As we celebrate my giveaway during September on BookFunnel and Instafreebie, I thought I’d share one more piece from my first year in blogging. This brief post touches on the beauty of inspiration found in the littlest things, and what began as a convenient insertion for the sake of a word count quickly became one of the most important symbols of a novel series.
Yes, I still have this necklace, and yes, I’ve received a few other pieces of jewelry over the years I wouldn’t mind writing about. I’ll never top my son Bash, though–all it takes is an acorn for him to spin a tale about fire trees and squirrel firefighters saving the acorns of safety.
Lesson learned, writers: never underestimate the power of a found thing. x
Emily Ebeling, the professional photographer and friend who compiled the lovely winter shots I posted in “Where and Why I Write,” also took a few shots of this:
Just a necklace, right?
The actual finding took place a while ago. At the time my graduate school experience mirrored the Minnesota spring: cold and messy. One afternoon I spotted this bright red in the muck. Even with the dirt and oil, I could see it was something beautiful. It just needed a home.
My daughter loved it too, which is nice, until one realizes that a baby prefers to show her affection by slobbering all over it. Often the necklace ended up by my computer because it was in the only room we kept closed off. During my first NaNoWriMo, I pulled elements from the book room into my story because, well, they were there, and I was…
7 thoughts on “#blastfromthepast in #writing #fantasy to #celebrate my #arc #giveaway: “In Praise of Found Things.””
Funny story. During my son’s first parent-teacher conference in kindergarten the teacher sized us up for a moment and said the following.
“Well, is smart. REALLY smart. And when he’s on task he’s usually the first one done. But we have trouble getting him to get started sometimes.”
“What do you mean?” asked my wife.
“Oh the usual stuff, he was looking at the wall, or out the window, or at the decorations in the room. So we just had to get him to focus on his paper. We thought it may have been that he was over-stimulated, so we put him in the office to see if that helped.”
My wife nodded, but I had no idea what “the office” was, so I interjected, “What ‘the office?’”
“Oh! Well, it’s a divider we can put around a child’s desk to take away distractions and help them keep their minds on whatever assignment we’re doing.”
I laughed. “Oh yah, that didn’t work.”
The teacher looked as me, “That’s RIGHT. But why would you say that?”
“Because he probably found a hole in the divider and starting treating it as a docking port for his pencil – which had become a spaceship.”
The teacher looked at me with headlight eyes. “How did you KNOW that?”
I raised my hand, “That was ME my entire time in grammar school.”
LMAO! That is an AWESOME story, and you totally need to turn that into a scifi kid’s story where the pencil DOES become a spaceship that shrinks the kid and off he goes while the class thinks he’s just in “the office”… 😀
Jean Lee's World 
Funny story. During my son’s first parent-teacher conference in kindergarten the teacher sized us up for a moment and said the following.
“Well, is smart. REALLY smart. And when he’s on task he’s usually the first one done. But we have trouble getting him to get started sometimes.”
“What do you mean?” asked my wife.
“Oh the usual stuff, he was looking at the wall, or out the window, or at the decorations in the room. So we just had to get him to focus on his paper. We thought it may have been that he was over-stimulated, so we put him in the office to see if that helped.”
My wife nodded, but I had no idea what “the office” was, so I interjected, “What ‘the office?’”
“Oh! Well, it’s a divider we can put around a child’s desk to take away distractions and help them keep their minds on whatever assignment we’re doing.”
I laughed. “Oh yah, that didn’t work.”
The teacher looked as me, “That’s RIGHT. But why would you say that?”
“Because he probably found a hole in the divider and starting treating it as a docking port for his pencil – which had become a spaceship.”
The teacher looked at me with headlight eyes. “How did you KNOW that?”
I raised my hand, “That was ME my entire time in grammar school.”
My wife just sighed.
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LMAO! That is an AWESOME story, and you totally need to turn that into a scifi kid’s story where the pencil DOES become a spaceship that shrinks the kid and off he goes while the class thinks he’s just in “the office”… 😀
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hmm
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Beautiful!
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Thank you so much!
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I’m pleased you still have it. Everything needs to find its own destination and home. xxx
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Indeed. 🙂 xxxxx
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