Dear Papa,

I set myself down in words, in ink.
Blue lines running like rivers on the page
and my name
scrawled at the end with a hesitant hand.

My penmanship inelegant, sentences ineloquent
saying everything and nothing that I wanted to say.

But writing things down is like leaving fingerprints
or getting paper cuts, or making reckless decisions.

It’s like trying to draw a bird in a minute:
unable to capture its lightness and movement.

 Hello, everyone! I'm afraid I haven't posted anything in a long time, but hopefully this will make up for it. November was filled with writing absolutely nothing but my NaNoWriMo novel, but after that I put up Red Sea Rising and began working on a Narnia fanfiction, the first chapter of which I present here. I had a wonderful beta reader on Fanfiction.net edit these for me, except for this chapter.

These are letters between Susan and Lucy not long before and up until the train crash in The Last Battle. I hope you enjoy them!

Letter One

Dear Susan,

“What’s your girl like, then?”
“Eh? Wot?”
“That letter you’re writin’. Go on, tell us what she’s like.”
“Aw, my lady, she’s smashin’. Mad, too.”
“Mad? How mad? Does she throw pans and ‘oller?”
“Nah, mad about flowers. An’ clothes. An’ flowers on clothes. She paints roses on ‘er stockin’s and ties wreaths in her cloudy red ‘air…”
“An’ by cloudy, you mean…”
“Sticks out in waves every which way. Ain’t ever lied flat, s’far’s I can remember. Gives kisses of its own, it does.”
“Sounds… strikin’.”

I don’t hunt and peck.
I can type, it is clear
I don’t need all my fingers
I don’t need lines and methods and training
or words per minute.

(So we did that random word thing again. This week it was mailbox.)

This letter is not intended to be taken too seriously.  Rather, it takes itself too seriously, which is what made it so amusing to write.

 - - -

An Encyclical on the Use of Lukewarm Words by A fellow Sinner in the matter of grammatical and linguistical crimes

Dear Friends,