Day Two: A summer day without sunshine is...

... an opportunity to do a fun creative writing exercise!

My gardening customer and I agreed that it was too rainy for me to dig weeds today, so we rescheduled the appointment for next week when, we hope, the weather will be more cooperative. I stayed at home and caught up on other tasks, which included working on my article for this Friday's Island Dispatch on the benefits of having your own rain barrel and compost bin.

It is, of course, easier to write an article after doing a creative writing exercise. Once I've done the creative writing exercise, I feel looser and freer with my writing, which is especially good when producing a first draft. When you are at that stage of writing, you want to turn off the internal editor, that offers nothing but criticism and hinders the writing process. I should point out that the internal editor is not your enemy. When you are in the rewrite and revision stage of the process, you want that internal editor to be turned on to catch all of the inconsistencies and errors in your story.

So, the creative writing exercise for today.

I went to a creative random word generator. It generates one to eight random words for me. I chose eight.

These are my words: parrot, souvenir, tray, law, seagull, leech, fungus, scandal

When you write, you can use these random words or you can go to the random word generator and have a bunch of words generated for you. Click on the word random after the colon to get to the generator: random

I have set a timer for fifteen minutes. In that amount of time, I will write a story, using all eight words. You could write a story or a poem or anything else that strikes your fancy. You get fifteen minutes, regardless of your chosen format for writing.

Ready, get set, go!
The parrot was squawking loudly at me. Squawking word, not like a crow that just makes loud squawky noises. It was taunting me because I had stowed away on a pirate ship. Who stows away on a pirate ship? Didn't I know better. The parrot had spotted me. The mean guys would spot me. They would grab me with their grabby paws and they would throw me overboard with a big heave-ho. There was no law out here on the high seas.

But it was the law that I was fleeing. The cruel, horrible law, made by cruel, horrible people. I had not worked in years because all of the jobs that I could do had been taken over by machines. The only jobs left were those of servicing and worshiping said machines. You were to bring the machines everything that they needed. The machines gave us everything. We were to worship them. I refused to worship those machines. I walked away and wandered the beach, collecting souvenirs of the time when nature ruled. I picked up seashells and a few lost pieces of coral. I carefully stored my treasures on a little tray.

Unfortunately, I was discovered in my low-tech life. I had gotten rid of the computer, the smartphone, and all of the needed accessories of 21st-century life. My story was printed in the newspaper. It was a scandal. How could I live that horrid low-tech life?

I contemplated that as I bathed in the river. I could no longer live outside because all houses were smart houses. Technology ruled and the powers that be used technology to their advantage. The machines could watch your every move and they could yell through the smart phones for you to change your attitude and your life.

Hence, I found myself on the pirate ship, surrounded by outlaws. I was one, too, but the pirates had not caught me...

"Aarrggh," said a particularly pungent pirate. "What have we here? A leech, a barnacle, an extra human?"

"Speak, ye fungus, before I throw ye overboard."

"Um, er," I mumbled. I had no words. Words fled from me at the moment, leaving me speechless and in danger of a quick trip into the water, filled with jellyfish that sting and who knows what else? Why had I banished myself from unpleasantness into this danger.

A seagull landed next to me and stared at me with its glinting little eyes. I screamed. I was terrified of seagulls for no reason known to me. At this, the pirate began laughing gleefully. All of a sudden, the pirate started to sing and dance. What the heck? The song sounded familiar, like something out the of The Pirates of Penzance.

Before long, I was surrounded by all of the rest of the pirates, who were busily performing a huge production number. They were singing and dancing and exclaiming, "Aaarggh" and "Shiver me timbers."

The head pirate, who was super pungent, came up to me. Close, really close. Why did pirates have to smell so bad? I would feel embarrassed if I fainted. Of course, then I would be unaware of being thrown overboard. The pirate roared and I knew that my time was up. That was it. The jig was over. Or was it the jig is up. But I digress. How could I digress from my imminent demise.

"Are you an alto or a soprano," the pirate suddenly asked.

"Soprano," I squeaked in a high little voice.

"Here's the music." He handed me a score that looked as if it had taken a mud bath. "Learn it. Fast."

I was sent to the costume shop and was fitting in a serving wench costume and...

Time expired.
Whew. That was fun, and now, I feel looser as a writer and ready to begin the first draft of my article.

Your turn. Go for it and have fun. Remember, you don't have to make sense and you don't have to worry about spelling and grammar.