flamingdog

Okay, this is a little game me and my best friend used to play when we were bored teenagers and had some time to kill. We would buy a notebook and a packet of pens, and then one of us would write a couple of paragraphs on the first page, and pass the book over to the other, who would continue wherever the first person left off. There's no limit to how much you write, you can leave it in the middle of a sentence, go off on complete tangents, feel free to give the words you're left with a completely different interpretation to that intended by the previous author, and just write whatever you feel like. Try to keep at least some commonality and a narrative thread with the previous author, don't just go from a medieval setting to space 3,000 years in the future. Let yourself be inspired by each other. Don't feel like you have to edit too harshly, just write whatever.

Take it wherever you want.

As with many things, it isn't so much the end result of this that feels good, it's the process that's enjoyable. I'll be interested to see how it plays in this context.

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The sunlight beat down on his bald pate, glinting and twinkling in her eyes as she watched him through her living room window. It was hard not to resent his measured, clipped movements. The calm, decisive, measured way a bunch of keys seemed to materialise in his hand, unlock the door and disappear almost instantly. Not an ounce of wasted effort or extraneous movement. As he disappeared through the door, she let the curtain fall back over the window, casting the room once more in cool darkness. Faintly, through the double-layered glass, she heard the thump of the door slamming home behind him and it was as if her heart had dropped into her feet.

She walked slowly through to her kitchen, her padded slippers swishing against the thick pile of her carpet, then squeaking across the stained linoleum of the kitchen. Once again, her mind groped for thoughts, as her body went through the motions of filling a kettle with tap water. Once again, it came back a blank, as it so often seemed to these days. Sometimes it seemed like it had been years since she had been conscious of having a coherent thought; but the irony was definitely not lost on her. Her mouth twisted into a wry grin as the kettle began to make its customary noises. His face flashed back into her mind, and for some reason she found herself concentrating on his