Hello and welcome to another season of Writer In Motion.

This prompt is not what I was expecting! Especially after last season! Unlike last year, when I looked at it and knew exactly what I wanted to write, this time I’m at a bit of a loss. I even asked my kids what impressions they got from it. Their responses ranged from the hand looking like a beard and a guy smashing a cloud on his face.

For me, the phrases that kept coming to mind were “dissapating into mist” and “toz ol” (get lost, in Turkish, but literally “become dust”).

A passage from my WIP came to mind:

No more ground. I’m done giving ground. This is Finn. This should be painful, but I’m dissecting it clinically. This is the moment of change. This is when my life as Tessa Daevana is instantly over. Evaporated. I feel like I’m in a fog. A fine mist of a dissolved Tessa.

-The Shining Palais, almost-drafted WIP

And this from a completed MS:

What was that phrase? That insult baba would mutter under his breath at their neighbor? Toz ol! Become dust! Fitting. A disintegration of the corporeal form into nothing but particles of dust was kinda like… How life was these days.

-Ancient History

So for me, I’m thinking something slightly angsty, but not so much to be cliched. A sense of a loss of self. A wraith in the shadows.

But even if it starts out depressing, I want the ‘turn’ in the story to lead to something triumphant. I came across this passage on a blog post (I’m doing this on mobile so I don’t have a citation ready atm):

The English language is full of paradoxes, like the fact that “literally” pretty much always means “figuratively. Other words mean their opposites as well — “scan” means both ‘read closely’ and ‘skim.’ “Restive” originally meant ‘standing still’ but now it often means ‘antsy.’ “Dust” can mean ‘to sprinkle with dust’ and ‘to remove the dust from something.’ “Oversight” means both looking closely at something and ignoring it. “Sanction” sometimes means ‘forbid,’ sometimes, ‘allow.’ And then there’s “ravel,” which means ‘ravel, or tangle’ as well as its opposite, ‘unravel,’ as when Macbeth evokes “Sleepe that knits up the rauel’d Sleeue of Care.”

So to me, there’s this concept of a reversal. Someone wanting to hide away and dissipate into nothingness deciding, in the end, to become made of dust, something powerful and ancient and stealthy.