One Page for 4/20/2019
I could’ve sworn I’d posted something (or had written a one pager to post) between March 27 and today, but it looks like I overestimated my willingness to think through even a page before going on vacation and visiting family. Today I’m happy with myself for finally being over my jet lag and having slept through a night without waking up in the middle of it. Even happier, I coaxed myself to write a page with another genre in mind — fantasy!
This was difficult for me, as I realized it’s been a while since I’ve even read fantasy or even YA fantasy, and also because lately I’ve worried that I’ve begun to lose my imagination. That’s of course not the biggest problem in the grand scheme of things, but for someone whose life goal is to publish a novel — I’ve already achieved my goal of writing one, technically :) — it is a real concern. However, I’m also beginning to believe that it’s truly a muscle everyone can work on. Although speed is not the most appropriate metric to measure myself on, I’d like to eventually write some fantasy without telling myself I can’t and then getting up to check my phone, take a sip of my tea, fix my cuticles, organize my stationery…you get the drift! This time, I thought back to the first episode of the last season of Game of Thrones, which I watched having watched well, two episodes of the first season ages ago. Here goes.
The words:
Prompt: After three days, the storm let up and the winds died down. But there were dark clouds on the horizon, and we knew we didn’t have long. They’d be out looking for us, so we had to load up on supplies, hit the road toward…
Response: …my cousin Silmka’s settlement further down the river. To be honest, I couldn’t be sure that she would welcome us, let alone protect us from the [Driftlings] we’d gotten off our tracks — up until now. Of course, I couldn’t tell the rest of my party any of this. Party isn’t even the right word for us either. We’d banded together out of a lack of alternatives: me, a former tutor in the castle, then other castle residents fighting now to survive alongside the less privileged settlement dwellers who were suspicious of us and always would be. Like Silmka was of me, or became so after I had to start keeping my correspondence with her plain and unspecific, when she’d wanted to press me about my students or their families. She, in turn, made it plain that I’d become one of “them” now, and our letters had ceased. But when one from her arrived three weeks ago, asking if I’d heard anything about recent Driftling sightings — before they turned into massacres — and whether as blood family I would honor our bond and share information, I’d told her. That the security and military ministry heads had gathered some survivors to [“]study their immunities.[“] I’d risked a random search of outgoing letters from the castle. Silmka hadn’t replied, but I’d hoped she honor our bond in exchange now.
Originally published at J Wang.
