You all were buying your skeletons?
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post deleted by
author for reasons unknown…
c’est la vie, mon brave.
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Our tenth story is now in!
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Seems odd that the “notorious procrastinator” … per Mrs * that is me … is not the actual procrasinator this go around! Y’all need to get those stories into piggy ASAP so he winds up being the one that misses the deadline. Because that would be hilarious.
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I have, in fact, not even started yet. I’m planning to write mine this weekend and live blog my panic and self-loathing while I do.
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Well, if you buy a plane ticket, I’ll pick up you at the airport, supply the liquor and provide a full, drunken accounting of your combined efforts. I have 2 brand spanking new bottles that are ready to make us regret our decisions (about opening them, not our choices in significant others 
)
Mrs * would like to me suggest that you should tell Madam Fender that Savanna is wonderful this time of year. “We can leave you two miscreants under the oaks with the bugs while the ladies drive over and enjoy some shopping.”
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I’ve submitted my ghost story in Word. It’s about a Country House garden that feeds on its visitors. Wed 23/Oct/2024. Please add my name to the list of entrants.
PoetBrian
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Just wondering whether folk would like to share how they created their story: where their ideas sprung from and all that. The story behind the story. Am I selling this right?
Perhaps it’s just me, but I enjoy hearing how folk piece things together. Tis all grist to the mill at the end of the day before the sun goes down at the speed of light without a care in the world…
Obvs. I don’t mean to stomp on @pigfender’s trotters, so will delete if inappropriate or I have broken the Villa Diodati contract that I signed in blood. Bwahahaha!
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My official story… it’s self evident. I imagine a different ending to an event in my life. Fully explained if piggy puts it out there as-is.
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Not at all… share away!!!
Mrs PF doesn’t hate the idea. My bank account does, though!!! 
She also points out that the last time she had rum was over 20 years ago, and someone gave her free maracas. She wants to know if the maracas are standard. 🪇
One month spirit tale
Completed by now (for sure)
Good intentions’ ghost
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The only rum guarantee I make is “enough to ensure trouble”. If by some chance “non-trouble” things show up it is devine intervention.
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FWIW, my little slip of a tale takes its cue from willfully misconsrruing a line of poetry from Syrian poet Adunis. Conceit in hand, since the tale text is essentially a monologue, the text could pretty much write itself from nothing – geistwritten, of you will.
"Oh, my past days — they used to walk in their sleep and I used to lean on them.” — Adunis
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auxbuss asked:
“wondering whether folk would like to share how they created their story”
I’d spent a few days unable to come up with an original idea, so was rationalizing doing some fan fiction — writing about a character in Firefly/Serenity who died, but haunts the ship. Then one day, I was exchanging emails with an ex-colleague about a boss who was a bully, and that night, a very different idea came to me kind of in a dozing dream, and details accumulated during the night. As sometimes happens to me, it started with the ending (which I wrote first) and the rest sort of fills itself in (requiring tweaks to the ending).
— Conrad
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I spent a few days waiting for something to wriggle out of my subconscious, and when nothing did, sought inspiration by exploring local folklore. As I did that, a tale I already knew popped into my head: the legend of Dunmail, the last king of Cumbria, who is buried under a pile of stones on Dunmail Raise – the watershed between north and south Cumbria. Every year Dunmail’s warriors are said to retrieve his crown from Grisdale Tarn (above Dunmail Raise), where is kept safe, and then tap his cairn to see if he ready to rise, which, of course, he never is and confirms with an utterance from his grave.
Having an army of ghosts seemed like a good start, and freed me from having to invent one, and so I went on from there, retelling the legend in very different and much darker way. I also had an ending in mind early on, which survived.
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I leaned on my day job for inspiration. From there, it didn’t take a lot of effort to find a few ghosts and wrangle them into something I hope is interesting.
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The name of the Country House in my story is “Tattybogle House”, and the Dog is named “Doug”. A sense of Scottish humour may be useful
PoetBrian
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I find that my hyperactive brain rushes ahead to find any relevant topics or ideas. So when it comes to writing, I just pick them up from memory as I go along.
What you could do is to treat it like a brainstorming session. Have a white board in your kitchen with your ideas on it. Ask anyone passing through for ideas, or comments on your own ideas, to write them down.
Then, while looking at the board, try to weave a story through the ideas on the white board. Crediting important contributions to the people who made them, is polite and should be considered if practical.
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