Writing journal

Assignment: Go www.fearof.net. List of the top 100 phobias. Scroll down page with eyes closed and then stop. You must write a story about the first fear that your eyes stop on.

Ligyrophobia – The fear of loud noises. More than the instinctive noise fear.

When Miss Grant left the morning teacher meeting, she was not pleased. She hated those fire drills. She couldn't quite put her finger on it, but it filled her with dread. Plus, she had planned a math test for that morning, which meant sitting in silence for two hours. She was really looking forward to that.

Now she would have to skip that, reschedule it, she'd be late with her classes... it was a whole thing. Of course, she understood how important those fire drills were, so she made sure her students were properly instructed and behaved responsibly. They were good kids. Of course, fifteen is a tough time for everyone and some of them could get a little... confrontational at times, but it wasn't even a decade ago she was in their shoes, and she still remembered those terrible teenage years.

They were one of her first cohorts and other teachers often joked that she will soon stop caring that much. They come and go, no point trying to build a relationship with them. They will forget you.

She sighed.

“Good morning class,” she greeted, trying to muster a cheerful mood.

”'morning” a couple of voices replied, while most students kept looking at their phones or chat.

“Today's test has been postponed.”

All heads perked up at the same time and the students started to cheer in a choir of “Whoo!” and “Thank you, miss!” She cherished the little happiness she managed to give those kids.

“Instead, we're going to go over the material you were supposed to study once more, who wants to come to the blackboard and solve an equation?”

The room immediately turned silent. She picked Laura to start and handed her a piece of chalk.

The minutes passed slowly, the fire drill looming over Miss Grant head. Her heart rate seemed to never slow down during that time, beads of sweat running down her spine in anticipation.

Finally, at 10:30, it happened. A loud noise broke the awkward silence the room was in while Marcus (bless him) was trying to figure out a relatively simple exercise. The students shared a look of surprise that quickly turn into understanding: that's why the test was cancelled!

The sound of the alarm started far and muffled, and quickly moved closer and closer, until it was right above them. And that's when it happened.

Miss Grant felt her shoulders getting tense and her heart rate sped up. She could feel the blood pumping in her ears. Her hands were clasping the edge of the desk. She saw her student looking at her expectantly, waiting for instruction. But she couldn't move.

“Miss Grant?” one of the girls called. She couldn't tell which one, the noise was too loud, her vision was getting fuzzy.

She felt her breath getting shallow, her throat closing around her words. The noise was piercing through her ear and her brain. She tried to speak, there were things she was supposed to tell the kids, but she couldn't remember, she couldn't find a way out of the blind terror that was grappling her.

Suddenly, there was a hand on her wrist, the room started moving, slowly at first, the steadily. She felt her legs giving in, but she didn't fall. Something warm held her head upright, sweaty palms pressing firmly.

The next thing she remembered was being offered a glass of water in the schoolyard.

“Miss Grant? Are you ok?”

“Give her some space, you dick!”

“I'm trying to help her!”

“Don't push me!”

“Stop it, guys!”

She was sitting now. Her body was still shaking, but the noise was gone. Her muscles were sore as if they had been contracted for a long time. She realised they had been.

“Thank you,” she breathed out, handing the glass back.

“She can talk!” someone whispered. It made her smile.

“I'm so sorry,” she said, “I don't know what happened.”

One of the boys – Kevin, she remembered – shyly explained: “I think you had a panic attack, Miss Grant.”

“Oh.” is all she managed to reply.

A tall, lanky man she recognised as Mr. Porter rushed to her. She instinctively stood up, finding that her body had found its strength again. She smoothed her skirt and quickly dabbed the side of her eyes to dry the tears that had been forming there.

“What happened, Miss Grant?”

She wasn't sure.

“There was a fire drill,” one of her student teased.

“I know that,” Mr. Porter replied.

“So we left our classroom,” another one said.

“In an orderly line. Left all our stuff there,” a third added.

“I had a panic attack, I'm so sorry,” Miss Grant finally said, eyes on the ground. “It's never happened before.”

“Oh,” he seemed taken aback. “I thought it was one of the students.”

“It was me,” she admitted, mortified.

“Well, the student behaved impeccably. They followed protocol and-”

“We behaved impeccably!” one of the students echoed and all the others cheered. Miss Grant finally smiled.

“Of course they did.” She said proudly.

“Let's take you to the nurse office,” he offered. She nodded, and as she left, she gave a grateful look to her student.

Before they had reached the entrance, a voice called: “Miss Grant?”

She stopped and turned.

“Do we still have a math test tomorrow?”

She took a moment to consider.

“Yep.”

“Nooooooooooo,” the whole cohort complained, but very softly, barely more than a whisper.

Miss Grant made a mental note to bring the kids a cake tomorrow.

Assignment: To create a complete short story in exactly 55 words – no more, no less

Robert tucked a strand of loose hair behind the girl's ear. What was her name again? He was a bit drunk. She was much drunker. He leaned in for a kiss. His wife would never find out.

“I gotta go to the bathroom,” the girl giggled as she left.

He waited patiently, savouring what the night may bring him.

It'd been twenty minutes before he realised his wallet was gone, and so was the girl.

You are out walking through an isolated field and you stumble upon a small flag poking out of the ground. You walk over to the flag and decide to start digging. You can’t believe what you find.

I've been here before. Well, not in this barren field, this is new. But I've been sad before. Tired. Lonely. I know this feeling, I know it will pass. Walking has always helped me clear my head. And so I walk

I try to think of nothing. I look around. There's a pile of sugar beets on my left, covered in a plastic sheet to protect them from the rain. There are clouds above, a light, shapeless grey from horizon to horizon. Pebbles beneath my shoes. A muddy patch. A flag.

I take a second look.

Yes, there's a small flag poking out of this field, about three inches tall. I kneel to pick it up, curious. It resists my pull. As I look at it, I notice that under the mud, the flag is not plain, but coloured in three horizontal stripes: purple, orange and yellow.

On a different day, I may have shrugged and walked away. Today, any distraction is welcome. I decide to take this little flag home with me and look up what it may signify. Perhaps a training flag for sailors? Maybe part of a doll set, or a miniature.

I scratch the soil with a couple of fingers. The stick is planted solidly in the ground, it goes deeper than I expected. I start grabbing handfuls of dirt, I pull some grassroots that surround the polished metal of its stick. Then, my fingertips find something hard, perhaps the base of this little flag. As I dig and dig I find that's actually an oblong metal box, five inches wide and twice as long. “A time capsule!” I think immediately.

I pull it out of the soil and wipe it with the palm of my hand, excited. Only then I notice the strange blades of metal on its side, shaped like mouldboards on a plough.

For a moment, I panic. What if it's an unexploded bomb? There's plenty in these fields, form one of the many wars fought during the last century. I stand there, frozen, holding the object in my hands, too scared to put it down.

For a moment, I consider throwing it as far as possible, but I'm not particularly athletic and the explosion would probably reach me anyway. What if I gently put it back and run? Or would tippy-toeing away be smarter?

As I ponder, I hear a clang coming from inside the object.

“This is how it ends,” I think, a bead of sweat running down my back.

I wait for the explosion, but nothing happens. Another sound. A creaky little noise like old furniture. The small flag starts to spin slowly with a sound scraping metal and what seems like a faint panting.

I'm too surprised to move. I watch the tip of the bomb unscrew itself and I swear I can hear a faint muttering, but maybe it's just the wind. The hollow piece of metal falls at my feet with a muffled thud and I instinctively jump back, letting out an embarrassingly high-pitched scream.

“Whoa whoa whoa hold still for the love of God!”

I look around, startled by the voice.

“Who's there?” I yell to the wind. Maybe I'm losing my mind. There's no one around me.

“I'm here!” I look right in front of me and I see her. She's holding on for dear life to the edge of the metal box I'm holding. I immediately flip the object in a vertical position and she finds ground under her feet.

“Phew,” she exhales. She stretches her fingers, then pulls her goggles from her eyes to her forehead and looks up at me. I stare at the small, perfectly formed human in fingerless gloves and some type of uniform that's standing in the can-shaped object I'm now holding. She seems as flabbergasted as I am.

Her eyes dart left to right, I can see her breaths getting shallow. She's scared.

“No no no don't be scared. It's all good, I won't hurt you.”

There's a long silence.

“Can you put me down then?” She says hesitantly.

I gently place the mysterious object on the ground. I want to grab her and help her out of it, but I feel like it would be rude. She quickly throws a ladder out of one side, though, so I don't need to worry about it.

She climbs down and reaches the ground, then drops on her knees and starts crying.

“Hey, hey, what's happening?” I lower myself to her eye level, practically crawling on the muddy ground. “It's all good, you're safe.”

She takes a few minutes to calm down, then rolls to a seating position, back against what I now understand is a small vehicle.

“I'm sorry, I thought... I thought I'd die in there. I've been stuck in my digger for three days, I was running out of food... I had lost hope.”

I blink, still trying to adjust to the fact that a tiny woman is talking to me.

“Thank you!” she says as if she's just realised she's supposed to, “You saved my life.”

“How did you end up in there?”

She takes a long breath.

“My people have lived underground for a very long time, but our ceiling is slowly crumbling down, burying parts of our city. My family had to leave their house, and many others with them. We can't move the soil fast enough, and soon, there will be no space to put it. So I built this digger from a metal box that fell through during a landslide...”

I pick the digger and see it is, in fact, a modified bomb casing.

“It must have come from somewhere, right? Somewhere outside. So I set myself to find a way out. But five days in, my digger got stuck...”

“You hit some roots, your vehicle got tangled...” I explain.

“But then you came.”

She gives me a small smile and wiped a tear with the back of her hand.

“No problem,” is all I can say. It truly was no trouble, apart from some dirty fingernails and a small death scare.

“They said it was hopeless, but here I am!” She says with a chuckle. “Just needed a little help.”

“But you didn't know someone would be there to help you.” It slips out of me, I realise one second too late how indelicate I've been.

“But you were there. You saw my flag.”

She's gotten a little cocky now, which I suspect is her natural disposition.

“I did.”

“See? If you don't ask for help, no one's going to come. But if you do, there's some hope.”

I'm still on all four, which is a pretty stupid position to be in to be delivered a universal truth. So I sit and rest my weight on my heels. I too have been in a hopeless hole for a while now.

Maybe it's time I put my flag out.

Assignment: To create a complete short story in exactly 55 words – no more, no less

When Greg opened his eyes, he felt only one thing: hunger. He must have starved for days, perhaps weeks.

He screamed.

Nothing.

He screamed again, and again, to no avail. His captor was heartless.

Finally, in a fit of desperation, he jumped.

“Oof, my stomach!” a sleepy voice grunted, “alright, I'll feed you. Goddamn cat.”

NOTE: I've enrolled in a creative writing course and I will try to write every day. The course provides daily prompts to help create discipline and as much as I'm not a big fan of this type of things, I've started to see the benefit of a routine in other areas of my life, so... let's do it.

Prompt:

“She approached the unfamiliar door and nervously took the key from her pocket. She took a deep breath, unlocked the door, paused, then opened it. To her horror she saw…”

She approached the unfamiliar door and nervously took the key from her pocket. She took a deep breath, unlocked the door, paused, then opened it. To her horror, she saw that the floor was covered in a thick, faded pink carpet, littered with loose hair and unidentified flakes of something that could be food as much as plaster fallen from the walls.

“This is going to be terrible for my allergies,” she sighed, bringing a clean handkerchief to her nose. The room was musty and smelled of mould.

She prompted her suitcase on a chair and held her breath until she could push the curtains aside with a flurry of dust and fully open a window that was too small and smeared with oily fingerprints.

She smoothed her tailored jacket, finding solace in the familiar sound of her white gloves on the fabric. They would never think of looking for her there.

“What to do now?” she wondered.

She needed time to think. To plan. She'd never been alone, not like that. Her daughter travelling to Thailand. Her book club, suspended. Her husband laying in their backyard, his skull cracked open by a hammer. Truly, an inconvenience after the other.

And Karen hated to be inconvenienced.

January has ended and I've done very little writing. Not for lack of time, necessarily, even though work has been busy with the final deliverables. It's for lack of focus, I think, and another feeling I can't quite put my finger on.

Actually, scrap that. The feeling is clear and familiar: it's fear, plain and simple. Not the sort that makes you sweat and increases your heart rate, but rather the paralyzing kind. Where do I start? Where do I set the action? What world, what society are we talking about? I fancied myself a practical person with a problem-solving attitude, but the truth when it comes to starting my story, I would rather do anything else – with “scrolling through Tumblr” being my most infuriatingly time-consuming activity.

I know I'm lacking a clear idea or a fully developed plot, while I have themes I want to touch upon, and perhaps that's what's making this so hard to start.

New plan

I'm very lucky to be working for a company that wants to be “people-centric” and is actually trying to follow through with this intention. Today, during the weekly company-wide meeting, a new benefit has been announced. They have signed up for a yearly business subscription with Udemy – for those who don't know, it's one of those websites that offer a bunch of online courses – which means each one of us will be able to take any course at any time. Our line manager will make a training path for each one of us, that we can discuss and change, but we can also just pick any course we want, whether it be vegan cooking or origami. The purpose is to upskill but also to keep ourselves busy during this long lockdown that's happening here in Portugal, where the Covid cases have spiked so fast we have the higher number of cases and death per million in the world.

I've already started a creative writing course on Coursera and it seemed pretty cool, but I couldn't commit enough time to it. As soon as I get my login details, I'm going to pick a creative writing course on Udemy and see if I can manage to stick to it.

Hopefully, it will get my writing going within some clear boundaries and it will feel a little less scary.

A warlock is wandering, sad, trying to go about their life. Their god had been defeated. Killed, or has disappeared. They don't know.

It's not like they need their god. They weren't super involved to start with. From time to time the warlock would be summoned to do a quick job. In exchange, the god gave them speed, accuracy and strength.

Most of all, in times of need, the warlock could ask their god for counsel, for direction. Their god was generous, so much their gifts are still with the warlock. They knew a lot and sometimes liked to chat.

Now, the warlock feels lonely.

---

A rogue is running from a bunch of armed people. She's stolen something and accidentally got caught. She bumps into the sad warlock and asks for help. With a sigh, the warlock accepts. They easily defeat the chasers and earn the rogue gratitude.

The rogue is cheerful and chatty, lives her life day by day and believes she can always get away with anything. So far, she hasn't been disproved. She throws herself headfirst in any situation and likes a fight.

When she sees this big, strong warlock without a cause, she goes bright-eyed thinking about the mischief she could cause with such protection. She decides to adopt them.

Originally, I had the idea to set the entire story within the same society, with a ruling class and a smaller, closed community living within it. However, I'm now toying with the idea of setting up at least two separate communities or political organisation that have equal power. I also want to have an enclosed geographical region I can manage.

The past

I'm thinking about a large continent island where a native community lived in the past. This community shared an ancestor with humans but evolved to have a special type of psychic power that allows them to share their consciousness. As a result, they cannot hide their intentions or lie. They live a communitarian life where feelings of ambition are rewarded only until they become dangerous to the community.

Some centuries ago, the invaders landed on the island. They found a pacific community that welcomed them and they started trying to communicate. When they understood the natives could “commune”, they got scared of what that power meant. The natives could never be fooled by double-speak or vague answers. They could read their intentions, and played by rules that were appropriate to such ability.

Soon, the natives became scared of the invaders because they had so many hidden feelings and motives. An inevitable conflict arose.

The invaders were better armed, but the natives knew the territory and could coordinate without effort. The native hadn't had a conflict in many centuries, and ultimately were not equipped to defend themselves not from a practical point of view, but because they lacked the strategic thinking and ruthlessness of the invaders. Even if their consciousness were bare in front of each other, they didn't always agree, and there was no leadership. They also had too much empathy towards these people they basically considered distant cousins, while the invaders just saw them as “others”.

It didn't take long for the invaders to virtually destroy the natives. The surviving natives eventually integrated with the invaders' society and mixed children were born, both with and without the ability to commune.

_note (to self)

I was going to make this longer and more complete and then realised there is absolutely no reason to do that. You know damn well you are going to review it a hundred times if it's a draft, but if you post it you post it and it becomes its own thing. Not final, just a thought-dump, as it should be.

This character was born into a middle-class family and had the opportunity to get bored. They chase a sense of unknown and disbelief, they want to be surprised.

They believe most things to be predictable. They got into mechanics, chemistry and engineering because it was a way to experiment with things, they live at the edge of the scientific discoveries of their time.

They like being a spectator of unusual things, but they derive no pleasure from other's pain. In fact, they have enough empathy to feel conflicted, sometimes, by their need for discovery and experimentation.

That's why they've decided to live most of their life in isolation, even though the big masses are a good source of unpredictability on a small scale.

Their family is mainly composed of merchants who most definitely do not understand their priorities, but they are supportive and miss them sometimes.

They like reading but they are often bored by the fact that plots are predictable and go back to the same tropes. In their mind, personal relationships are easily mapped out on a decision tree. The perfect balance of the natural world is based on causes and effect, and they sometimes resent it. They wished they were born before humans had neatly categorised everything they could find.

They are asked to help our party because of their deep scientific knowledge. They are pretty apolitical to start with, motivated only by curiosity and a need to escape dreadful boredom.

They will find themselves in the shoes of an oppressed group and experience the surprise that comes from expriencing plain injustice. Their actions will have consequences on other people.

I have realised one thing, and that is that I have no idea how to build a world. My main focus has always been characters. I'm not sure I'm any good at it but it feels comfortable. Building a world feels like an impossible task. I guess that's why I've always leaned towards fanfiction instead, where the world is already built for you.

However, I am a pragmatic person and as always I will approach the matter with a problem-solving attitude! Don't know about something? Learn about it. So I've started watching a few videos on worldbuilding to orient myself and find my foot.

What I've learnt so far

Some people are super into worldbuilding and sometimes get lost in it, so much they end up not writing the story at all. That's something I can definitely see happening for me, however, I think I'm more likely to get stuck before even starting, overwhelmed by such a daunting task.

I started with a short series by Tale Foundry, which has some interesting insight.

Place and setting

A place is determined by period and location. Eg: medieval Italy

A setting is determined by period, location, level of conflict and duration: Eg. a medieval Italian villa frantically trying to create a quarantine in the days before the black plague arrives.

I found this distinction very helpful to focus on the relevant parts of the world I will need to build. It also helped me picturing my world not as a fixed thing where the action happens but rather a series of dynamic settings that happen over time.

The 3 F of worldbuilding.

The video touched upon what they called the 3 F of worldbuilding:

*Free design: free development of a fictional world, independently of settings *Fixed design: designed based around specific settings *Found design: design that needs to be done because of events happening in the story

I'm mostly interested in Fixed design, as I've always done well setting some boundaries to my imagination. The world will be functional to the story I want to tell.

Worldanvil.com

I've watched a few other videos about writing fantasy story and more than one mentioned World Anvil, which is described as “a set of worldbuilding tools that helps you create, organize and store your world setting.”

I may give it go.