“The Drabble” is a popular blog and many people take part in it. Recently, they liked one of my posts/stories as they have, before (“The Story of Mathias Wizandar”). The seemingly most important rule behind a Drabble is to write  a story in one hundred words or less. For us lovers of poetry and flash fiction, it is one of those exciting ways/places we can express ourselves efficiently as writers, and prove that it is not so difficult, after all, to write a story that meets literary qualifications in so few words.

I have never submitted a Drabble until now (send one here 🙂 ). I sent the last one-hundred word story I crafted to “Reader’s Digest”. It was not accepted for publication, yet I thought others might find it humorous. It was about a time when I accidentally felt the leg of a woman who I thought was my girlfriend; it was her sister. At any rate, here is a photo of a candle (please, pardon my amateur photography) and a kind of summary of “The Story of Mathias Wizandar” in the form of a semi-poetic Drabble.

To Light A Candle

As a Christian, Mathias endured thoughts of the use of magic for decades. Dedicated to his work, he stayed single yet happened upon a young woman in a bookstore while dreaming of fantastic, goldenly magical, shadowed forest glades. He read a spell book she sold to him and considered its prose, held his hands above a candle while speaking a spell to watch the heat of its light dissipate surrounding shadows.

The rhyming may have seemed cheesy, yet I think the summary was there, and it was fun to do something spur-of-the-whim. “Goldenly” was a quick neologism, I cannot imagine how many words may have been better, yet I sometimes dream of dark forests with trees that drip glowing gold from their leaves and attribute those ideas largely to H. P. Lovecraft, especially if there is a big tomb there with a man reading about fantastic worlds besides a casket.

I usually like to craft a good plot with an outline and re-think it to a more valuable idea, write out a draft and revise it, then polish it until I think an editor somewhere may want it. That all takes time, yet we, as writers, have our hopes and goals. Thank you for reading this post; I hope you enjoyed it. 🙂

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