Wednesday 28 December 2011

A Trip to the Future

"it's a very unusual way of travelling"
Another prompt referencing the time travel in The Christmas Mystery. Honestly, I think these are the worst! It took me hours and lots of really stupid ideas until I came up with a - very imperfect - idea of an unusual way of travelling: through a kind of surveillance picture/portal in the guard's cave. If you don't like it, believe me, it could have been a lot worse.

So, who do you think those two are? I think it's pretty obvious, but then, I currently live with these characters in my head and know them better than you do (or at least I hope so).

By the way, I hope you had a wonderful Christmas!
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Friday 23 December 2011

A Cold Wind is Blowing...

First things first: Yes, I took the name from Harry Potter. Sue me. :-P

When I first thought of this project I assumed the greatest difficulty would be to connect all 24 posts in some way or another. Now that I've arrived at prompt number four I notice that the real difficulty is to keep them separate. The first thing I think when I look up the next sentence is: to which character would this fit best? Not: which plot best supports this sentence?
I have to drag my mind away from what I already know, try to clear it completely and approach the prompt with no background screaming to be integrated. It's already starting to drive me insane, but then, it's a great test for my perseverance and capabilities which I intend to pass.

"he scarcely had time to look surprised"
could be anything, really. After some internal arguments I managed to use it to introduce Norbert and the concept of the guard dragons for the world where strong dreams come alive in.
Did any of you already guess who his successor will be?
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Tuesday 20 December 2011

Love is...

Sorry for the long break! With the holidays almost upon us it gets a bit harder to focus. Plus, telling the story from inside Lucy's mind was hard and prompt number three was a difficult one.
"like running before the wind - or like hurtling down a moving staircase"
What do you think this could be?
The obvious, when you know The Christmas Mystery, is of course their way of travelling from Norway to Bethlehem while going backwards in time. But my blog shouldn't be this close to the book...
In the end I went for love. Love can be a lot of things, and love at first sight can happen so quickly, right?

So now you've met Dan and Lucy! What's your first impression?
Yes, I know, Lucy seems a bit... well, let's say disagreeable. But you have to understand, she had a really bad day at work, not enough sleep for over a week... And her highlight of the day was meant to be a date with Brian, who always makes her forget the woes of the real world. But he didn't show up! You can't blame her for being so aggressive, can you?
Dan, by the way, is a colleague of Anne, who also works at the Café. Just in case you wanted a stronger connection to the characters you already know...

Now, about those last two sentences I ended the story with... The second one wasn't planned, it just happened that, when I wrote "matter of Brian", my brain went straight to a large pink balloon going gloop, gloop. Blame Terry Pratchett.

The most important question:
Do you really think that excerpts from Harry Potter in English would make this story easier to read than the Italian ones? Won't thy get mixed up with the ongoing story too much?

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Wednesday 14 December 2011

Childhood Mysteries

The second prompt was one of those I was really looking forward to. Especially the German version always had a mysterious and alluring effect on me, while the English sounds a bit boring:
"I know of a short cut, and that's the path we're taking now."
This is -  and always has been - a sentence whispered by a stranger, taking a girl by the hand and taking her somewhere. Good or bad? That was hard to decide.
In the end I chose a childhood experience for Anne, not meant to harm her, but with quite a damaging effect. Brian wanted to do her a favour, of that I am quite sure. Not entirely sure, mind you, but quite.
You see, Brian is a mystery to me - he was created as one. The weird kid, the willing outsider, the red head who always has dirt stuck under his fingernails and smeared over his face... Honestly, I can't tell you much about him, while I could tell you just about anything about Anne you'd possibly want to know.
I'm looking forward to get to know Brian a bit over the next few weeks. :-)
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Monday 12 December 2011

The first Flash is up!

It has begun. :-)
The sentence I had to include in my first post was
"perhaps the clock hands had become so tired of going in the same direction year after year that they had suddenly begun to go the opposite way instead".
In The Christmas Mystery this is a thought Elisabet has when she follows the lamb from the shopping centre, because that's when she starts running back in time, although she doesn't know it.
Going the same travel-back-in-time route seemed a bit lazy to me, so I looked for something else. Dreams are always a nice place for clocks going backwards, aren't they? Dreams and premonitions...

Anyway, how do you like Anne? She is 18 at this time, has left her home almost a year ago and is now back to take care of the house while her parents are on a wonderful three weeks Christmas vacation. Lucky that nothing did go wrong in the end, right?

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Friday 9 December 2011

About This Blog

Hey,
my name is Sarah and I have a blog. It's called "24 Flashes" and will, over time, become a collection of 24 flash fiction works I intend to write.

Why?
Oh, well, there are various reasons. I can safely name two of them:
One is that I lacked greatly in the creativity department. There were a lot of things I wanted to do, but none that I actually felt like doing. I wanted to do something, though, so I started something entirely new instead of forcing myself to continue with old stuff.
The second reason was that I was thinking about a blog for work for months, but didn't get the support I needed. I think the fact that I had a blog in mind for so long also prompted me to start one for myself.

So, what is it about?
I was never really searching for inspiration, it just came when I finally got to my December reading. "The Christmas Mystery" is a wonderful pre-Christmas book, and the index contains phrases from the 24 chapters. Every phrase serves as a prompt for me now, to write flash fiction that (hopefully) works on it's own, but is still somehow connected to every other prompt result.

Backstage?
Yes, backstage. I'm not sure how I'll manage that as well, to be honest, but I would like to post some insights as I go about writing for the prompts. I think it will be fun.
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