Baggage Lost

I miss my boomerang. It was nice, and plastic, and yellow. It's true that it had never successfully returned yet, but it might have. It vanished into the cricket nets at the beginning of the week and was never seen again. Rest in peace, yellow boomerang; Your replacements didn't do well, being unaware as I was as of their decorative and non-returning nature and they were of course useless. Oh, fie to the very idea of non-returning boomerangs! What nonsense it is. Being unemployed is tough enough without the idea of duplicitous projectiles. Oh, at some point I will have to dump this baggage of boomerangs and mental instability, or double down and go all the way to the extreme. You can get rid of baggage if you need to, but remember it is sad as well as freeing to watch parts of your past float back into river and away, and then walk away to the rest of your life.

The Quirky Muffin will be only three posts away from the mystic four hundredth when this one goes up, and on the most part it's going well. There is one item of baggage to the blog that may need to be cut loose though, the story known as 'The Glove'. No matter how I approach it I can't seem to follow it up in a way that's appropriate to me. It just becomes generic every time. Jasper Fforde talks about the 'narrative dare' in the way he writes books and stories, which is something with which I very much identify. There is no 'narrative dare' to make 'The Glove' interesting to write so far. 'Oneiromancy' has the dare of being a story build around an obscure word, 'Wordspace' is essentially 'write a story where the characters are words', and 'Triangles' is all about parallel universes and what lives between. What is 'The Glove' about? 'Night Trials' was tricky too as it was first, and also similarly lost its distinctness as it went on.

Perhaps 'The Glove' is about alien conspiracies on a world dominated by bagpiping spies? Or is it a young man's passage from innocence to adulthood via a journey around the alien world? Is it a classic coup on a world full of tartan? What is the dare? It's going to bug me. What are the logical consequences of a world's historical culture and technology being isolate and divided between two distant capital cities? It needs some thought, but obviously that would introduce a degree of tension in families and populaces as progeny choose which direction to go. Then, what would become of those skilled in both? Ah... That's an interesting question, as is the question of how you enforce such a partition of skills. What is the hidden structure that allows that to happen, and should it?

Wheels are turning finally. Maybe some more unhelpful baggage has drifted downstream. Lets hope it didn't have the cutlery or the dinghy in it too.

O.