Story magic

Today is the last day of the 8-day writing retreat. With no big project to work on, I floundered the first few days, not knowing how to structure my time or direct my energies. But I fell into a comfortable rhythm of drafting 2-3 poems a day and writing a fictional prompt. Some of the poems have real potential and that pleases me and I have liked being back in the kind of thinking that poetry gets me into. I become more observant of what's going on around me as I am always looking for poem ideas: a snippet of conversation, light on a tree trunk, a face seen in a store.

The prompts have been less successful though fun to write. My good friend Bridget gave me a Storymatic box of prompts for Christmas. It has two kinds of cards, characters and situation, and they've been fun to fool with. Then yesterday, as I was writing a prompt that needed to incorporate a parade and a smoker, story magic happened. About the fifth sentence, something in my creative self began to tingle and a character showed up, one with great possibility for something more, something larger, maybe the next novel. I don't know yet but my excitement while writing a few more sentences and then taking a few notes of possibility was palpable. Even better, I woke up thinking about the prompt this morning and what different things could happen next.

And this morning I wrote a different prompt and had the same tingling, the same excitement. I don't know if the two prompts are connected or are two separate stories or are even really stories, but something has opened up and it's way cool!