Welcome to your Friday Morning FYI (super-late-since-I-was-attending-WDC16-this-weekend edition) – my chance to share observations/wisdom/rants in short, easily consumed form.

So, yeah, Writer’s Digest Annual Conference – my favorite writing-related event, the thing I wait for all year and then enjoy beyond reason (though this year I missed several dear friends I also enjoy beyond reason, who I applaud for instead doing important things for their careers). As I always do, I’ll put together and post a recap over the next day or two, but for today I need to decompress. So for this week’s FYI, I think I’ll post what I wrote for a prompt we were given in one of the sessions. The goal was to emphasize how characters of different backgrounds and in different situations would describe the same setting. My group received “Rich lady in a ballroom”. Here’s what I wrote:

The floor plan was perfect, each round, white-clothed table set precisely fifteen feet apart, eight seats around. The center pieces were perfect, tall with pink and purple orchids from the local botanical gardens, wide with sharp leaves hanging broad from crystal vases, full with baby’s breath and dime-sized purple flowers I didn’t know. The stage was perfect, raised just enough to allow everyone to see my speech without feeling dominated, with an enormous American flag backdrop, the generic display for someone about to announce a candidacy.

But none of it mattered. No one would sit at the tables. No one would smell the flowers. No one would hear my speech, because I’d canceled the whole f*cking thing when I got the call that Julie, my perfect daughter, had been in an accident.

Yes, I cheated by adding a twist. *shrug*

Thanks for reading,

{RDj}