These are my responses to the writing exercises from our third Writing Apocalypse lecture. These are all completely raw, unpolished and unedited, and were written during the lecture in the small window of time allocated by the lecturer.
Write a few sentences about, or involving, an object from your daily life.
My new Kindle arrived the other day. It took me hours to re-download my content from the cloud and work out how to wipe the old Kindle. It was worth it though. This new Kindle is more comfortable and has more room and longer battery life. As with the other, it lives beside me, and I go nowhere without it. I may have to add a password while I’m on placement. Some of the content is not safe for work, and definitely not suitable for children.
Write a paragraph in third person dealing with some aspect of a pandemic (past, present, or future) in which the object from the previous exercise appears.
The stories coming in from Europe and Asia were terrifying. Thousands dead, hundreds of thousands infected. For once, the Prime Minister was proactive. As cases built in Australia, he put the country in lockdown. Travellers were quarantined, citizens confined to their homes, all non-essential businesses closed down. Jane went from loathing Morrison to approving of his forward thinking, even though she’d have gone crazy without her trusty Kindle. She was right. Australia emerged from the pandemic relatively unscathed, with less than five hundred deaths. They were lucky.
Consider the emotional weight of your object. Convey its significance without explaining or telling. Use first person plural.
Whenever we went camping, we would bring along our favourite books or games to entertain ourselves. Once we discovered the joys of fanfiction, we were lost on how to read it in the middle of nowhere, where the World Wide Web might as well refer to some kind of spider apocalypse. One Christmas, Dad gifted us each with a Kindle. It wasn’t long before we figured out that they were the pathway to fandom Nirvana. Just download the stories before we left home and hey presto! instant library of fanfics. It was like books with special features and we were stoked.
Categories: Fiction Friday
Rafferty's Rules is Closing Down 
What are your thoughts?