The fight

The clang of swords striking rang out like a shockwave through the air. The two fighters stood, holding one another's blades just back from the other's throat, locked in combat. They had been fighting for well over an hour, and they were both breathing hard, covered in sweat and blood. Their arms in particular were covered in cuts, both deep and shallow, and their clothes were in shambles, barely hanging off of their bodies.

Geriad shoved his elbow into his opponent's gut, making him step back, and giving himself the freedom to do the same. They both stumbled away from each other, their strength long since drained. The only thing that had kept them going was an unwillingness to lose. Geriad was determined to make it past this dark knight, and the dark knight was determined to keep him from advancing.

With a shout, they rushed toward each other once again. The swung hard and fast, vertically, horizontally, diagonally. The grunted in agony and rage with each blow, chipping away at what little strength they had left, when suddenly Geriad's blade snapped clean and two, and the end of his sword crashed and stuck into the ground. He looked up, drained, as the dark knight raised his own sword in victory, preparing for the kill.

However, as he swung, Geriad collapsed to the ground, causing the knight to just miss, and as the momentum of the strike carried the sword down and across where his body would have been, the sword crashed into the broken remains of Geriad's sword stuck in the ground, and it too broke. The broken metal clattered to the ground, and the two opponents stared at each other in silence. Slowly, Geriad got back up on to his knees, and the knight did not stop him. They maintained eye contact as Geriad got once more on to his feet, and the prepared to fight with their bare hands.

Blow after blow they traded, making no attempt to block the other's punches. This had long since stopped being a test of skill. The fight would be decided by whoever could stand the longest. Fists made contact with stomachs and faces, plowing away in vain attempts to end the fight. Both fighters could feel themselves going numb.

Finally, both of their punches landed on the other's face, and they fell, hitting the floor simultaneously. They breathed hard, wheezing as they tried to force the air through their crushed bodies. From beyond the door that the knight had been guarding came a tsk, and the door opened to reveal the princess whom Geriad had been coming to save.

"You two," she muttered. "I have been waiting for so long for you two to finish already." She stepped gingerly over their bodies, a knife in her hand. "All of those guards expecting you to com get me. Never expected me to come in from behind." She discarded the knife, letting it drop into the chest of the dark knight, who gasped only for a moment as the blade sunk. "Won't be needing that anymore. You beat the rest of them for me." She danced happily to the door. "Finally, freedom. Toodaloo."

Earth and Water

It was late at night as Ryan danced his way around the school campus, feet pounding against the ground to a beat in his head, and dust flying up around him. His arms swung wildly around, as if he were at home playing his drum set, and though they had nothing to hit, they moved with a precision that one could only have from years of practice. As he reached the climax of the music in his head, Ryan slammed his foot hard into the ground, which pushed back hard against him, launching him into the air where he spun around before landing solidly on his feet.

Ryan laughed to himself aloud, rubbing the back of his head, and as the dust around him settled he heard something in the distance. It was a much softer music, something from a string instrument, and it was enticing, as if it were begging him to come toward it. Slowly he started to walk towards the front of the school, where a large fountain had recently been installed.

As he approached, he saw one of the girls from school who didn't talk much. He thought that her name was Megan, but he wasn't entirely sure. She was sitting on the edge of the fountain, violin in her arms, playing it slowly and gently. Music rose from her violin as if it were enticing everything around it nearer. The water from the fountain seemed to rise and fall with the music. Megan played with her eyes closed, gently swaying with her music.

Ryan couldn't help himself. "Megan?" he asked. She immediately stopped playing, and the water seemed to return to a normal flow as she looked wildly around for the place Ryan's voice had come from. She let out a terrified squeal when she saw him, and tried to run away, but tripped on the fountain. Ryan moved quickly, seeing her fall, and rushed forward. As his feet pounded against the ground, he could feel it pushing back against him, launching him forward. He slipped under her body just before she hit the ground, catching her and taking the blunt of the impact.

Megan squeaked as Ryan grabbed him, but the impact of their bodies hitting the ground startled her and she didn't move. After a moment to catch his breath, Ryan slowly sat up, cradling Megan in his arms. He smiled gently at her. "It is Megan, right?" he asked softly. She gave a small nod, her eyes wide. He carefully got up and set her down on the fountain.

Megan scooted away from Ryan as soon as she was out of his arms. "What do you want from me?" she asked, her voice wavering. Ryan blinked, confused by her fear.

"I heard your music," he explained. "It was like it was drawing me here."

"I knew I shouldn't have been playing in public," she muttered to herself. "I didn't want anyone to find me playing."

"Why not? Your music is beautiful." Megan's eyes shot up to him, wide opened, her face blushing hard. Ryan grinned, a thought coming to mind. "Kind of like you," he tacked on. Her eyes seemed to widen even further, her blush getting deeper. She started stuttering, trying to think of a response, and Ryan just started laughing at how adorable she was.

Megan glared at him at that, and quickly gathered her things and started to run away. Ryan jumped up and ran after her, shouting for her to wait. He was much faster than her and easily caught up. She scoffed at him and turned her head away. "Hold on, Megan," he said quickly. "Let me walk you home. I'm not a bad guy. You just keep catching me off guard." Slowly she looked up at him, one eyebrow raised. "Please?"

"...Fine," she muttered under her breath. Ryan smiled and, without thinking, put one arm around her waist and kissed her on the cheek. Megan's cheeks flared up, and Ryan laughed again, but this time she didn't run away.

Numbers in writing

Make no mistake, in making this blog, this challenge for myself, I decided that I would meet a minimum of five hundred words a day in writing. But numbers mean nothing. The reason I did that was so that I wouldn't feel like I was cheating myself by writing, say, a haiku. Now I have nothing wrong with haikus, but I want to be a novelist. Writing haikus so I can say that I wrote something every day isn't going to help me.

I bring this up because in school, every writing assignment is a page or word count. As we go further along, teachers don't necessarily ask for better results, but longer results, at least in my experience. And I understand that they don't see what you've written in the past, so they don't know that you're getting better. But why does longer equal better? Why is that the equivalent that we strive for instead? We do this with everything: books, movies, games. We put so much emphasis on the quantity that we forget that it's the quality that really matters.

Have you ever read something incredibly dry that just kept going? It just goes on and on and on, it never ends, and it never goes anywhere, and you feel like your brain is going to start dripping out of your ears. It just boggles your mind as you're reading it how the author could have possibly thought it was a good idea to stretch this scene out for so long. We've all been there. If we've ever written anything, we've probably thought that about our own writing. I know I have. And yet we leave it there, because we have this insane idea in our head that it has to be that long, or it wouldn't be good.

But then there are the people that get this idea too far into their head. An excellent, classic example is the philosophy final exam. The question is simple: Why? People write entire papers, pages long, answering the question. And then there's the student who responds "Why not?" It works there, sure, but can you imagine if you tried that anywhere else? It doesn't work. It's not an answer, it's a push off. You're just ignoring the question rather than answer it. People need answers. When you write, you have to anticipate those questions and answer them. Otherwise when the reader finishes reading your work, they'll feel dissatisfied. That's just as bad as making them bored.

Here's the thing. Being long doesn't make something bad. It also doesn't make something good. When you write something, it should be long enough to be interesting, to serve its purpose, and to leave the reader with no questions that you don't intentionally want them to be left with. It doesn't matter if you're writing fiction or non-fiction. It's all about the content. One of my favorite sayings as a writer is that you should write like a girl's skirt. Long enough to cover the important bits, and short enough to be interesting. And I don't care how sexist that is, because it's hilarious and true. And it's certainly not something that you'll forget any time soon.

Flight

Jason's feet pounded against the pavement as he ran as fast and hard as he could away from the lab. Any minute now he knew the guards would come chasing after him, and it wouldn't take long for them to catch up to him. His hands were sweating inside of the freshly stolen gloves, and the shoes on his feet were heavy and awkward. He couldn't have lasted very long running away from the guards regardless, but with this equipment it would only be harder.

As he got further away, eventually Jason heard the sounds of sirens burst to life behind him. Time was growing short for him to get out of range. The buildings on either side of him as he ran felt constricting, as if they were closing in around him. His legs were quickly getting tired, unaccustomed to the weight of his shoes. He had to find a place he could make the jump.

Suddenly there was the sound of a concentrated explosion behind him, and he felt a bullet whiz by his face. He was definitely running out of time. The guards' shouts were drawing closer. Jason could practically feel their breath on his neck. He turned a corner, and in the distance could see a sudden cliff drop as he approached the end of the city. This was his only chance, and he made a mad break for it. He pushed his legs to give the last of the energy that they had, and he prayed that they would last long enough for him to make it to the edge.

Gunshots became more frequent. Fortunately the guards were having a hard time hitting him while running and trying to avoid hitting what Jason had stolen. He briefly considered zigzagging to make it harder for them to hit him, but it would have cost him time and energy that he was severely lacking.

As he made his last few steps approaching the edge, he could see miles beneath the city the distant remnants of land upon which his ancestors had lived. They were far too wasted for anyone to survive in now, however. Even if he could somehow miraculously survive the drop, he wouldn't last more than a few days in the wreckage of the old world.

He braced his legs and leapt wildly into the air, pushing himself off the edge of the city floor. The wind rushed around him as he began to plummet. As he disappeared out of sight of the guards, he snapped his gloved fingers and felt his shoes begin to buzz with energy. He swung his legs back and forth, vainly attempting to make them parallel with one another, and fear gripped his heart as he saw the ground below slowly approaching. But then there was a loud crack of energy, and suddenly his feet would no longer move apart from each other. He looked down to see that his shoes had created a field of energy beneath his feet that he could ride like a skateboard.

He pulled hard on his electric skateboard, and in doing so found his path of descent start to change, curving upwards until he was no longer falling, but flying. Jason laughed out loud. "They work!" He shouted to the air. "They really work!"

The crash

There are some things that happen to you in life that never leave you. Some are the memories that fill us with joy, that we turn to when we are in pain, that give us hope for our lives. And others are the most painful things that we have ever experienced, that return to us time and time again throughout our lives in the form of nightmares that make us wake in a cold sweat. No matter what we do, we will all experience both of these, and they will stay with us forever. We often wish to forget the painful memories, but they are just as important to hold on to as the happy ones. They give us the ability to see through the darkness. They remind us that things could be worse, and have been worse, and that we made it through those times. Knowing that gives us the strength to make it through the dark times.

I wouldn't be surprised if people thought I was too young to experience these kinds of things. These dark memories that haunt me and always will. But there is no minimum age that these come at. They could happen when you're five, and they could happen when you're thirty-five. I've been through several of them, and I freely admit it. I try not to think about them, but it's impossible not to at times. But I know that they're important to hold on to, and to understand.

I was making a night time drive, making my way up to college on my own for the first time. I was already kind of on edge. I had only just begun to live on my own for the first time, and I was never much of one for driving in the first place. It took a good deal of focus not to dwell on the uncertainties that I was already faced with, and I tried to use the road to do so. Nothing was off. It was just dark, and I had my music playing. Nothing was strange.

I looked down for a moment to check something. Whatever that something was is the only thing I can't remember. Before I looked down, there was nothing wrong with the road. I had plenty of space in front of me, I was on pace with the other cars, everything was fine. I looked back, and suddenly I was faced with a full stopped car, and quickly shortening ground between us. My foot slammed into the brakes, and it only took half a second for me to know I wasn't going to stop in time. I tried to swerve to the left, into an empty lane, but the momentum of my car wouldn't allow me to move from side to side.

I couldn't stop in time. I couldn't get out of the way. There was nothing I could do. All of this had happened in the space of maybe three seconds. I was maybe a dozen feet away from the other car, and all I could think was "I'm sorry."

If you've ever seen a frame by frame of an animation, you know what the next split second was like. Only half a second went by, but there were three distinct moments. In the first, the crash itself occurred. There was an explosion of sound, the pounding of the airbags against my face, a jolt that shot through my body as he forward momentum of my car abruptly came to a stop.

In the second, there was nothing. My music never stopped playing, but I could hear nothing. I was still smashing forward against the belt and airbag, but I felt nothing. There was darkness as my eyes instinctively closed. It was as if, in the not even half of a moment, I had simply ceased to be. I've often heard that, in the instance before death, a person feels bone chillingly cold. I did not. I did not feel cold or hot. I felt nothing.

In the third and final moment, I was suddenly dropped back into existence from the nothingness I had so briefly experienced. I could hear cars continuing to drive by me, my music kept playing, and my emergency blinkers methodically ticked away. It took me a second to realize my glasses had flown off my face, and the reason I couldn't see was because of that, not because something had happened to me eyes. I felt sore, but as I patted around myself I couldn't find any injuries.

I didn't know what to do. If I had to go through this again, I probably still wouldn't know. All I could think about was how glad I was to be alive, and how deeply I wished the people in the other car were as well. My heart was pounding hard, and I couldn't do anything from where I was. I couldn't find my phone, or my glasses, and I certainly couldn't make the car move.

A lot of other things happened after that, and I remember them just as distinctly. But the thing that scares me is the crash. It's a miracle that I lived through it, much less experienced so little injury. Sometimes I can't help but think about it. I can't help but picture how I could have died, pierced by broken metal or glass. It terrifies me. It takes everything I have not to be crippled by what happened and what could have happened.

And yet I'm still here. I'm still moving forward. I'm alive, and I'm well, and I'm still doing the best I can to do what I want and need. Remembering this is painful. I can physically feel the pain that was and could have been when I crashed. But I can't just forget it. I have to remember it. I have to remember it because, as weak as it makes me, it also gives me strength. I could have died there, but I didn't. I was permitted a chance to keep living. I have to use that.

Death is terrifying. But life is so much more than we give it credit for. Those bright points in my life are so much brighter now that I have such darkness to compare it to. Would I have avoided this if I could? Of course I would. And if I had a second chance to change my past, I probably still would. But I can't. And so, instead, I will use it to better myself.

Wings

Princess Arianna sat on the single chair in her bedroom, which she had moved to allow her to look out the large glass doors leading out on to her balcony. She watched the stars twinkling up in the sky as she sat in her warm room in her nightgown. She imagined herself pushing the doors open and leaping off of the balcony, spreading her arms to reveal a beautiful set of wings as she flew away from the castle and her cramped life. She knew better than to try. But that didn't mean she couldn't dream.

Suddenly a servant burst in to her room without knocking. Arianna let out a small scream voluntarily. The servants were supposed to knock before they entered a room. "Princess!" the man gasped. He seemed short of breath, and his face was drawn and terrified. "There's an intruder in the castle! You're not safe here!"

Arianna leapt to her feet and pulled her nightgown tight around herself. She suddenly felt very cold. "What about my parents?" she demanded.

"They've commanded me to make sure of your protection," the man responded. He turned and pulled the door shut behind him, pushing the lock firmly into place. "They are going to stand their ground in the castle, but they've said you must escape."

"But where am I supposed to go?" she asked, becoming scared and desperate. She could feel her mind starting to shut down, unable to think properly.

The servant reached into his pocket and pulled out a letter, holding it out to Arianna. "The King advised that you should escape to your uncle. It probably won't be safe there for long either, but it will give you time to plan." Arianna nodded, taking the letter shakingly in her hands. Abruptly she stepped forward and wrapped her arms around her servant. 

"Thank you, Perman," she whispered, trying not to cry. 

Just then, there came a powerful pounding on the door. It was as though they could feel the entire room shake woth each slam of the door. 

"You should go," Perman whispered back. Arianna nodded and, without hesitation, ran to the glass doors she had been looking out of earlier. She took two long strides to cross the balcony, then leaped, taking a step off of the railing to throw herself into the air, three stories off ground level. 

Behind her, Perman quickly closed the glass doors and turned around as the main doors exploded open. He could feel the remains of the lock just barely miss his head. A huge man entered, towering above Perman, anger on his face as he scanned the room. "Where is the princess?" He demanded. 

"You're too late," Perman said defiantly. 

Outside, Arianna's discarded nightgown flopped to the ground, as the letter she had been holding on to was caught by the wind and floated gently through the air. A moment later, a bluejay gracefully soared down and caught the letter in its claws, then flew high into the air, headed in the direction of the Kingdom of Vastria, where Arianna's uncle lived. 

Writing blocks

The first day of the new year seems like an appropriate time to talk about writer's block. Especially considering that, coming in to the new year, I am experiencing it. I find myself facing writer's block very often, which is part of the reason I want to do this whole thing. I'm hoping to find ways to continue writing even when faced with writer's block, if not start to make it go away simply through repetitive writing.

I think this is something that every writer goes through at one point or another. I've heard people try to deny that writer's block is a real thing, and I personally think that those people are conceited liars. I have seen so many people say that writer's block is just people being lazy, or lacking creativity. Some of them are even skilled writers. But I refuse to believe that they have never had a single day where they sat down to write and nothing came out. They probably pushed themselves to write something, and it probably came out terrible, and somehow they've convinced themselves that they still did something so they didn't experience writer's block. But they did. That's just how it goes.

People have off days. The thing about writer's block is that writing is a much more personal activity than a lot of other things are. There's no formula that you can just follow and make it work. You can analyze stories and find formulas, sure, but just writing off of one makes a story sound cliche and boring. I can't speak for other creative activities. I don't have any experience in them, and I don't want to imply that they are somehow easier or lesser than writing is. But writing has to come directly from you. It can't be taken over by someone else, and by writing you are putting your own self on the line.

One of the only solutions I have ever heard to dealing with writer's block is to keep writing. But the thing is, writing when you don't know what to write is, at least to me, one of the hardest things in the world. Some days, I'd rather be in a fist fight with someone twice my size than try to write with writer's block. On a good writing day, I can easily get off 100 words a minute, sometimes for hours at a time. On a bad day, that slows to a crawl of 100 words in an hour if I'm lucky. As someone who wants to be a writer, that is unbelievably painful.

I don't know if these kinds of things even apply to other creative endeavors. I've never really heard of an artist's block or a musician's block. I'm sure they exist, however. I've just personally never heard of them. I have to wonder how they get through those things. Do artists just force themselves to draw? Do musicians just force themselves to make music? It seems to me like these really aren't the best options. It seems more like they're the stories that people spread about things because they heard them somewhere once, but they have no basis in the real world. I don't have a better answer off the top of my head, but I would have to think that somehow, somewhere, someone has a better solution. If only they would share it with the rest of us.