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Dear Person-I-Spit-Apple-Pie-On,

You don’t know me, but we attended the apple festival together. Well, at least we attended the apple festival concurrently and I feel the need to explain my behaviour.

You see I had just eaten 60 varieties of apple and I was feeling good about the experience. One might even say high. I naturally, as all right minded people would, thought the good feelings could be attributed to the vitamins, bracing weather and presence of good friends. Solid in this belief I did not restrain my sampling of other sugary treats. (This could be called mistake number one.)

In this glow of happiness I saw the pie tent.

(FYI there should be random tents with pie and fruit and diet coke set up through the city…someone write that down.)

I bought pie. (This could be called mistake number two.)

I began to consume pie as I walked. (This could be called mistake number three.)

Then the world got funny. Very very funny.

Part of my brain realized that making airplane noises while convincing friends to try my pie was less than balanced.  Part of me realized I might just be drunk on the sugar. But that was the small weak part and I was past the point of no return. So I walked and talked, not quite able to keep a straight line. I was crying with laughter but marginally keeping it together until a friend pushed me over the sugar-giggle pie-spitting edge by telling me that I should try not to spit pie on the guy in front of me. (You’ll just have to take my word for how funny that was in the moment.)

This is when the pie spitting began in earnest.

In my defense at this point you were nothing but a tear blurred blob of beige in my path. Please know that I am not in the habit of spitting partially chewed pastries at strangers and it was a spit or choke to death situation. So really you saved my life. Thanks.

Note to self for the future. Apples have sugar.

NB. I totally bought more apples than I think I can actually eat. I have no self control. But in good news the apple-energy was put to good use and I’m half way through the edits I need to make before SiWC next week.  Yay!

Writing Exercise:

Many of the apple trees sold at the apple festival were branches of one type of apple grafted onto the base of a different kind of apple tree. (It has something to do with how quickly apple varieties mutate. Mmmmm mutated fruit.) Seeing this gave me a thought that I should graft together pieces of writing.

I started thinking about all the quickly written scenes I have in my notebook. These scenes were written in haste when I was inspired and I didn’t want to lose the thought, but now they just sit waiting for a place. If you’re like me and you have similar scenes choose two of them at random and spend a few minutes grafting them together to make a longer scene.  How could the characters meet?  How were the events linked together?

Happy writing.

NB. If you don’t have a book full of partially written stories, choose two books off your shelf and try to graft the ending of one to the beginning of another…could be interesting.