A Foolish Figure

I became very excited about writing fiction around the beginning of 2001.  I wrote this work of historical fiction in January also not-for-school.  It was intended for a writing competition, so the length was limited.  Still, I somehow managed to squeeze quite a few of my favorite things into the story:  Classical cultures, Pompeii, tragedy, self-sacrifice, and carefully researched names. 

( Slave, but Free )

Scene:  The Kebster is sitting at her computer editing what is sure to be the great novel of the 21st century.  The Kebster's dog, Arthur, is lying on the ground, semi-comatose.  The Kebster's chinchillas, George and Lennie, are chewing frantically at one of their wooden platforms--quite literally sawing off the branch they are sitting on. 


Georgen'Lennie: making threatening stances at each other Reah Reah Reah !  [that is my attempt at chinchilla nasty noises]

Kebster:  distracted from novel-of-the-century Stop it guys!

GnL: continue preparing for epic battle

Kebster:  Oh!  Do you guys need food? 

Comatose Arthur: JUMPS UP INSTANTLY AT FULL ALERT    FOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Did I mention that Arthur was a dog?


EDIT:

Two more entertaining doggie moments this evening.

1. Arthur has been chasing the two flies that are haunting my apartment.  He may be scared of many things, but in the face of flies he is a noble hunter!   I hope he has better luck catching them than I have.  At least he sticks to it longer than I.   But there is nothing quite like watching a dog chase and snap at what (from about three feet distance) looks like thin air.

2.  After his failure in procuring a moscian (totally made that word up.  But if Will can do it, why can't I?) meal, the poor starving canine had to do something.  So, he walked around in his very up-to-no-good way.  He disappeared, and suddenly I started hearing pig noises.  When I got up to investigate, I found him licking at his empty bowl, snorting and oinking, as if he were dying of starvation.  I'm telling you...you'd never guess that I feed that dog a proper amount of proper dog food AND and let him lick off almost every plate...

3. Arthur was lying half asleep a few minutes ago.  He (unfortunately for me) let out a short, but potent little fart.  He JUMPED, frightened by the noise that came from right behind him.  Then, he turned around and started searching for whatever dastartdly intruder could have mad that noise.

Unfortunately, I don't have to get up to find evidence for what made that noise...

Now he's making half hearted attempts to capture George and Lennie.  I guess it is sort of cruel for me to force him to live in harmony with what must appear to him to be mutated SQUIRRELS!

I'm just going to finish out 2000 in one swell foop, because I looked at the stories that I had written in the first half of 8th grade and they were all...weird.  Really weird.  The first two are titled "character sketches."  I have the vaguest memory of them, but I don't really know what it was all about.

The names are really funny to me.  Actually, all the names in my old stories.  I loved names.  Even now I have a very long list of the names that I will name my children, provided whoever I marry likes them (the names, not the children) and I actually want to bear...fifteen children.

Yeah.  SO not happening.

Anyway, I really love names, but I used to like really strange ones. All I can say is I really labored over those names.  :-)

So, here we have Character Sketch number one.  I suspect it to be based on a fable.

( The Horses )

Have you ever written anything so blatantly personal--as in not autobiographical, but might as well be--because you were thinking about it, and you really wanted your mom to read it, so she knew what you were thinking about, but you simultaneously didn't because you didn't want her to know what you were thinking?

I have!  And this is that story.  It was written for school, and I was pretty sure Mrs. K, my teacher (at that time she was Miss W.) would show it to my mom, thereby saving me the embarassment of bringing it to my mom, or forcing myself to bring it to my mom.

Also, going blind is my worst fear.  Well, my second worst fear, after being surrounded by spiders.  Eek!

( All Things Work Together For Good )

It appears that around the time that Y2K never happened, I was a very morbid little girl.  Yes, indeed.  Perhaps I was far too taken with Eomer? (See title of post.)  While that is an intriquing possibility, I am inclined to dismiss it.  See, in January 2000 I had only read LotR (and only five or six times at that point), I had not seen the Peter Jackson movie, for the very valid reason that they had not been made yet.  I had seen the animated movies.  But the animated movies did not have the utterly gorgeous Karl Urban in them.  Oh yes, he is utterly gorgeous. If it weren't for him, there would be very little reason to watch Star Trek XI.  True Story.  Anyway.  Because I had only read the books, I did not know what an amazing and beautiful character Eomer was, so I was only really obsessed with Sam Gamgee, and a little bit with Faramir (David Wenham.  *sigh* ...  but I loved Faramir long before David Wenham was born.  Well, long before I had even heard that David Wenham was born.  Two very different time frames, come to think of it.)  

But I digress.

Back to me being morbid.  We had to rewrite an Aesop's fable for a class, and then we had (I think...if anyone is actually reading this, and can identify a source for the second story, I'd like to hear it, because I may be misremembering) to come up with our own moral and write our own story for it.  To see proof that I was morbid, read below.

(Just to prove that you can always find someone worse than you, I should point out that I, at least, did not draw diagrams of interestingly evil torture chambers during indoor recess like most of the boys in my class.)




( Of Nests and Night )

What you are about to read constitutes the high point of my literary career.  It's true.  My seventh grade English teacher was the daughter of the kindergarten teacher (small Christian school=lots of people are related.)  My teacher liked this story and showed it to her mom.  Her mom liked it so much that she read it to the kindergarteners. 

I cannot tell you how much that went to my head...

Well, I can tell you:  It went so much to my head, that I thought it would win a national story competition.  The competition was to write a story about the first thanksgiving.  That's why we had to write the story at all.

I was young and innocent then.  I didn't realize just how politically incorrect it was.  It didn't stand a chance.  *sigh*

I did get to feel a little bit famous for a day or so, though.  I even fantasized about it being turned into a play that would be put on in the Thanksgiving Day program.  Needless to say, that never happened.  Hey, a girl can dream!

I should note that the title was my mom's idea.  I have never seen the TV show that it alludes to. 

( Truth or Consequences )