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The Creative Endeavours of a Cat

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The Cat In The Hat:
I figured I may as well make my own thread. I'm a story writer and almost finished (I hope!) NaNoWriMo for the fifth year. This will probably have excerpts, my favourite bits, from that novel/ones in the same series. It is titled 'To Kindle A Flame'. Comments are very much welcome, including feedback like how you feel it could be improved, etc. Be as harsh as you like.

Hello, world!

The Cat In The Hat:
Am I allowed to double-post in my own creative journal-thing? ;)
So just a bit of context: the story is essentially that of a search for truth by a futuristic girl. She had always believed what she got told to be truth, and then the Bible came into her radar and she realised that she really had to make a choice. Her name is Adira, her mother's Dorothy, her friend/adopted sister's Emily, her friend met during the book Tom, and the mentor-type helping Adira to discover things (without bias, but he does agree with the Bible not the Ruler, the competing ideology), Mr Saunders.
My first excerpt, quite possibly my favourite:

Suddenly awakening to the time, Adira hurried out of the building and into the twilight. I spent all day here? she marvelled inwardly. The time had gone by like a flash as she avidly consumed the words on the pages of the book. When she closed her eyes, briefly, she thought she could still see them, sharp and clear and confusing.
What if everything she had always been told… wasn’t true?
Was it possible?
[…]
What was the truth?
The questions buzzed around her head like a thousand flies that were trapped in there. All of a sudden they seemed like weights that lay heavily on her, a burden that would not go away. If that was truth — then all she had learnt, all she had been taught, was lies.
An ugly word.
What if?

The Cat In The Hat:
Today I finally got to introduce one of my favourite characters (at ~45K words). I rather like the way I introduce him (wrote this pretty much just now), although it definitely needs a lot of work. In this, Emily and Adira are out shopping at the market. The tildy is a scene break.



[...] In near-silence, the pair went through the shopping list uneventfully.
With one item to get, something happened.
Emily misjudged the distance between herself and someone else and nearly knocked the short, hurrying man off his feet. He turned, his face in almost complete shadow from his hat, which was tilted low over his forehead, partly in an attempt to recover his balance.
In the process, his gaze fell on Emily.
~
I hate crowds. Someone bumped against Neil for the second time that morning, and he glanced up, ready to let loose a verbal tirade against the disturber of his peace, then let it go out of sheer exhaustion. This day of all days I have no patience. He pulled his hat down lower over his face, hoping that no unlucky chance would make him meet anyone he’d once known. Something he had feared ever since…. He cut off the thought halfway.
Now he could barely see. Great. But still, it was better than the alternative. Head down low, Neil charged through the crowd, his small yet surprisingly solid frame ploughing through the people. Maybe I should go to a different market; this one’s getting horribly busy now.
The last item on his list was got, his small robotic shopping trolley running obediently behind him. It crossed his mind that the manufacturers must have had a sense of humour; no sane person would have constructed a shopping trolley with the ordinary structure, but adding on a head to give instructions to, and short legs to allow the device to run after its owner, instead of wheels or traction pads. He was faintly aware of surprised and sometimes annoyed glances as his trolley followed him. That make was from long ago, well, eleven years ago. No one had those any more.
Neil didn’t care. He just wanted to get his supplies for the month and get out again. Once more he inwardly cursed the deliverers and their determination that being out on an island, he could hardly expect them to deliver food and other necessities of life to him: he had to leave his home and go there. His lips turned down at the remembrance, and it was followed by a whole host of inconvenient memories.
This was definitely the wrong day to come: the eleventh anniversary of the day his life stopped.
Another person knocked into him as he charged towards the exit, with no other thought than to get out of the place. In stumbling to get his balance, Neil looked up through the shadow cast by his akubra and looked straight into a pair of eyes that he knew.

The Cat In The Hat:
In celebration of just having won NaNoWriMo (literally just now) I shall put up another excerpt.



“Well,” he said with a flicker of a smile, “that’s a question I can’t answer. Stuff happened to me, and I had to get out of there. Look, kid, I’m sorry, and maybe if I went back and had it over again, I’d do it differently — ”
~
He stood in purest shock as the words came from his mouth and, unbidden, called up a whole host of recollections.
I’d do it differently. He had scarcely thought of it before, in the time after the nightmare began. But now, now that he’d said it aloud, Neil began to wonder if it wasn’t true.
I had to do that. I had to get away. Or was that run away?
He shook his head, trying to dislodge the thoughts that were occurring to him, unsettling ones.

Coolmate:

--- Quote from: The Cat In The Hat on November 30, 2020, 09:18:39 pm ---- snip from above -

--- End quote ---

Hey Cat in the Hat! :)

Congratulations, this is amazing news, thanks for sharing! ;D These excerpts have been a good read too :)

Coolmate 8)

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