The Fantastic Murder of Lawrence Pearce.

When he ended the relationship, he couldn’t have known what would become of him. 

Lawrence Pearce and Rosalie Snö lived in bliss for a while but he grew weary of her awkwardness and peculiar personality. It was cute at first, but it quickly turned sour. The way she was always so polite, erasing herself to please the world and her horrible snow globe collection. Damn balls were everywhere! Lawrence had inadvertently knocked one off the counter once while looking for a mug and she had broken down in tears, knees in the broken glass, delicately picking up the tiny figurines of the globe while blood spread rapidly in the water around her crouched body. At the time, Lawrence felt extremely guilty and tried his best to make it up to her. He even brought back a gorgeous snow globe (that cost him a little fortune) to replace the broken one. Nevertheless, Rosalie was inconsolable because it wasn’t the same. 

Some days later, a new globe appeared and Lawrence was glad to see her spirits lifting up. Curious as to why this particular globe made her happy, he looked at it carefully; the scene represented a woman swimming in a pond, surrounded by snow and thin dead trees. Or was she… drowning?

It was at that moment that Lawrence’s love for Rosalie started faltering away. He felt uneasy around her, almost scared. And it only went downhill from then on. Even worst when he ended it.

Now, after walking for hours in the thick, heavy, and freezing snow, fighting against violent, stinging winds blown by the massive storm, Lawrence wonders how he didn’t see this coming. There’s no pond though, only an evil looking snowman. He wants to quit, yet he keeps going, listening to the sound of his chattering teeth, trapped in an eternal shiver that shakes him full of painful tremors, torturing his frozen muscles with each involuntary spasm.

Rosalie sometimes appears over his head, scrutinizing his ravaged face 

Lawrence understands, to his unfailing horror, the fate that awaits him while Rosalie smiles upon him. He has been walking around in circles for the last painful days, in the eternal storm of a snow globe, his footsteps disappearing under the undying blustery weather, his face whipped by biting snowflakes. With a heavy heart, tears freezing on his cheeks cracked by the bitter cold, he approaches the thin partition of the globe that surrounds him. Helpless and weak, he lifts up a hand with fingers blackened by the menacing grips of the cold, delicately presses it against the glass in a last pleading gesture. He lets his head fall heavily on his chest, his heart pounding with cold despair. And while she keeps smiling with marvel, Lawrence lets himself slowly slip against the smooth glass of the snow globe, closing his eyes, letting the snow wrap him under a blanket of white crystals. 

Lawrence Pearce will lay still forever in his snow globe kingdom, built by the polite Rosalie Snö.

Perfect Valentines Love Story

Lili was about to give up the online dating game because she had not met anyone with whom a flame was ignited.

Maxx was about to give up the same gig because he, on the other hand, had only met crazy women. Although, before closing his online profile, he decided to browse a few more profiles one last time. Someone caught his eye, a woman with a funny profile, common interests and a picture where she looked cute, timid and nice. Maxx wrote her a message and waited to see if she could be the one. Not just another nut job.

Before closing her account, Lili verified the last messages in her inbox and noticed one that stood out from the usual ‘nice smile, nice boobs, wanna get together’ kind. It was short, simple, yet funny and flattering. She decided to reply and see if he could be the one.

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The Old Man and the Beast.

The old man was near the end of the road but he was out of breath and his feet wounded by the rough roots sticking out of the earth were throbbing from pain. His heart thumped loudly against his temples, beads of sweat lingered down the side of his tanned face and he felt terrified. He wondered if he had outrun it and stopped dead in his tracks. The old man stood there, paralyzed, racking his brains trying to remember what had been chasing him. His wrinkled hands swept away the sweat that was now running down his bushy brows. He sighed, feeling quite exhausted, and reached out to the closest tree to lean a hand on it.

“Stupid old brain”, he mumbled.

A freezing breeze shook the dead leaves off the ground and his gaze followed the path he had just run through. The man thought he saw a shadow float at the bottom of the tree line but nervously giggled it off because the path was inhabited mainly of shadows beneath the setting sun. 

Since the old man was still unable to remember what he had been running from, he decided to sit down for a little while to give his sore feet a break. He did not understand, nor did he remember, why he was barefoot running around on a dirt road. In his pyjamas. He absently caressed the flannel tissue of his pyjamas on his folded knee, still trying to figure out what he was doing out here. As he sat still on the cold damp ground a shiver suddenly sprung from the bottom of his spine all the way up to the nape of his neck. He felt as if someone was spying on him. Or something.

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Reconnecting with characters: Jack Rogue, Detective.

Sometimes I find it very hard to dive back into writing a story that was started a while back. Even though it is on my mind and I am itching to reconnect with my characters, the step towards the open canyon is often difficult to take. And also terrifying. Indeed, I believe fear has something to do with it; what if I do not remember what I intended to do with the story? What if my characters seem bland and the plot thin? What if I cannot find the appeal I first did in this particular story? When faced with those concerns, I tend to shut closed like a clam and stubbornly stay sheltered to avoid confrontation with what troubles me. The problem is; I have never learned, or found the guts to self-teach, how to deal with these apprehensions.

And so I decided on one thing to do: let the old story be and write something else. Something new. Something different. Which works. But I still feel the longing for my older characters and find myself missing their story on which countless hours have been spent already. Sure I could ask other authors how they do it – if they have ever left a story untouched for a long time. However, I feel that my perception of how it can be done would then be jaded. Because I admire people, writers in this case, does not mean I have to mimic their ways of doing things. Besides, I have always been more of a “do-it-yourself” type of person.

Before long, I started thinking of another idea that might work for me; if I am missing my characters, why not start with them? Why not reconnect directly with them and let them guide me back to their story? It seemed brilliant indeed!

And so, the following occurred:

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Cheer up love.

She sat on the couch near the window overlooking the street. Outside the cold bit the few scattered pedestrians’ cheeks. Her eyes followed a father and his child hurriedly making their way on the snowy sidewalks, anxious to get to the warmth of their home.

The sky was gray and heavy with more snow. Some leftover christmas lights glittered under the darkening afternoon. Trees bent and shivered shaken by the strong wind that chimed through the windows cracks.

She peeled her eyes off the scenery outside to look at her computer’s blank screen. She couldn’t think of anything. It had been days since her fingers had last slipped across the keyboard, agile and inspired. What was missing?

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The Greatest International Scavenger Hunt the World Has Ever Seen

I’ve been absent from this blog for far too long.

It got off to a great start but I got caught up in life and put this little artist world aside. But now I’m thinking, writing, creativity, imagination, they’re part of my life, right? So even if I don’t have the perfect story or drawing to post, even if my imagination is running dry, I bet I can still find a way to put something interesting out into this world. After all, I’m a creative person and if I forget about it because life gets in the way, it means I ain’t doing it right!

So here I am, back and ready to allow writing and creativity to have a very loud presence in my everyday life because that’s who I am.

A few weeks back, when November started stretching out its darkness well into the afternoon, I caught wind of a worldwide scavenger hunt that sounded intriguing, mysterious and fun: the Greatest International Scavenger Hunt the World Has Ever Seen (GISHWHES - gishwhes.com). I thought; what an exciting way to rid ourselves of the depression this month often burdens our minds with. So I registered, with @themaxx and my best friend (forever partner in crime), and so the journey began. 

The witty, intimidating and endearing organization’s leader (the enigmatic Misha Collins) guided us through an international hunt, asking us to find a variety of objects from a list, that we needed to create, imagine, photograph, video, draw, glue… you get the picture. This fierce leader encouraged us to dive into the craziness of creativity and asked of us to get out of the normality of everyday life. We had one short week to gather as much points as we could, where as each item on the list added up to points. The list of items we had to accomplish ran up to 219. Some were easy to get done, some were funny, some more serious and others just plain insane.

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A cat’s gaze.

Photo: Émilie Payette (L.F.R.)

Fauve landscape where dunes shimmer like the sun under a delicate pale lace. In that mystical universe, a rift thick as an abyss, engulfing valleys in a deep black hole, or stretching out as an ebony silk hair between the golden craters.

To get lost in a cat’s gaze is the most precious inspiration I have.

The Giant at the End of the Road.

Photo: Marie-Louise Arsenault (Memramcook cemetery, Moncton)

When I was a kid, I remember being touched by a book called The BFG, which stands for The Big Friendly Giant (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_BFG). It told the story of a gentle giant who would blow dreams into children’s bedrooms once they were asleep. One night, a little girl unable to  fall asleep, sees the giant walking around the city, crouching to windows here and there. Then begins a beautiful story of an odd friendship between a giant and a little girl.

I had loved that story so much that I would try to draw the giant and imagine that I was the little girl who lived the adventure with him. I might have forgotten a little about the BFG as a teenager but somehow he never quite left my imagination and from then on, I could never see a giant, in movies, in other books, without thinking he must be sweet, kind and friendly. 

And I think it is why I wrote this next little piece. As part of a contest, I needed to let the picture above inspire me into writing a short story of any genre. As I closed my eyes to let my imagination guide me through the path, I finally met my own giant; gentle and sweet, a little blue and nostalgic but in the end, the perfect friend to the little girl still holding on to the bottom of my heart.

The Giant at the End of the Road

At the end of the path, a giant cries tears of desolation, and watches me coming closer while wiping his nose with the back of his hand. I slowly walk under the trees’ canopy devoid of leaves, and come to a halt at the outskirts of the road, a few steps away from the giant who is seemingly regaining his calm. His tears have stopped rolling down his puffy cheeks but he still sniffles away loudly.

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Snow globe

It is pretty much the middle of summer. It might feel odd to be reading a short story depicting a bitter winter, but a snow globe doesn’t always just exist in winter.

I always found those little globes quite interesting; not the manufactured touristy ones but the pretty ones. Like those of Walter Martin and Paloma Muñoz (http://www.martin-munoz.com/); unlike the happy snowglobes that often represent fantastical, magical and dreamy settings like castles and princes and princesses, the globes Martin and Muñoz create explore a darker place of the imagination world, where the fictional characters are not always nice and where the fantastical creatures seem strangely menacing.

It was those globes that inspired this very short story. I let my mind drift in the darker corners of the two artists’ imagery and brought to life a similar setting where nothing is quite pretty about the particular snow globe.

Hope you enjoy a little shiver in the midst of a beautiful summer…

Snow globe

A malicious sparkle lit up the snowman’s beady eyes when he noticed the man had finally realized where he was.

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