first they met -- every day since, in this makeshift war of hedgerows and ambush, and he'd thought nothing of it. But in the candlelight, that night when the Abbé had brought the news, the telltale crest had flared up for the first time with the sudden movement of the hand that bore it; that clenched on the table at the name of Trélan.

He would have liked a closer look at that emerald. Only now the Marquis wore it no longer.

Comments

[pedanther]

I'm probably going to squib out of doing this myself, but I look forward to seeing what you do with it.

[igenlode]

Well, I'm not planning to do anything fancy with it, as I'm still trying to continue progress on "An Outsider and a Foreigner" at my normal (abysmally slow) rate, in addition to writing these. I'm simply attempting to write vignettes from the book I'm currently reading, and keeping that up daily for a month will be quite sufficient challenge in itself.

It takes a couple of hours, on and off, to get each one working (and even then I realised at about 3am last night that in the course of editing I'd managed to duplicate the phrase "from time to time" without substituting for the earlier occurrence!) That's about the timescale people are recommended to adopt for their daily word-vomit exercise in novel writing, so the challenge is equal, along with the overall commitment issue. It's just that the nature of the effort required is more suited to my tendencies as a writer.

(At the moment I'm also trying to keep the drabbles in chronological order, but I think that may be impractical over thirty days without having done any planning -- I'm just looking up each day's prompt as it comes!)