Stripes
#8 of Dumb Stuff I Wrote on the Fly
Zebra day.
Okay, so in celebration of tiger day, a story about people who face a sudden appearance of stripes, all color is drained of their vision except for black and orange. The narrative alternates between a cynical look at the change and an appreciative look at it, like so:
Black - jail bars, rows of jail bars, in between which are only the deadliest criminals, armed with claws where their nails might have been in a world with more color.
Orange - ladder rungs,
Black - dark, even in no light, you experience the burn of your limited options. The stars come out, not furious, but nearing that temper all the same
Orange - sunset on an ebonous beach
Black - The dark pit of the soul where you dare not look, and even if you did, what would you see except emptiness? (Okay that's a bit cliché'd.
And so on and so forth. This is going to be particularly challenging, as I will need to come up with examples, or glean examples from...
Something I wrote today, which is one of my creative hang-ups; when it comes to starting new stories, I struggle to latch onto an element of it that genuinely interests me. Yesterday, I listed all the projects I got the furthest with and the incidents or conversations that inspired each one, and the common element is that the path from the moment of inspiration to the cultivation of the idea was entirely unplanned and accidental. This story? Planned and deliberate. It fails to hold my attention in a way that I can see it to its completion.
This tells me I really do need to turn my attention to the projects that I actually yearn to finish.