Word Paint Blogfest

The day has come. Yay!  I'm excited to see the outcome for this since it's my first time hosting one. Thank you for everyone who takes part in the blogfest. I'll be getting around to the entries as soon as I can. Depends how this weekend goes since I don't have plans yet but should do something since Saturday is my Bday. :-D

Just a quick reminder of the blogfest explanations. The book is Word Paint: A Guide to Writing More Descriptively by Rebecca McClanahan. According to the book:

"Like painters, writers are the receptors of sensations from the real world and the world of the imagination, and effective description demands we sharpen our instruments of perception."

"Description is an attempt to present as directly as possible the qualities of a person, place, object or event. When we describe, we make impressions, attempting through language to represent reality. Description is, in effect, word painting."


Rules:

1. sign up in the linky option down below. Sign up on or before August 27th, though it's easier if you sign up before the last few hours of the blogfest day, just saying...
2. post your word painted entry on August 27th(a day before is okay too). It's nice to post if you sign up cause it feels like a trick to get people to visit your blog. Yeah, I said it! *points to "it's" cause it has "it" in umm it... lol.
3. Word count should be less than 500 though a little over isn't so bad. The problem with long entries has to do in part with the formatting of the blogs. With three columns it's even worse than two but both have the smallish width that makes the entry seem even longer.
4. Link back to the blogfest (aka My Blog) so your viewers can read the other entries if they want.



The other entries:






My entry is from a short story I wrote a number of years ago, when I was new to Writing.com. The story hasn't gone much further but it was a fun exercise where I had to focus on the senses and use that within the setting. Yes. I had to focus hard to get this much description (which isn't very much). It's something I have to do in rewrite usually because I don't think about what works with description for first drafts. And it's in First Person *gasp*. It has been edited, critiqued but like I said, it's a few years old with no novel connected to it at this point. Enjoy!


Rough Justice

The air had been muggy that night; a slight fog sent a chill down my spine. Sound seemed to have vanished after they ran away, leaving just me… and a body. Pavement, hard and freezing cold, supported my hands as I remained knelt down for what seemed like hours. The only smell was of the city, its usual mixture of pungent and pleasant odors. The body hadn’t been there long enough to affect its atmosphere. How does a person react to a situation like that? Wrong place, wrong time, someone dead on the sidewalk. Then the noise came, sirens shrieking in the night. They were coming. I felt this burst of panicked energy with the strong desire to run. Should have ran, gotten away from there, but I remained as the police arrived.

I had touched the body. Took me a few weeks to remember that detail. A huge mistake that was. Questions fired at me so fast there was no way of reacting correctly. I didn't stand a chance. To the police it was a simple case; dead body and person standing there. I guess leaving wouldn’t have helped with my fingerprints being there.

That night was like a horrible dream. Took a different route home, having forgotten an engagement with Danny… again. All my focus had been on how I had disappointed him until two thugs, obviously from the EhDonno gang, had pushed past, knocking me aside to the brick wall of an apartment complex. Then after seeing the body, it all spiraled down from there.

A throat was suddenly cleared, shattering my thought process. "Mr. Brooks?”

Snapping back to the present, my focus returned to one of the state attorneys who had been asking questions for the past hour. I seemed to do this a lot lately, let my mind wander into past thoughts, forgetting all that I was doing at the moment. The look on his face made it obvious that he was a bit flustered at my lack of cooperation. “I’m sorry but could you repeat the question, please?” That made him even angrier but, oh well, not much I could do about that now.

“If you were not involved, then who was?” The lawyer thrust the question out with a faked sarcasm. It was obvious to me, and hopefully to anyone else, that he was attempting to use that tone to make it seem like a crazy question to ask.

“I don’t know.” As the words came out of my mouth, my mind was saying something different. I couldn’t just tell them who it was, that would mean death for sure. If they had killed this guy I am sure the gang wouldn’t have a problem getting rid of someone like me. It would have been easy to tell the truth, I would have stood a chance with the jury if I had. Yet I kept silent.