Not really. But I feel so remiss when I don’t update as much as I used to. Blame darn school.

I’m just going to paste a few excerpts from responses to prompts from one of my classes. I like the class a lot.

This is part of a response to a prompt about literacy, but shucks, it’s truer than true with my writing.

I suppose that whatever I try to write makes them vacillate between realities, either jarringly or gently, opening their eyes to more possibilities, or at least reminding them that once they internalize the ideas these words represent, they’ll always have access to them.

After reading this fairy tale, I wrote:

If I were a nonconformist fairy tale author in the nineteenth century, I would enjoy poking fun at the social expectations of the day. I’d create a king who demands a daughter from his wife-queen, with an open disclaimer and subtext about actually wanting a son, so as not to put undue pressure on his wife-queen, which essentially effects said pressure. And just to spite and/or please her husband-king, I’d make the queen bear a lovely and beautiful daughter.

Oh, the dear infant’s christening! How much more can a sister-witch feel jilted than by her brother not inviting her to the grand christening? First of all, she’s a witch, which immediately casts her in her brother-king’s shadow, and second of all, she’s a witch, and everybody knows not to slight his own sister, especially if she’s a witch. It might be within the Divine Right of Kings to make mistakes without the same kind of accountability as punishable society, but being a sister-witch to the king also makes her a sister-witch-princess – Princess Makemnoit, to be exact – and somehow she turns the christening into a cursing! Interesting caveat.

So, the heir to the throne is not only a daughter, but also weighs nothing. And, she laughs too much. Not suitable at all for anyone who will need to find a husband-king and to rule with gravity (horrible pun intended).

And, she finds no satisfaction on dry land, but she discovers that she can think more deeply in the water. She realizes she has substance when she swims. The light-princess meets a prince who helps her with these self-realizations, and the possibility of marrying and becoming a happy merman-mermaid couple is not so far-fetched. After all, what were his chances of meeting a weightless light-princess with a chronic laugh?

Love is the cure for such an ailment (of course it is), and when the prince offers his life to save the light-princess, she struggles to return the favor. She does save him, and she is glad to have him and finally cries, at least a lake’s worth of tears, the materialization of all her emotions culminating to a proper sobbing, causing it to rain, relieving the drought, ensuring that the lake never recedes to a dangerous level again.

Happily ever after, of course. I would be trying too hard as a nonconformist author of fairy tales in the nineteenth century if it were a different ending. But the happiness here is relative to gravity, and the prince and princess live without fear of curses upon their children that render them as electrons, without matter. In the end, everyone matters.