Day: August 21, 2022

Now You See It, Now You Don’t

Fandango6 Comments

In case you just got a notification or an email about my flash fiction challenge post and then linked to it and got a “not found” message, that’s because I fat-fingered my iPhone keypad.

I saved my draft and intended to schedule it to be posted at 3 am Pacific Time tomorrow. But when I went to schedule it, my finger must have hit “Publish Immediately” instead. That’s one of the perils of posting from a smartphone using a tiny, virtual keypad rather than from a laptop or desktop with a standard keyboard.

But fear not. I moved the prematurely published post back to my draft folder and have now scheduled it to be published in the wee hours of the morning. Well, the wee hours of my morning, anyway.

So please accept my apologies. And in case you received neither a notification nor an email about that post, then never mind.

Sunday Poser — Creative Juices

Fandango4 Comments

For this week’s Sunday Poser, Sadje wants to know what gets our creative juices flowing? She specifically asks whether it’s…

  • Images
  • questions
  • word prompts

My short answer is all of those do. I am happy to respond, as time permits, to all three types of prompts. But in addition, my imagination can be stimulated by something I read in a newspaper or see on TV. Something that shows up on my iPhone’s newsfeed. Or just something that happens to me in the real world. Maybe a song or a smell will spark my imagination.

So I suppose my bottom line is that just about anything can trigger a gushing of my creative juices.

Photo credit: chriswinfield.com.

The Addiction

Fandango11 Comments

“What’s this, Dad?” Eric asked his father.

“Oh that?” Jeff said. “That’s just a memento of my days as a high-stakes gambler when I used to live in Vegas before your mother and I met.”

“But what is it?”

“It’s an antique petard, son,” Jeff said. “It’s a small, bell-shaped bomb filled with explosives that was used for blowing up gates and walls when breaching fortifications. It was an iconic battle device used back five or six hundred years ago.”

“So how is it that it’s a memento of your gambling days in Las Vegas?” Eric asked.

“Well, son,” Jeff said, “shortly after I met your mother, I confided in her that I had floated a loan with some rather unsavory types in order to support my gambling habit. She was really pissed and threatened to stuff a petard up my ass and light the fuse unless I paid off my debt and never gambled again. I stopped gambling immediately because she was the best thing that could ever happen to me and I didn’t want to lose her.”

“But why did you still have the petard?” Eric asked.

Jeff sheepishly smiled. “It’s your mother’s way of keeping me on the straight and narrow. It serves as a reminder for me to think twice about ever gambling again.”

Written for these daily prompts: Word of the Day Challenge (memento), Fandango’s One-Word Challenge (gambler), My Vivid Blog (iconic), and Ragtag Daily Prompt (float).

Cellpic Sunday — 08/22/22

Fandango8 Comments

John Steiner, the blogger behind Journeys With Johnbo, has this prompt he calls Cellpic Sunday in which he asks us to post a photo that was taken with a cellphone, tablet, or another mobile device. I thought this might be fun so I decided to join in.

Is this a prehistoric monster, a dinosaur whose remains I dug up in my backyard?

Or is it a potato that I pulled out of the back of the bin in my kitchen?

I’m going with a dinosaur.

If you wish to participate in this fun cellphone photo prompt, please click on the link to John’s post at the top of my post to see his photo and to read his instructions.

The Letter U

Fandango10 Comments

Deb, over at Nope, Not Pam, has this weekly challenge called A Letter a Week where she gives us a place, an emotion, an adjective, a verb, and an animal all starting with the same letter. Then she asks us to write a post using those items and the letter she has given us, which this week is the letter U.

Here are Deb’s U-words:

Place – Universe
Emotion – Uncomfortable
Adjective – Unadorned
Verb – Unnerve
Animal – Umbrella Bird

Unadorned, uncomfortable, and unnerved as I was, I was bound and determined to find the rare umbrella bird.

When I finally found one, I saw that it was about the same size as a crow and I discovered that it loves to eat large insects and spiders. It also eats frogs, lizards, and small birds. It has a large curved beak that helps it to pick fruit and berries from the treetops.

Yet after years of searching the universe high and low for the umbrella bird, my overall reaction was that I was unimpressed.