Speculative fiction (what some longtime readers might think of as "SciFi") can be described as the fiction of ideas.

​Even more than other fiction, SF often examines the consequences of one idea across a whole society.  For instance, what if robots became so beautifully built that they could pass for human? What if you could outsource your own memories? What if Hitler had won the war?*

So with SF on my mind, today's writing warm-up exercise:

Story 1
The eclipse was less dramatic than she'd expected. Not that she was in the cone of totality, but still, she'd never witnessed a solar eclipse before. Never mind a double.
Still, she'd taken the afternoon off, and though the cheap protective glasses had broken –– she'd forgotten them in the seat of her vehicle and then sat on the damn things when she'd slid into the seat in the cool darkness of the parking bay.
Still there it was: her first double-lunar eclipse. She watched two penumbral cones shaving the sun into a puny lozenge of light. An unseasonable breeze sprang up. She shivered and wished there was someone next to her. She hadn't considered herself in any way sentimental, but she longed now for something communal, a human companion.
The sight of the sun, even as small and cold as it was from this distance, turning just that much smaller and colder –– well, she felt for a moment that she understood primitive superstition.
And then, as quick as the remembered snap of a plastic tiddley-wink, the moons parted and the sun shone round and bright again. 

Story 2
He kept watch on the mirror-calm surface of the water, barely breathing.
He was comfortable –– or anyway about as as comfortable as anyone zipped into a breather suit and strapped bodily against the pot-bellied ventral surface of a drone hopper could expect to be. He refused to consider the blurring of the features of shore, blocked out thoughts of the hopper's speed (only a quarter-sonic, almost survivable without the suit), kept his attention on the glassy reflection of the sky.

The handful of beta-blockers he'd swallowed at the start of his shift was working to keep his blood-pressure low. He shrugged his shoulders against the petal-soft lining of the suit. He stretched the webbing between first his left and then his right hand.

Eyes open, he told himself. He was going to need to be very quick and very lucky or he was going to end up very dead. And he wouldn't be the only one. 

The third time, I realized quoting the opening lines of The Canterbury Tales in the original Middle English was a painful dating stratagem of people in my chosen field of study. The idea being, perhaps, to stupefy and render the object unconscious.  

Still, April is a time when folk DO long to hit the road.

Springtime itchy feet.

​Questing for sunny beaches or the last few downhill runs, going for the peak cherry blossoms or those first bulbs poking heads out of the mud. 

Each trip worth a Tale.

P-p-pa-poetry? Here, this won'd hurt much:

The Caterpillar by Ogden Nash
​
I find among the poems of Schiller
No mention of the caterpillar
Nor can I find one anywhere
In Petrarch or in Baudelaire
So here I sit in extra session
To give my personal impression.
The caterpillar, as it's called,
Is often hairy, seldom bald;
It looks as if it never shaves;
When it walks, it walks in waves.
And from the cradle to the chrysalis
It's utterly speechless, songless, whistless. 
​

After years of snapping selfies of Mr. Linton and me, I think this is it.

"Years ago," wheezed the oldster, arthritic knuckles whitening on the handle of the deluxe walker. "Years ago, artists had to use rubylith to separate each color for a color print."

Honking into a worn handkerchief, the dusty wheezer raised watery eyes and continued. "Hours I spent over a drafting table, X-Acto blade in hand, separating colors. The eye-hand coordination alone --!"

After a long pause, the lecture continued. "It took years to learn the tricks of the trade. Nowadays, all it takes is a ninety-nine cent app. Putting artists out of business. I don't know how they make a living any more."

Yeah, artists mostly don't make a living.

In honor of all of us antiquities who remember cutting ruby to separate colors, here's a timelapse video of the Rubylith process...

But those 99-cent apps are really fun:

In this highly digitized age, it's nigh on impossible to grasp the amount of work that went into, for instance, the 1939 movie The Wizard of Oz. This link describes the Technicolor process.

Such an effort to give the viewing public ruby slippers!

Go on, turn the news off for a few minutes. 

Turn this up, dance around, make a list of all the things you love. 

Then, I dunno, maybe consider giving up expressing your outrage for a whole day?

Perhaps take stock of the way the air is moving outside?

​Or think about a song that YOU cannot resist. (And by the way, I want to know what song that is...)

Peace out.

He probably needed to warm up before tortoising. Today's writing prompt comes all the way from the Galápagos.

Pranayama

He tried to still his thoughts.

Circular breathing.  He counted in with the breath: one-belly, two-ribs, three-shoulders. He attempted to send his breath into the interstitial area, wherever that was––!  And then out again: shoulders-one, ribs-two, three-belly. And pause.

He was happy to pause. He could out-pause anyone. Not that it was a competition.

The instructor went on, and he decided to keep pausing. He'd hold still, he figured, and then nip back in next time.

Like Arlo Guthrie, he'd just wait for the chorus to come around again. Circular breathing was frustrating and difficult, but the practice was only forty minutes out of a day.

Ah, there it was: Inhale. He did, trying to make the breath open first his belly, then ribs, and finally, shoulders. Or what would be shoulders, had he any. Ribs? His ribs were fused into carapace, and everyone knew a carapace didn't –– shouldn't!–– flex. And what chance did his belly have against the dusty plastron? He lived inside a shell corset, and he might just as soon ask his breath to give him wings.

He recognized the monkey-brain resistance and focused on the air moving through his sinuses. He sipped the air in and ahhed the breath out. His eyes closed. In. Out. In.

The class finished and the day turned into night before he opened his bleary eyes again. The night was absolute, fog blotting out the yellow streetlights and the stars alike. Damn, he thought. How long was I out? I wonder what year it is.

I'd like to be bigger and better than this, but I just kept hoping to find a more flattering match for my own face.

Time, I will not pretend, was laid waste in the mostly fruitless effort.  

​Portrait of a Man Dressed as a Shepard, Sigh. Portrait of the Danish King Christian. Heavy sigh.

Fine fine fine.  I didn't go so far as to put on make-up, which I hope explains why me and King Christian both look a little, um, fatigued.


Still, even when I went way, way, way back, to the passport photos that didn't turn into my first passport –– kind of a funny story. I was pretty sure I had been adopted after the passport office rejected my application MORE THAN ONCE –– guess who Google says I look like?

My editorial life is about helping people tell their stories.  Helping them say what they are trying to say.  

The goal is to make the projects better, more useful, and pleasant for the wider world of readers.

Sometimes the job resembles therapy. 

One writer might need a hand to get past things that make him fearful or full of doubt. Another might require a subtle check on the runaway train that is her imagination.

I'm torn. On the one hand, face-palm. Verbiage like this an affirmation for why there is a profession like mine.

​On the other hand, gently massaging my forehead, I am just grateful that this didn't happen on my watch. 

Warm-up writing prompted by –– what else? A PONY!

There would be no escape this day. Sqantahonoh-neehoit (a name that roughly translates to "rhomboid-shaped fruit of the false-kola cactus")  resolved again to bide her time. The art of survival was patience. It was a thing she'd come to know, along with the feel of the saddle on her back and the tug of the lead-line. 

She'd witnessed what happened when patience ended. Her herd-mate, Gohollin-ah (meaning "Speedy wooly caterpillar" or, with a slightly different inflection "Wooly kitten"), had been lost to such an event. A day like any other until the moment of impatience. Followed by panic, a loud outcry, and a beating that ended badly. Before even the moon had a chance to rise, Gohollin-ah was taken away in a vehicle that smelled of blood and fear and death.  

A hard day and a sorrowful night it had been.

The scent of freedom came to Squantohonoh-neehoit now –– nearly masked by the carnival odors of corndogs and fry-dough, and the tang of hot pavement –– on the dusty wings of the breeze. She did not reveal the glowing coal that was her spirit. She snuffed deeply of the freedom-wind, and reminded herself: I am patient. Patient as the log that waits for water. Patiently waiting for the flood to carry me free.

She would run again, she knew it. She would run and roll in the sand. She would crop sweet green grass and drink clear water as it sparkled over rock.

She did not hear her own deep sigh of sadness and longing. 

She did not know that her patience would save her. She did not know the shape of the freedom could shift and change like snowdrift in a blizzard. But it would.