I haven't been writing fiction, this is true, and I haven't really been writing much else, unless you count grumping on the internet. (That should count in the cosmic word count.) But I've been filling up with ideas and prompts and solutions to fictional problems, and that does count. It counts a lot.
The lake at Dunn's is home to the best dragon ever. I had to spend time out there on the water, quietly thinking about him, worrying that he'd tip the rowboat in a pique. (He has piques.) And he has a lot more muck and weed down there than I'd realized. This is a problem if you're the kind of dragon who gathers small treasures. And he does. I needed to realize this.
And I needed to watch the kids run around barefoot near the fireplace. Kids get black feet when they do that.
I needed to hear families bickering about floats and whose stadium chair this is and how old do you have to be to row your own boat and sit down, sit down! Get in here this second or you will never go out in a boat again! I mean it!
And the ladies running out of their cabin, demanding to know where the bees were coming from. Demanding this of other campers, as though they would have any idea how bees were getting into the ladies' cabin.
Dragons are scary, but so are bees and cabin ladies.
And mattresses, when they have been used for decades, have bones inside them, to poke up into your ribs and wake you every hour, and make you wonder just whose bones they are and where they came from and whether you are seriously sleeping on someone's skeleton, because that part over there feels like an elbow.
And that's just one place.
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