Garden of Thought

With thanks - or blame? - to both thisbluespirit and john_amend_all - I picked up that 5 fandoms meme today, except I don't seem able to think in 50-word bits just now, so after much pruning I've wrangled each one into a drabble-size instead. Brevity isn't always my strength.

1: Pick five fandoms. List them in alphabetical order. Okie-dokie...

1. All Creatures Great and Small
2. Doctor Who
3. Lord of the Rings
4. The Scarlet Pimpernel
5. Watership Down

2: Visit this site (http://plagiarist.com/poetry/random) to find your first RANDOM POEM OF POWER. Write down the 5th line (yes, even if it's an E.E. Cummings poem and you wind up with an apostrophe). Repeat five times and - you guessed it - list 'em in alphabetical order! (No cheating, mind! This is a challenge and it's always been about creativity.)

3: I think you can see where this is going. Write a very quick 50-word half-drabble (Pfft! I need more words than that!) for each fandom (try to do it all in one sitting - make your brain explode!), using the line from the poem as a prompt. You don't have to include it in the half-drabble - it's just inspiration.

4: Bravo! Have a cookie.

( Well, here's the results! )
.

 

( Once more - the 15 revealed )

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( Response for lolmac once more )

 

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John_amend_all:

 

( and finally, responses for kerravonsen )

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 Whew! That took a bit of doing, some of those.  Thank you so much to everyone, that was grand fun. :-D
 

 

I may have had to miss Fic Rush (again) but at least I was not entirely without a bit of writing going by.  I had a lot of responses and it took a while to crack some of those literary nuts, but now it's done.  I'll post the results in chunks.

First of all, here's my fifteen:

( Fifteen characters tossed in a salad bowl )

And now....

 

...

 

Comment with BLUE SNOOD and I'll give you five questions to satisfy my curiosity. Go post the answers on your journal with these instructions and spread the madness!

And here are the questions nentari of the Orange Knickers asked me, ( under here )

Snagged from curuchamion, who had the good sense to yoink it from eponymous_rose, the more the merrier - and besides, I needed something like this today.
( The instructions )
Whew! Considering I had to do them while popping back and forth on errands and other tasks, and the mood being all over the map I think I'm fairly pleased with how they came out. Tiny snippets like this are strangely difficult to do, because of the constraint of the story arc to a mere 50 words. But hey, it had poems for the prompts! I couldn't resist giving it a try.

( All Creatures Great and Small )
( Doctor Who )
( Gilligan's Island )
( Horatio Hornblower )
( Lord of the Rings )

Snagged from infiniteviking, the DRABBLES IN SPACE meme!

1) Get a title from here or some other title generator.
2) Add "IN SPAAAACE" at the end.
3) Write a drabble!

Good fun for a quiet afternoon, excepting that mine went a fair bit longer than a drabble. Here is the result in which Ian takes an unexpected trip:

( Something in the Husband....in Spaaaace! )

Heaven forbid I should neglect my lemminglike duty to fulfill the meme buckets on LJ - and besides, I have half an hour to kill and can't think of anything really useful I can do in that small of a chunk of time.
( Three!...um, I mean, in a meme. Not in velvet. )

stellastars and I were noting how so many of these multi-question memes seem to have been written up by bored 14-year olds with a bent towards the modern dating scene. Having never been of that variety even when I was teen myself, I thought I'd come up with a few questions of my own for the more old-fashioned among us. Shiny new meme as follows (modify as you see fit and send it out to play):

Old Fashioned Meme

01. Have you ever purchased old-fashioned clothing simply because it was old-fashioned? And worn it?

02. In public? When it wasn’t a ‘historic era’ event?

03. Have you ever been told that you were born in the wrong century? By who? Did they mean it as a compliment or an insult?

04. Men are at their most manly for me when dressed in: A) hoodies and trendy jeans. B) flannel and denim. C) tweed and herringbone with leather patches. D) silk and velvet.

05. Waistcoats. Reaction?

06. Long, thick, full skirts with enough material in them to dress an entire village of skinny urban waifs. Reaction?

07. Old style names: A) I wish I had one. B) I use one online/secretly. C) I name all my pets and children with them. D) I’m getting my name legally changed to one next week.

08. You’re stranded in the bucolic countryside. Who would you like to come calling?

09. You have the wondrous opportunity to recite poetry beneath a blooming cherry tree whilst others listen rapturously. What poem do you recite?

10. You’ve done something marvelous in the drawing room. What is it?

11. You’ve looked up a vintage recipe and managed to cook it just because it was mentioned in a book you were reading. Was it edible?

12. Piercing: A) Scream and faint gently but dramatically. B) Oh, nose, tongue, anything floppy is fair game. C) Odds fish, my dear, I wouldn’t dream of it!

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( And my own answers, since it wouldn't be fair to set it out there on the waves of LJ without doing it myself. )

Yoinked from lothithil just because my curiosity got the better of me.

1. Take five books off your bookshelf
2. Book #1 -- first sentence
3. Book #2 -- last sentence on page fifty
4. Book #3 -- second sentence on page one hundred
5. Book #4 -- next to the last sentence on page one hundred fifty
6. Book #5 -- final sentence of the book
7. Make the five sentences into a paragraph

I really thought about 'cherry picking' some books for this based on what I know of their literary styles, but thought "Naaah - really pick up those five books!" The five books in question were the actual stack I currently have by my bed which happen at the moment to all be nonfiction and I just wondered what they would look like in a blender. It really isn't always like this...

Book #1 Parkinson's Law, Prof. C. Northcote Parkinson
Book #2 The Essential Erasmus, Desidarius Erasmus, Dolan trans.
Book #3 Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar, Thomas Cathcart
Book #4 On Government, Cicero, Grant trans.
Book #5 On Old Age, Friendship and Divination, Cicero, Falconer trans.

*place in a box and shake vigorously*

Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. I feel that entirely too many people confuse what are really natural gifts or endowments with virtues! If we choose to behave as if there is a God and we get to the end and it turns out there isn't, it's not a big deal (well, maybe we've lost the ability to thoroughly enjoy the Seven Deadly Sins, but that's small potatoes compared to the alternative), if we bet there isn't a God, and get to the end only to find out there is a God, we've lost the Big Enchilada. For neither the Spartans, who invented your life-style and way of talking and who recline daily at their meals upon couches of wood, nor even the Cretans, who never even reclined at meal-times at all, maintained their states more successfully than the Romans - who find time to enjoy themselves as well as to work. "Nothing could please me better," Quintus said, and when this was said, we arose.

Whew!