Angels, Maybe – New Starts, Plans, Ideas.
I’ve begun to foster ideas again, which is huge when there has been a period of time when new story ideas just haven’t been arriving. I blame a book call Just Write One Thing Today. I have been writing one prompt out of this book since I bought it six months and five journals ago. I have about six months of prompts left and I still use it every single day. Right after feeding the dog and pouring my coffee, it’s the first thing I do. The second thing I do is turn a journal page and write the next scene of whatever WIP I am working on. So far, in those six months, I have written a novel and a half.
So something is working.
I’ve also committed this year, to releasing a Newsletter a month, with some of the fruits of the last six months. January 10th’s newsletter went out with the first quick peak of one of these fledgling story ideas, and I decided it would be good to share those same ideas here on my blog. To that end, enjoy a couple of bickering angels on their way to help their charges.
Below the thin cloud cover, cities sprawled in orange, tentacled amoebas flowing from glowing nuclei. For all the talk about things man-made looking nothing like nature, from up here, man’s greatest achievements had an uncanny resemblance to nature’s most ancient and basic building blocks of life.
So was man mimicking nature, making it a simple matter of time before he figured out how to create life on his own?
Or did it mean man was nothing more than a larger, more complex building block with no real self-determination and in time, as she had done with the amoebas, nature would tire of this new toy and move on?
“Tell you, I don’t like either one of those scenarios.”
“Was I talking to you, Gabby?”
Mica’s travel partner flushed. “You were really loud. Inside your head, I mean.”
“Yes. Inside my head. Key word there. We’ve talked about this. You can’t go around plucking thoughts from people’s heads. It’s invasive.”
Above them, the seatbelt light pinged.
Gabby settled back from leaning across Mica to see out the window. Planting his arse in his seat so he could fasten his seatbelt, he shot Mica a grin. “Trust me. Not much on most of their minds beyond eat, sleep, fuck.”
“Don’t judge.”
“Who’s judging? Just observing.”
As soon as he’d clicked his seatbelt closed, Mica gripped both arm rests.
With his right hand, Gabby covered the back of Mica’s left, warm strength soothing Mica’s nerves. “It’s fine,” Gabby whispered. “Pilot’s practically board with how routine this is.”
“Bored people make mistakes. That’s pretty much why we’re here, and speaking of, why the hell are we in this thing? It’s slow and heavy and shouldn’t be up here. Tons of steel, a million moving parts. It makes no sense.”
“Science, Mica.”
“Science is stupid.”
Gabby chuckled. “It’s actually not. And it’s all they have. They trust it.”
“They have us.”
“They don’t know that. They can’t know it,” he said, voice a rumble of warning Mica didn’t need. “Which is why we’re in this thing. Blending in, remember? There’s no flying on this particular planet in this era.”
“They do have night though. Darkness. We could have floated down in the dark, no one the wiser.”
“How do we lead them out if this crisis if we don’t at least try to understand it from their point of view? That’s the actual mission, right?”
“I hate this mission.”
“But you love these people. In fact, more than any of us, you adore them. So stay calm. Be down before you know it.”
