This week on More Odds Than Ends, here be unplanned dragons. But maybe they’re friendly…right? Come on and explore the adventures with us, whether it’s filled with roaring flames and fangs, or friendly scales and frolics.
| Sticker | Thorn | Stuckee |
| Fiona Grey | “There’s a dragon in the moat.” | Leigh Kimmel |
| nother Mike | The old book fell open on the table, revealing words that seemed all too fitting… | Becky Jones |
| AC Young | Keeping dragons as pets never really caught on. | Fiona Grey |
| Becky Jones | The cat followed him the whole time. | nother Mike |
| Leigh Kimmel | It was way too small, but we didn’t have any other options beside making it work somehow. | AC Young |
| Padre | The dragon was curled up in the parlor. | Padre |
And our theme carried through to the spares.
| Spare | Each night, the wait grew longer. |
| Spare | The rumors started with a rumble Command was ordered to ignore, lest attention be perceived as giving the idea creedence. By the time the dragons were released, pretending ignorance was no longer bliss. |
| Spare | A talon hovered over her chest as she fought to scream. |
| Spare | Dragons to the left of me, dragons to the right of me, here I am, stuck in the middle with dragons! |
| Spare | The doctor said, “Take two gypsies and call me in the morning.” |
| Spare | The year the dragons rebelled |
And for a touch more flavor – or char, perhaps – here’s a visual prompt.
Happy medieval times, y’all!
Images generated by Fiona Grey with MidJourney.
More Odds Than Ends 
lest we forget… https://youtu.be/Y7lmAc3LKWM?si=EU1moV4VgFlQRoK3 sing along, now! Puff, the magic dragon…
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This week Leigh Kimmel stuck a thorn in my paw: It was way too small, but we didn’t have any other options beside making it work somehow.
As soon as I saw the spare picture prompt I burst out laughing, and knew where the story was going.
—
We are a theatre troop. We were hired by a playwright to put on a new play for kids in the local theatre.
Someone, I’m deliberately not pointing fingers, had failed to do some basic counting. The changing rooms didn’t have enough space for all the actors needed to play all the roles in the play. But we’d signed the contract. We had to make the best of a bad lot.
And then there wasn’t enough storage space for all the props we needed, and the costumes needed more space than normal as well.
We ended up hiring a marquee, and stuck it out in the staff car park. We walked in and out through the back door of the theatre. The additional space gave us just enough room to put the play on.
The first night dawned, the premiere. We got into our costumes, and took our positions in the wings.
The curtain came up, and I walked on to the stage. I was the mother dragon, playing the host for my daughter’s birthday tea party. Various friends of the daughter dragon, all little dragons themselves, all enjoyed themselves, eating cake, drinking tea and playing draconic games.
The pleasant scene couldn’t last, and things soon went wrong.
The rest of the play was a series of draconic plots that initially made things worse, and then, once we’d figured out that we needed to work together, put things right.
The final scene was another draconic tea party for the young dragons.
The play closed to much clapping and joy from the assembled kids and parents.
The next morning I read the review in the local paper. Five stars. We’d succeeded.
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[…] week’s MOTE challenge came from ‘nother Mike: The old book fell open on the table, revealing words that seemed all […]
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[…] This week, a snippet excised from something I’m working on, inspired by AC Young. My prompt went to Leigh Kimmel. It was dragon-themed over at MOTE – a free dragon scale to the first ten people who go check o… […]
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You might try checking out Amazon for dragon scales. They probably have a discount if you buy a lot! (I have to admit, now I’m tempted to go do a search on Amazon and see what turns up.)
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And now mine is up on my LiveJournal at https://starshipcat.livejournal.com/1535475.html. As is so often the case, it has all the problems of trying to write a scene from somewhere in the middle of a longer work when I’m not sure how it fits into the whole.
OTOH, as the leader of my online writing group often says, it’s words on the page that didn’t exist before I started working on it. When the time comes to work it into the whole, I’m hoping I’ll have a better feel for what the final text needs to be.
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I got my own prompt this week. “The dragon was curled up in the parlor.” Not sure where it is going, but it’s kind of fun.
“Sir. You have a visitor.”
I sighed. I had not wanted to be disturbed this evening. I had a new book and it was every bit as wonderful as promised. Then again, the author was one of my favorites and never disappointed. But…
“Tonight? I’m supposed to be off tonight.”
My butler gave me a level look.
I sighed again. I knew him well enough to know that if he felt it was important enough to interrupt me, then it probably was. We had been together for a long time. I got up, put my book aside and walked downstairs.
It was a dragon and he was curled up in the parlor.
“Are you the troubleshooter?” it asked.
“Well, I’m a troubleshooter. It’s my job to find trouble in these parts and go shoot it. Usually until it stops being trouble.”
“Excellent. We have need of your services.”
I gave it a calculating look. Dragons were notoriously independent creatures, so who was this “we” that it was referring to. It didn’t sound as if it was the imperial we. Things were looking… intriguing. I nodded. “Go on,” I said. Hopefully it would pay well, too. More gold in my pocket was even better.
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Oops, sorry, Padre. I like what you wrote, though!
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Becky Jones placed the thorn in the middle… (Becky and I traded prompts this week! Thanks, Becky!)
The cat followed him the whole time.
[well, let’s see…]
When Harvey heard that Christine liked cats and had a favorite one at home, he thought he knew what to do. So he carefully carried cat treats in his pocket for their next date. And when he got inside Christine’s house, the first thing he did was to give that cat a treat. He didn’t get to stay long that time, but the next time, when he walked into the house, the cat came running.
Harvey carefully gave the cat another treat then and there. And the cat followed him the whole time he was in the house. He gave it another treat, after a while.
From then on, the cat followed Harvey anytime he was in the house. Which eventually made Christine angry.
[or maybe…]
Wilbur was glad to visit his sister, with her new baby. But he was a little surprised when she put the baby on the floor, and he started crawling, because the cat immediately got up and followed him the whole time as he crawled around the living room.
Wilbur shook his head and looked at his sister. She was chuckling.
“Okay, what’s with that cat? Why is he following your baby around?”
“It’s actually very simple. Little Willy isn’t exactly the most careful eater when he gets to sit in his highchair and has a meal. So, he often drops food around the chair, and on himself. The cat knows enough to hang out under the chair and snag stuff. And, when Willy goes crawling, sometimes food drops off his clothes. Again, the cat likes to snag those tidbits whenever they fall. But to catch them before I get to them, he needs to follow Willy around.”
Wilbur bit his lip and watched the cat chasing the baby around the floor. Actually, Willy seemed to enjoy swerving and sometimes stopping, making the cat work to follow him.
Wilbur and his sister had a good laugh as they watched the little caravan running around the living room.
[Oh, that’s kind of nice…]
[What’s that? Something about who pinned the cat on the tails of the man? But there’s no time to figure out what you are whispering about? Okay… oh, Tom and Jerry?… ]
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