30 days of Creative Writing: Day 15

Today I’m working on exercise 1 of the eleventh section of ‘Back to Creative Writing School’. This section is called ‘Hit and Miss Bibliomancy’.

Bibliomancy is the practice of telling the future by opening a random book and reading the first phrase seen to divine an answer. In this exercise I had to choose three random words from a dictionary and write a scene, either using the words directly or as themes.

I’ve had my ‘big’ dictionary (as pictured above) since 2001 possibly longer. I know it went to university with me then, but I’m not sure how long before that I got it. It’s the 1996 edition, so it is possible I’ve had it since the late nineties. Opening it randomly and choosing three words gave me

* flaxen
    – Of flax
    – (of hair) coloured like dressed flax; pale yellow

* scoria
     – Cellular lava or fragments of it
     – The slag or dross of metals

* languid
     – lacking vigour; idle; inert; apathetic
     – (of ideas) lacking force; uninteresting
     – (of trade etc.) slow moving; sluggish
     – faint; weak

Today I’ve started writing something; tomorrow I’ll try to finish it and post.