Wednesday, February 01, 2006

Maybe God Created Me to Get My Children

My two oldest boys have found new respective occupations this past week, which has made the house much quieter.

While all of our boys love books, Micah (9) is sometimes difficult to coax into one. Micah is a man of action and interaction; he is drawn to computer games and board games and cooking and playing with friends and pushing his brothers. He is prone to nagging and boredom. He loses interest in a story more quickly than does Marshall, and will sometimes leave a book un-finished.

Last week he chose Madeleine L'Engle's "A Wrinkle in Time" for an upcoming book report in school. He has read good books before, including the Narnia books amd Harry Potter, and he has enjoyed them. But something in "A Wrinkle in Time" caught him in a new way. He has finished the first book and is on to the second in the series. He's reading before school in the morning and after school whenever he is not eating, doing homework or playing piano.

My children's school, North Hills Classical Academy, is helping each grammar-school child write and "publish" a book, to be completed by the end of this year. Marshall (11) started writing and hasn't stopped. He's in the middle of two stories, one for the school project and one "just for myself". He is getting up early (6:30 a.m.) to write. (Oh, that his mother could acquire such discipline!)

Mark my words: within five years Marshall will be a better writer than I am. At least as concerns fiction. Here is a teaser:

Zecor was waking up. It was not terribly early nor terribly late, but the sun was shining brightly. Zecor, like everyone else in Platinum, was a robot.

Zecor half reluctantly rose from his bed. He put on his removable armor, which was only taken off during the night. This certain armor covers the head, back and shoulder area and is unique to this particular type of robot.


Continuing...

I must tell you that Zecor had long envied the position of Rash, leader of the group Sliver. Silver was a group of three robots who fought crime and protected the whole of Platinum.

Zecor suddenly had an idea.He came up with this idea without trying to. There is no way to tell how he thought of it but... he thought, "If I secretly kill Rash, then I might make it up to his position."

With this plan still fresh on his mind, Zecor rushed through the crowds, which were quickly gathering as the morning progressed. As he pushed and shoved through the population on the street, his plans grew greater and nastier.


At the Head Government Building...

Zash and Slash, Rash's two companions, were competing in their acrobatic and weapon-handling skills.

"Beat this!" yelled Zash as he ran toward the wall of the building, jumped, ran up the wall a ways, turned around on the wall, and ran back, brandishing his weapon.

"That's easy!" replied Slash. Then he did the same move, but in a slightly more impressive manner.


No, Marshall has never seen the Matrix.

Zash and Slash are twins, which is a complicated thing for robots.


Ummmm... Perhaps he knows more about reproduction than I thought? He seemed to think this line was funny.

Zecor has now infiltrated the government building:

It took Zecor very little time to reach the stairs. From the bottom of the stairs he proceeded to the second floor. Going up, Zecor went a bit faster than he meant to. It was a strike of luck that nobody saw him ascend.


And one more bit of humor, as Zecor confronts Rash, the leader of Silver.

"Hello! I believe your name is Rash?" said Zecor.

"Yes, it is. And, by the way, my name does not describe my personality. What do you need?" Rash said, kindly.


For anyone who's interested, I can let you know how the story ends, but it's shaping up to be a long one.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Maybe God Created Your Children so He Could Get You

:)

Rachael King said...

Andrew: Thank you. Actually, you are right. I can't imagine what I would be or what I would know of God without my children. Certainly much less, on both accounts. I hope I can be as much for them.

Laura: I don't know how it ends- he hasn't finished yet. I am well; better than my few previous posts suggest, anyway. :) I hope your mother continues to recover.

Ron said...

He writes dialog better then me already! All my attempts at fiction die quickly once I get to some dialog.

Rachael King said...

Ron: lol. me, too. Dialogue is the main reason I doubt I can write fiction. I don't do conversations well in the flesh- much less know what to put into fictional mouths. I think if you want to write dialogue you have to read a lot of it, and Marshall has already done much more of that than I.

Also, he's been making Bionicles talk for years, invented whole histories of the various races, created individual personalities- so he's had practice.

You're ahead of me, though, because I can't even claim any "attempts" at fiction (not since high-school, anyway).

Rachael King said...

lol. It would have to be a light and funny book. (I'm not very funny.) But I could write it for comic relief in between the titles, "The Unchanging Nature of Everything You'd Like to Change" and "Embracing Entropy: Why You'll Struggle All Your Life and Then Die".

Rachael King said...

And if you think this title is good, you should hear the one Scott and I came up with for the book we're going to write jointly, about our journey to and adjustment to life in Alaska. But I don't want to spoil the surprise...