I was all ready to head out the door this morning when it suddenly hit me that today was Sunday, not Monday. I was about to go to school on a day I should be at church.
We were a little late today, but at least we made it for sacrament. One of the speakers told a fictional story that I liked about a waiter who dealt with a regular customer who would always say he liked the food, but complained there wasn't enough bread. The waiter doubled the amounts of bread he was getting for a few days, until he was up to eight slices with his meal. The man still wasn't satisfied. One day the waiter, very determined to prove he could make this customer happy, took a nine-foot-long loaf of bread (a baguette, perhaps) and cut it in half. When the man had finished eating, he said, "Good as always... but I see you're back to serving just two slices of bread".
The speaker compared it to how we often react to receiving blessings from God. He gives us great things, but sometimes we are blind to what we have. We might compare some of our more obvious blessings with those our peers have, complaining that our friend has eight blessings while we only have two, even though our two are very meaningful gifts in our lives.
I got some things done that I wanted to do today. Studied notes a bit. Drew. I wrote the first pages of my "Stars and Finches" draft. It was weird. It was late a few nights ago and before I went to bed I tapped out a few sentences that I ended up really liking (My favorite is "Water was his comfort food; he drank it like a drug", but that might go in Chapter 2 or 3).
I've never had a strong beginning for this story, since I keep picking different starting points and have been told several times that I need to "rewind" and "start the story earlier". I usually keep the Google Docs file for at least one story open in another tab, so when I got tired of reading through my horitculture and chocolate notes, I glanced over and added onto my loose sentences.
I've been picking at this story on and off over the last three years, unable to commit to a magic system because various Internet searches keep leading me to people saying, "Someone else has done that" or "This is the system I used in my published novels" or "That's such a cliche thing". Still comes as a shock to me that "disabled princess in a wheelchair" is considered overused, because... I have never seen anyone else use that idea. Or a nervous wreck of a king who has meltdowns when his people twist his words. I just can't resist the idea of a wheelchair throne (which, as stated, I have never seen), or powerful authority figures in distress who accidentally hurt people because they're scared and everyone hates them.
Anyway, within fifteen minutes I had set myself up for a decent plot, slipped in a bunch of world-building details, invented a numerical system and some magical instruments, flipped the narrator's education level 180 degrees, and accidentally rebuilt my entire world so that all the colors are different from ours and the ocean is so polluted with decades of old, acidic magic that it will kill you if you're in it for more than a few minutes. Huh. That'll work.
That's the thing- I plan out my writing projects, but I always have to plan them loosely, because only when I get to a certain point do I come up with the "magic" I need to spark something off.
I'm leaning towards calling it Painting Finches In the Stars since in the current draft Ethel has a passion for painting, but I'm not really sold on it yet. Hopefully something will strike me later on when the story is more solid and not prone to being scrapped and rewritten entirely every few months. I'm also partial to The Finch In the Boardroom...
