Desert Song

An old song once began playing over the rushing dunes from a nomads fable. Soon the song grew louder and louder till the cities markets were filled with the echo’s of melodic voices.

Like the sand in dunes that marked the city’s horizon, the people in the once crowed market were swept up. They flowed to the outskirts where the orange sun colored the sands. The weary caravans seeking shelter saw a city walk towards them. They cast aside their robes and heard the music too. Their camels abandoned, looked on as the humans went on their path.

The sands stretched on far beyond the roads and the trade routes. The patter of feet and voices of exodus were drowned by sand and the roar of pleasant hums. So they went into the sands of phantom voices and the city stood in pleasant silence.

The sky set and a purplish night fell over the dead city; so goes the nomads fable.

 

P Word Essay: Purple, phantom, people, playing, path.

The White Revolver (R word essays)

“Only a few meters away… The revolver must still have a round in the chamber”

He dragged himself across the cold white marble that grew a sickening shade of red as the hallways’ occupants bled out. His sticky fingers irritated him. He drummed them against the floor as he caught his breath. Funny how he still felt excited, like adrenaline made him invincible, like he was still in control. If only he could get up.

“No. That’s not it. I’ll just need the gun, he’ll be back and he won’t be ready,”

The revolver was an old thing. Primitive; a remnant from naive days. His coat looked like one he used to wear back then. He’d picked it up last week on a whim. Maybe it could have been a return to the glory days. It seemed a bit hilarious to start reminiscing at that moment.

“Must be the blood loss. Where’s the bloody revolver anyway? Might take me forever to find it in all the blood,”

It wasn’t supposed to turn out this way. It was supposed to be easy. But he was uneasy the second they’d walked through the revolving doors. All that planning was for nothing. What a time for revelations! The cities best law enforcers would never be suspected of staging a robbery. It had taken them forever to gather up fall guys, but those were worries from a time when he had more things to worry about.

Four shots rang out and a gun clattered as it hit the floor.

Everything went wrong when they choose their first collateral for the day. They’d have more glory and authority if a few clerks and tellers hit the floor. Four shots rang out and a gun clattered as it hit the floor. The first victim didn’t fall. He grasped at his head and gargled black foam, one that seemed to drip from the hole in his head too. His face threatened to pull into his ears drums and he groaned like a falling tree. His arms tore themselves apart and seemed to extend into a hundred antennas. Before anyone said anything, one antennas flew across the room and whipped him. It cut halfway through him and he fell over, mouth agape. He looked like he was trying to understand why he’d turned into butter.

He didn’t die. He wished he had; he wished he hadn’t seen everything else that happened. One by one, the thing hunted down everyone in the bank. Everyone who had seen, everyone who…

The doors spun open.

“Well… Hello there,”

“Too late” he thought to himself.

He didn’t take his eyes off the ornate handle

Upturned now and against the wall, he turned and spotted his revolver. It’s ivory white handle unstained out just out of reach. He didn’t take his eyes off the ornate handle even as a crack filled the room and his ears rang with the sound that be his end.

This is a part of the word essay challenge.

Prompt words- revolver, round, revelation, remnant, reminiscing.  

S Word essay

A word essay about the letter S wouldn’t even be close to complete if I didn’t mention the word that starts with S and refers to activities that the censor board thinks is rather un-Indian.

My censorship is not inspired by misguided ideas on what constitutes culture as khaki enthusiasts see it, rather it’s because… Well, no patriarch, guileful aunt, or heckling grandmother can be expected to stay technologically illiterate these days, can they? My fears are not misguided, just last week Facebook’s’ terrifying ability to learn everything about you became all to apparent when an old, grey haired progenitor seemed to appear on the people you may know category. If you haven’t guessed by now, I’m counting on a shaky hold over the English language to cover my tracks.

To virgin eyes that fail to understand or care about the endless carnival of light humor that populates the internet, stalking is all too easy a hobby to take up. Now, while I have been informed my tendency to write poetry on eyes movements, dreams, and other topics that catch the interest of my over obsessive mind may not be very easy to understand, I don’t want to take any risks. But I won’t bother taking anything down either. Flight might be the better option but there isn’t any reason to hide. There isn’t much here that would interest the un-literary kind I’d warrant.

So this series where I journal every reaction certain letters evoke marches on, without one very simple word that would be too obvious a clue for snoopy kin.

T Word Essays

T seems to be a portentous letter. Yes I know what portentous means, no I didn’t look at a dictionary to learn what it meant, and yes I am smug about the fact that I know what it means.

Terribly tiny tales were these series of images that had a line or two that would make up an entire story.  And they would be these tiny, tragic stories that were very enjoyable. I haven’t come across them in a while so I assume they aren’t written anymore or have dipped in quality. I found myself struggling to work with fiction the other day, everything kept turning into a novel. So I’ve decided to try and do something similar to the terribly tiny tales type. Not too close though, nor too different.

Today we were told we will have to try and type out word essays throughout this month for our creative writing course, a very convenient task. I’ve been writing these essays since forever and should beat everyone else to the end. I had forgotten where I had stopped this series and wondered if I should even bother continuing it when the word essays were mentioned and terribly tiny tales and the letter T screamed from some corner in my head. The letter, had in a few seconds, filled me with ideas about what to do with the blog.

These essays are a welcome break between stories, poems and non fiction, and these breaks stop myself from working too hard and sounding like a tactless crustacean. This is one assignment that’s terribly portentous of being all too easy.

PS: If you haven’t noticed, every sentence has a word starting with t. T is a very easy word to work with after all; I wonder if I should start writing these word essays differently.

U Word Essays

Underpants, umbrellas, uterus’s, understatements… I’m really starting to wonder if I should dump the current word essay format and write stories about underpants and umbrellas.

These word essays have become a writing journal of sorts and are rather pleasant to work on but they’re starting to make me a little impatient. Write fictions seems more interesting now, but I can’t use the word essay or word story challenge till I’m done with this challenge I’ve. So the stories about flying umbrella wielding mermaids who are out to lay eggs inside the heads of unsuspecting… Maybe I shouldn’t give the story away just yet. And yes my head does have a tendency to come up with disturbing fiction.

Untamed, unspoiled,utopia, uncensored… “U” seems to spend most of it’s time working as a prefix. Do letters feel bad about not have a lot of words that they have exclusive access to? “U” seems like the sad chap who always has to rent his suits. For every usual or umpire there seem to be 40 unclean, uncertain, un-this, un-that.

A lot of words that start from U feel serious in a bad way. Uniform,umpire,undertaker etc. they seem to scream somber.  Utopia- that’s not a happy word, it means happy things but doesn’t seem very happy. It drab and serious in comparisons to Paradise- which seems to leap at you with excitement.

A sort of unsoiled utopia. That’s what the exams would have been if there weren’t so many holidays between each exam, and if the exams started in the morning instead of the afternoon. I would have have just walked in and out, writing about stuff I heard heard through the year and spent the rest of the day at ease.

There’s a species of happy laziness that can’t survive with too much free time, and there’s no way you can “study” for journalism so here I am writing, and speculating about future stories involving flying mermaids.

V Word Essays

V feels more natural hiding within a word rather than starting words of it’s own.Violent, vortex, vox poluli, villan, vigil… now it seems roman.

Voila! The letter V. I can’t shake the feeling it’s very foreign. Do you think V ever feels jealous of W? Or DoubleVay as it’s know as in french. Or maybe W is the evolved form of V. I’d go on about how V must have been the creation of an over-enthusiastic grammarian hopping up and down excitedly at a table of bored,ancient grammarians explaining how having double the number of V’s would make the language awesome. But I feel like somethings amiss.

I hit a hundred blog posts yesterday, I should be more confident about my writing by now. But my mind can’t help but wonder. It doesn’t seem to have registered the fact that writing one hundred different articles is no mean feat. Even as I try to ramble write about the letter V, I wonder if I should redo the challenge. Write fiction with the words the letter inspires instead of being a hipster.

Oh well. It’s not like that should be much work. I’ll probably have more time if I’m not trying to put up posts everyday, but honestly I don’t care to plan ahead. I just want to write. Voila!

W- Word Essays

Wrung tongues sung wondrous thing about W. That’s the first thing that came to my mind when I thought of the letter W.

W is such a fun letter. Wooo,wisssh,womp,woooot, woosh,wheee etc. W lets you make so many funny words that adults are forced to put in dictionaries. I can imagine mischievous wordsmiths giggling suppressed giggles of in shadows while pompous elitists frowned sad puppy faces when they had to add in those words. Of course that never happened but, that’s makes for a cute story. The fact that you can make words like war or warts seems to be a glitch.

I have no sources for this but I’m certain that  the pronunciation of W is a remnant of some hardy Celts looking down on the french and their Dou-bla-Vey’s. The word “Work” has suddenly popped into my head. Is this work? Not really. Writing is like (hey look another word that starts with W) breathing? Scathing an itch? There’s no reason I should be trying to put up posts every day. It actually makes things worse for the blog; the law of diminishing returns and consumer burn spring to mind. I’m always paranoid all my good posts are doomed to the bottom of the page and people will only read my more mediocre work. But this doesn’t feel like great effort, so I’ll post away this month.

X- Word Essays

I didn’t get tired of the word essay writing challenge or get bogged down with. I kinda forgot all about it. Writers’ blocks come in more than one form it would seem.

Well what do I  say about the letter X? It’s a pretty cool letter. It’s instantly a gritty symbol .Put an X over a leaders face and you’ll have security agencies monitoring you. You can use an X they say way Zorro uses Z. Put it under skull and you have yourself a pirate flag. You can use it a signature too.  A very ominous and grim letter is X.

Words with the letter X are always so a random. I remember playing “name,place,animal,thing” in fifth grade and no-one else knowing what a Xolo was. X was a death sentence because no-one knew words that began with X or knew if the other person was making up a word with the letter X.

Names with X can sound cool but sometimes a Xena or Xender can sound like their trying too hard. However the letter X sounds best with names of ancient Persian emperors. Xerxes, Artatazaxta, Arataxerxus. I like how my tongue rolls when I pronounce the names, even if I’m just imagining myself saying it. These emperors who echo through history, like their names echo through your mouth, often matched the grandeur their names suggested, which makes everything better.

Y- Word Essays

Ygritte, yonder, young what do I say about Y?

YE? Yonder? I like the way those old English terms sound. I don’t know why should still be used. think about it. Ye just has a natural way of flowing out from your tongue. The same goes for yonder. Doesn’t “come yonder” sounds so much better than something like “come here”. Here means so many other things anyway. Yonder needs to make a come back.

Thee and thou should return too. “You” is overused anyway. “Where art thou?” feels like a natural sentence. English really needs a lot more words, it has like two while everyone else has three. Dost thou agree?

Z- Word essays

When I try to think of words the start with Z my mind churns out a mish-mash of common nouns.

Zebra, Zathura, Zarbon. I need to write about something that isn’t typical. No one wants to read hundred of words by Zebra. So I’ll write about ”Zoinks”. “Zoinks” is Shaggy’s catchphrase. Shaggy from Scooby-doo. The first version of Scooby Doo I remember watching was the 1950’s version that cartoon network used to screen in the early 2000’s. It had laugh tracks, terrible animation but was still pretty amazing. Telling kids that pretty much everything supernatural is just some realtor trying to scare people off so they can take over property is an unusual concept. I’m not sure why the writers of Scooby Doo hated real estate agents, but telling kids to question everything is rather rare and pretty cool.

I wish I had come up with a better word. Zoinks doesn’t demand much explanation in my opinion. I remember this weird Sean Connery movie, which he made after he got really worried he’d always be associated with Bond [Connery didn’t actually like the bond movies]. I haven’t seem much of the movie, but I recall Connery in bright red plastic underwear praying to this flying stone head called Zarbon [or something like that] who sat out guns. He also hates sperm. That was one weird movie.

This is all I can think of that revolves around the word Z. Hopefully I’ll get better as I run through the rest of the alphabet.