Day Ten. Portland Center Stage

So sad that this was the last workshop in the Ten Days of Writing, but so very glad to have made it to all of them. I always am sad to see the end of any Write Around Portland workshop, but this one in particular because it had so many twist, turns and variables for me. I got to write with some of my favorite facilitators, as well as some new ones and some that I even trained with.

Then there were the participants. People I've been in workshops with before, new faces that went to several in this series and people that brought their kids and just the overwhelming joy of writing with strangers.

As usual it all melted into two groups totaling about 30 writers in all. And, the magic happened one last time. Today a prompt I will definitely use in the future, was to first write a name or occupation of a person on a yellow piece of paper. Follow that up with a mood or emotion on a purple paper, and finally an action or activity on a blue paper. We then put our papers in coordinating manila envelopes, passed them around and got one of each back. We then could start with the words "that was the day that he/she.... or as usual what ever we wanted. I pulled out "British palace royal guard", "relief", and "people watching".

That was the day that he finally got relief from that nagging feeling he'd always had from not following his passion. Tommy Brown was an army brat, endearingly known to his friends as Private Parts. Tommy had got out of the army because his real passion was people watching. Sure there was plenty of people in the army to watch, but they were always the same. This people watcher liked variety in his people.

If Tommy had not caught that special on the history channel about the British empire, he'd never had put two and two together. Now Tommy lives in Manchester with his wife Kay, satisfying with much relief, his passion for people watching, as a British palace royal guard.