Day 5: Failure
Day five was a failure. Between work and plans, I was unable to get any writing done, but I thought resolved to do better on day six. I realized that while seven days was a good amount of time to follow a routine, this doesn’t leave any room for mistakes or undertaking a task such as writing a short story. So I needed to find a way to account for these things if I wanted to continue this series. I was able to decide on the name for the story: Parsley and the Hat Trick.
Day 6: Progress at last
Day six was my first day back to school from spring break and ended up doing a lot of writing in my class. I’m starting to think seven days is enough for the experience. I found that instead of Joan Didion’s method of having an hour before dinner and a drink to remove her from the pages, I work with just having dinner. When I have good food, that’s all I’m thinking about and I feel refreshed when I look at my pages. From what I can see, I might like working in the daytime and editing in the evening.
Here is an excerpt of today’s progress:
Parsley could be found in his office in the early morning going over his lecture notes. His previous lecture asked students to ask why Leporidae left the rabbits. The homework assignment for his class of fifteen students was to come up with a creative explanation for the disappearance. Not many students wanted to take a class so heavily based around Leporidae so he was confident his students would want to come up with something creative to be discussed.
When his clock showed an 8 a.m. time(?), Parsley hopped to his class. His students had grim looks on their faces.
“What’s going on?” Parsley asked as he hopped through the doorway. The class was in a small room with blue walls. There was a large circular window that gave the classroom a full view of the school courtyard. Every student sat on the ground behind a writing bench.
“The week of the equinox is starting today,” replied Cobalt, a brown and white spotted rabbit who was one of his star pupils. Parsley settled behind his desk in silence trying to think of a proper response. The equinoxes occurred four times a year and during the week of the equinox, a portal would open and a hand would reach out. A rabbit would be chosen to sacrifice itself to the hand. The large creature would grasp the bunny around the ears with its jaw. Parsley couldn’t imagine the creature chomping down on the captured rabbit’s head.