Day: May 21, 2024

Simply 6 Minutes — The Airbnb for Me

Fandango7 Comments

“Dad, why is Mom making us go away without her?” Brian asked.

“Yes, why isn’t Mom with us. We’ve never been on a trip without Mom. Why this time?” Rachel asked. “And where are we going, anyway?”

“We’re almost there, kids.” I said. “Mom has this big project for work that she needs to finish and we were distracting her, so she rented us a vacation home that she thought we’d all enjoy. This way we’ll all be out from underfoot and she will be able to focus on completing her project.”

“A vacation home?” Brian said. “Does it have a pool?”

“Is it in the mountains or by the ocean?” Rachel asked.

“I don’t know, but Mom said it was a fitting place for us and we should be arriving any minute now,” I said.

Brian screamed out. “Is that it? OMG! I love it. It’s a giant Beagle dog!”

Rachel said, “It’s just our dog, Ralphie. He’ll love it. Dad, isn’t this cool?”

“Yeah, cool,” I said. “But I think it’s your mother’s way of telling me I’m in the dog house for a while.”

Written for Christine Bialczak’s Simply 6 Minutes Challenge. Image credit: Alan Levine, published under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic licence.

Truthful Tuesday — The Good Old Days

Fandango8 Comments

Frank, aka PCGuyIV, is back with another episode of Truthful Tuesday. The idea behind Truthful Tuesday is for us to respond to the question (or questions) Frank asks and to be 100% truthful in our responses. No glib answers, no funny business, no fibs. Just raw honesty.

For this week’s Truthful Tuesday, Frank wants to know…

Whether going back in time to an earlier age or just waking up as a younger version of yourself, many writing prompts involve the idea of being young again, having to repeat some part of your life. My question to you is, Do you enjoy these kinds of prompts or do you cringe at the apparent obsession with being “young again”? Is there a particular reason for your answer?

I suppose we all reminisce about the “good old days” of our youth from time to time. Hell, I spent the whole month of April, in my unofficial A to Z Blogging Challenge posts, reminiscing about my mid-teens to late 20s. But my philosophy about the past is “what is done is done” and no matter how much I might wish to go back and have a do-over, no such thing exists in reality.

I’ve also noticed that in most of my dreams, I am younger than I actually am, and then I wake up and realize that I’m an old fart. So I’d say that in my subconscious mind, I revisit my youth and my younger days almost nightly. I don’t need to do so on my blog during my waking hours, as well.

Still, I don’t mind being asked in a prompt about going back in time or being young again. Like in a recent edition of Share Your World, when Di asked, “Is there any time in your life you would like to relive?” my response was essentially that…

I think I’d rather reflect back on my life through my memories than to actually go back and re-live it. That said, I have no issue writing about my past or my memories of a more youthful me in response to such prompt questions. Besides, I tend to believe that the experience of re-living a part of my life probably wouldn’t be as pleasant as the memories of it usually are.

Fandango’s Story Starter #150

Fandango9 Comments

It’s time for my weekly Story Starter prompt. Here’s how it works. Every Tuesday morning (my time), I’m going to give you a “teaser” sentence or sentence fragment and your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to build a story (prose or poetry) around that sentence/fragment. It doesn’t have to be the first sentence in your story, and you don’t even have to use it in your post at all if you don’t want to. The purpose of the teaser is simply to spark your imagination and to get your storytelling juices flowing.

This week’s Story Starter teaser is:

Arlene panicked when she realized she had sent the text to her boss, rather than to her boyfriend.

If you care to write and post a story built from this teaser, be sure to link back to this post and tag your post with #FSS. I would also encourage you to read and enjoy what your fellow bloggers do with their stories.

And most of all, have fun.

FOWC with Fandango — Chord

Fandango9 Comments
FOWC

Welcome to Fandango’s One-Word Challenge (aka, FOWC). I will be posting each day’s word just after midnight Pacific Time (U.S.).

Today’s word is “chord.”

Write a post using that word. It can be prose, poetry, fiction, non-fiction. It can be any length. It can be just a picture or a drawing if you want. No holds barred, so to speak.

Once you are done, tag your post with #FOWC and create a pingback to this post if you are on WordPress. Please check to confirm that your pingback is there. If not, ÿplease manually add your link in the comments.

And be sure to read the posts of other bloggers who respond to this prompt. Show them some love.