# [[Stories from the Weird and Wonderful World]] This was an anthology story that I wrote for my fiction writing class. For this particular story, I got the idea from a "Dream Workshop" that I had participated in a couple of months prior. In case you're unaware, a dream workshop is a communal creative writing workshop where you draw upon the experiences of both yourself and those around you, and turn those ideas into a short story. We all put a bunch of adjectives into bags and drew three to inspire us, and while I don't remember all of the ones I got, I remember one was "magic." Since we were talking a lot about dreams (go figure), I wanted to play off the feelings we often get when we become heavily invested in a dream and they feel so much like reality that you wake up confused for a second before realizing it was all a dream. In the workshop, I had only written the first two stories, but once I brought it to my fiction writing class, I expanded it to four stories (although I would later cut the fourth one, since it didn't fit well with the other three). I then used the feedback I got from my classmates to expand it even more and dive deeper into the narrator and how this sort of recurring experience would effect someone. The first story is actually based upon a fond memory of my childhood, as my family had a tradition of going out to a local apple orchard every autumn and picking apples to bring home. The second one is also loosely based on childhood memories, but not as directly as the first. My grandparents would often take us to the Missouri Botanical Gardens and we always had this one spot in the Japanese garden where there was a little hut near a lake that we would eat snacks in. I wanted to encapsulate that feeling of childhood freedom and sharing past experiences with the ones you love. The third story is actually a continuation/spinoff of a different story I wrote for the same fiction writing class that was simply called [[The Ducks]], so you can read more about that one there. # [[The Ducks]] This was another story from my fiction writing class that I was really happy with. The idea behind this one came from a coding technique I had learned from my short time as a computer science major to help with getting past mental blocks when coding. The technique is that, when you get stuck on a piece of code (or anything else, really), you talk through your problem out loud to an inanimate object (in this case, a rubber duck). While you're talking about your problem, you can often times end up figuring out the solution to the problem just by vocalizing the issue. It sounds crazy, but it does work, at least for me. So I decided to take this idea and take it an extra level by asking, "what if the duck talked back?" I didn't want to jump straight into the concept, because I think it's a good idea to build up to that crazy concept first to help ground the reader in the world. One of my favorite aspects of creative writing is world-building, so I tend to try and paint a clear picture of the world to the reader before getting right to the point. That's not to say you *can't* jump straight in to the concept, many books do this quite well, but I prefer to get the reader familiar with their surroundings and character(s) before hitting them with the crazy idea of the story.