vignette

[marycatelli]

This week's prompt is:
jewel

Anyone can join, with a 50-word vignette in the comments. Your vignette does not have to include the prompt term.

My effort:

In the open area, the lights, in all their colors, swarmed over the fog there, making the thing look like an opal.

An ugly, cut-rate opal, thought Tristan, bitterly. All cloudy and flawed. The sort of thing that was not set in jewelry but sold in loose handfuls as trinkets.

Comments

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

I can picture this fog, and despite Tristan's thought, it seems beautiful to me. Is the vignette attached to anything larger you're working on, or is it its own thing?


Here's one for you:

"For pennies on the dollar, you can rent a set of laughing-jewels, which will let you attend the gala flashing and sparkling as much as any of the glitterati. Your jewels will, of course, melt away with the first light of morning, but you'll have made your mark by then."

[marycatelli]

I'm trying to write a novel in vignettes. In fact, three novels. This is the SF one. Tristan would probably appreciate the abstract beauty more if he were in a better mood, and if the lights were not correlated with the disappearance of everyone on a large and thriving space station except him and three others -- and he and one of the others are still minors.

Cool bit about the gala. Is that what Cinderella got?

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I think I'd be in a bad mood too if the lights had spirited away a whole space colony--I feel for you, Tristan!

And I like the idea of a novel in vignettes very much--wishing you success.

I was thinking about the jewels in Thurber's The Thirteen Clocks. There's a woman who cries jewels, and people keep on asking her to weep for various good causes. Eventually she's all out of tears, but some villain is demanding that she weep him a fortune (I may be remembering this slightly wrong; I'm writing without resorting to Wikipedia). Someone realizes that she can be induced to tears through laughter (laughing until you cry), so they give the guy those gems--but those gems prove to be transient.

But yeah! I think Cinderella's finery is obviously based on a similar magical principle!

[marycatelli]

You got 13 Clocks right.

having fun with trying to get a novel from vignettes. Fall back and outline I think.