Another one of my Fiction As Daylog exercises. As before, I wrote a story based on a word (actually, in this case, a phrase) chosen randomly from the dictionary. For some reason I tend to be leaning toward telling stories through dialogue. Is this a sign of weakness? As always, comments would be greatly appreciated.
Enjoy. If you're interested, my most recent exercise, "Inspection," can be found here.
interior decoration
"Wow, I really like what you've done in here."
"Jesus this place is incredible! How did you do this? It must have taken forever!"
"Yeah. You know, it's not like it's really complicated in here or anything, but somehow I do get the impression that it took an amazing amount of effort."
Why, thank you. It did take me a while.
"It seems so roomy. It didn't look this big at all from outside."
"Holy shit, man. Look, I don't usually put a lot of effort into this kind of stuff, but you gotta teach me how you got your house to look like this. I have to try some of this shit on my own place, because compared to this it's a dump."
Sure, give me a call sometime.
"It's an odd collection of books and movies you've got here. Look at this. House of Leaves... So Long, and Thanks For All The Fish... I don't think I've heard of any of these."
"You've never heard of So Long, and Thanks For All The Fish? It's the Hitchhiker series! What the hell is wrong with you? Wait, you've only got this one? What, you couldn't find the others?"
Well, that one's just my favorite, you know?
"Yeah, all right, fair enough. Whoa, whoa, check this out, it's signed. Where did you get this shit?"
Well, you know. Authors have signings sometimes. All of those are signed, actually.
"Wow, really? Man, that's incredible."
"Hey, it's The Others. You like that kind of ghost story movie stuff?"
Well, sometimes. There's just something about some of those haunted house movies.
"Personally, I'm still looking at this bookcase. Look how it sort of just blends into the wall. That can't have been easy to do."
"You're right. Look at that."
You guys want some dinner now?
"No offense to your cooking or anything, but I don't even remember what we ate. I was looking at your dining room the whole time."
Ha, that's all right. I don't really pride myself on my cooking.
"But I bet you do pride yourself on your, you know, housekeeping, or whatever you call it. Anyway, I'm definitely gonna give you a call about that, because I could use some lessons on this kind of thing and... whew, that was just an incredible house, man."
"You know, if you're not too busy, I'll probably give you a call too, about the dining room. I can't get ours to look right."
"I suppose I'd better get on the bandwagon too. I really want to know how you did that with the bookcase."
No problem. Thank you all so much for coming.
"Oh, thanks for having us!"
Many thought he was surely beneath anyone's notice, and they all had it tough in this secular age. As it turned out, though, just entertaining dinner guests was usually enough to kindle a few sparks of belief and maybe even something like worship when you were the God of Interior Decoration.