“Beginning to write, you discover what you have to write about.”
Kit Reed

author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

actually writing blog

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this fictionette does not approve of your use of gladiators
Fri 2015-08-21 20:21:40 (single post)
  • 1,195 words (if poetry, lines) long

Hola! So it's Friday again. A fictionette appears! In this corner, chthonic beasts from the darkest depths of the earth. Opposing them: a quartet of careless picnickers and their unfortunate army of disposable gladiators and household staff. It's called "A Fine Day for a Picnic," and it's unabashedly a satire of E. Nesbit's Psammead Trilogy.

Now, to be fair, I enjoy rereading those books. But they always hit a sour note when the children, piqued that one of the servants is fed up with their bad behavior and is threatening to bring such to the attention of their mother, will threaten their politically powerless serf with something or other that will undoubtedly lead to them getting sacked. Or they'll play horrible pranks on them. Or they'll take them away on their magic carpet and dump them on a desert island, and leave them there, and say, "Good, serves Cook right for being so horrible to us." I'm really not sure where Nesbit stood on social injustice, but she doesn't exactly go out of her way to show that the children are wrong to do this. In fact, it might be argued that since the Cook wound up queen of the savages (CW: racism) and happily married, it was good for the kids to carelessly strand her on that island. Argh.

So I sort of indulged in this short-short story about a nice afternoon outing with a high body count. Enjoy, I guess?

(The Word Dash writing prompts for that day, by the way, were "jugular" and "junket.")

So there's a fictionette out and a blog post done before 8:30 p.m. on a Friday, just for a change. Success! But on a less successful note, right after declaring war on my short story revision, I sort of knuckled under. I have no good excuse. All I can do is extend the mission to next week and keep working at it. I will get there eventually...

But, however, not tonight. Tonight I'm about to drive down to Denver, put on my skates, and do some ROLLing around. So now I will finish scarfing down my leftover gumbo, print out my electronically signed waiver, throw on something roughly similar to what I used to wear in high school, and get the heck outta here.

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