"My life is spent in one long effort to escape from the commonplaces of existence." – Doyle
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February 11, 2025

Words for Wednesday Prompts - Feb 12, 2025

This February, I am the host for Words for Wednesday. Words for Wednesday is started by Delores a while ago. Now the prompts are hosted by various people on various blogs with Elephant's Child as the coordinator. The aim of Words for Wednesday is to encourage us to write using some or all of the prompts.

This week's prompts are:

1 - cruel
2 - return
3 - sneak
4 - solitary
5 - middle

Charlotte (Mother Owl)'s color of February is Glass Elephant Blue. See the color at Charlotte's blog over here.

You may write your piece in the comments or post it on your blog. If posting on your blog, please leave a direct link to the post so we can all visit you. Have fun writing!

February 06, 2025

Fiction: The Soul Guardian 1

~ January 2005 ~

Another soul forgotten. How easy for humans to abandon each other. At this late hour, in this dark alleyway dumpster, there are few humans passing by. Even with a light beaming down on her, she goes unnoticed.
    Anson kneels down by the child and places a hand on her small form curved in a fetus position. His warmth will do little for this young one. The child's soul appears beside him. He straightens up and looks her over. Such a fragile child but she cannot leave, not yet. Anson doesn't like it but it's not his decision.
    She tugs his hand. Anson pulls away and points to her body. "You belong there," he says in a calm voice. He gives her a gentle tap on her shoulder and she seeps back into her body. He whistles. A dog's bark echoes. Taking a few steps back, Anson eases into the shadows.
    A doberman steps into the light follow by a woman holding onto the dog's leash. Quickly, she assesses the situation and takes out her phone. Anson leaves before the dog can react to his presence.
    Further down the streets, Anson continues his walk. A quaver sweeps over the land - a chorus like cries of lost children echoed lightly in the air. Anson stops. A sinking feeling like he has missed something comes over him. The sound vanishes bit by bit. All soul guardians can hear and feel this disquiet every one hundred days but no one knows what it truly means. Anson lets out a breath.
    With a single thought, he can move from place to place but that is a rather dull way to travel. He prefers to use his body and keep the human habit. He has no worries about time and yet, everything he does depends on time. A second, a minute, might mean the difference between living and dying.
    He soon comes to a three-story house. Inside, a man is pounding his fat fists into a woman. She falls onto broken bottles on the floor. Her fingers find a large piece and she shoves the shard into the man's right thigh. He collapses to the floor. His soul appears beside his body. Beady eyes look from his body to Anson. Anson gives the man a hard shove, sending his soul back into his body. Without thinking, Anson presses a foot on the man's wound making him scream. After a few seconds, Anson releases his foot. It isn't his place to punish. The man falls unconscious.
    The woman scrambles away from the man, not even noticing her bare left foot is bleeding. Long years of violence has unstrung her. She trembles but her eyes remain dry as she shifts her body into a tight ball. Anson places a hand on her shoulder. The warmth from his touch provides poor comfort. She continues to sit and stare. In a few moments, she will call the police. Anson leaves. It isn't pleasant to linger. The man will continue almost without any regrets while the woman will be haunted for the rest of her life.
    Out in the open night air, Anson takes in a breath though he doesn't need it. His next assignment is far away. He must travel by thought. He appears inside a collapsed building where two men and a woman are crawling their way through an air duct to get inside. Their headlamps light the space and their dirt-covered faces. Anson leaves them and appears inside an open area. Under a pile of fallen ceiling, a boy and his brother are unconscious. Beside them, their mother lies on her stomach, dead, like the others in the semi-darkness. One of the boys is clutching an mp3 player. Anson flicks his fingers and the player's screen brightens. He chooses a slow song and turns up the volume to the highest level and then he waits. Later, he watches the boys being carried out but he doesn't stay.
    The night is long. But as he starts walking toward his next assignment, the little child from before appears beside him. He presses his lips tight. He must be resolute. She must go back. He turns around and the child follows.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

This week's Words for Wednesday prompts are: abandon, vanish, quaver, unstring, poorMore Words for Wednesday over here.

February 05, 2025

IWSG Feb 2025: Plot Pet Peeves

Insecure Writer’s Support Group
Reading is a preference which I have to remind myself whenever I read something pretty dumb. Here are some of my plot pet peeves:

01 - When the protagonist is knocked unconscious or taken away so he/she is not a witness to an important event and neither is the reader until afterward — I only read maybe three books with this but it's still annoying because there seems to be no reason for it and if there is a reason, it isn't all that great. If the protagonist doesn't witness an event - okay fine but if the reader doesn't get to witness it either - why? So maybe in a book where readers only get one point of view it makes sense he/she wouldn't witness something when they are not there but this doesn't mean they can't get another character to tell about the event in a detail manner instead of a summary.

02 - When a character delays in telling another (mainly the protagonist) something important or hide something that could have an impact on the whole of the story or clear up a huge misunderstanding — The whole I want to protect him/her is not really much of an excuse because eventually this something will get out in the worst kind of way to make the protagonist suffer more. Once in a while, having characters tell each other secrets (sooner rather than later) is not such a terrible thing. I get so annoyed when things get dragged out for too long.

03 - A small subplot (such as a petty crime) is talked of throughout a book and then is dropped/dismissed after a while with little or no explanation — If you open up a problem, however minor, talk about it throughout the book, it should have a resolution and not a one-sentence dismissal or completely forgotten.

04 - Bad guy/villain coming back from the dead for the third or fourth time — I'm not talking about fake deaths, I'm talking about a character dies and then gets resurrected in a way that they are the same. I know some villains are so good (or loved by readers) that they get resurrected but I hate that. If a bad guy is killed off, he/she should stay dead. What purpose is it to bring back dead bad guys except to prove that the good guy will only be better if he/she battles with the same bad guy or prove how incompetent the good guy is at killing bad guys?

05 - A character (maybe the bad guy/villain or even a main character) gets minor or no punishment after they admit their wrongdoing — Some of them even get forgiven which I have always found kind of wrong especially if someone tries to kill you, forgiving them seems like saying it's okay, I don't mind dying, blab, blab... There should be consequences to people's actions, some type of punishment or karma especially if they did something terrible or wrong.

What are some of your plot pet peeves?

(I got this plot pet peeves idea from Pages Unbound over here. I couldn't comment on that post because I have no wordpress or facebook.)
  
[More about the group over at the Insecure Writer’s Support Group blog here]