Sunday, August 14, 2011

The Creative Mind and Magic…

I firmly believe magic exists. Take for example the case of the magic wand. The wand amplifies and directs desires and intentions you focus your mind on. It is creativity manifest.

Hand a plain stick with a star on it to a child or even an adult and tell them it is magic. They will take it in their hand and possibly point it at a friend (or an enemy) and wave it around a bit, fully intending on turning them in a toad, or a duck or a tree.

In that instant they believe it might, just maybe, possibly… actually happen. Most people will agree that it won’t happen…but for the briefest moment in their minds they believed. And magic lived.

If you handed a billion people a wand and they also believed for only a second that their will could manifest itself into a toad (or a duck or a tree) then for a billion seconds magic would exist.

One billion divided by 31,536000 = 31 years, 259 days, 1 hour, 46 minutes and 40 seconds = 31,709.79 years. And there are about 6 billion people on this planet. That’s about 193 years of magic. 

So I firmly believe magic exists...even if for just a moment.

Wednesday, August 3, 2011

What I did on my summer vacation...

After a summer filled with new grand baby and vacation I’m eager to start blogging again and thanks to Janet Reid, literary agent I have a great reentry in the blog-o-sphere.

Janet ran a word challenge contest, she actually does this often but this time she forgot to name the winners. She does not forget often. The challenge was to write a story in 100 or fewer words.  Post the story in the comments section of her blog (http://jetreidliterary.blogspot.com) and use the following words in the story: lyrical, angst, conspiracy, reluctant, swoop.

I wrote this: 
"The old sideboard was painted with stories. Minutely detailed life marched up drawers and across shelves. A tiny war folded around the doors, a carefully wrought conspiracy hid in the corners and a love affair gone wrong erupted over the intricately carved headpiece. Rendered mostly in browns and greens, a fragile swoop of red would brightly proclaim a birth…or a death.

This furniture was too precious to sell, too detailed to interpret, too disturbing to keep as is. I dipped my brush in generic beige and reluctantly began to extinguish 87 years of lyrical angst.
"

I checked her blog today (I had promised myself no internet while on vacation) and I won her latest word contest posted on Sunday, July 31. What a surprise to come home after 12 days in the mountains of Idaho to find my name after the word “winner”!

Winning is a great motivator to keep writing…humm…let’s see…I have this idea….