Sunday, May 6, 2012

Idea Garage Sale: The Glass House

Okay, we have errands to do on the way to gaming today, so let's make this quick.

Short story I thought of a long time ago, before I knew I was a children's writer. Young woman who's consciously given up her dreams of a creative life, "facing reality," partly to please a young man she's no longer with, but she still has the life she got herself into for his sake. Poky apartment, soul-sucking day job. On an impulse, she buys a glass house from a flea market glassblower. After she gets it home and has lived with it, and had dreams set in it, for awhile, she realizes that it's a near-replica of a dream-house she inhabited mentally in high school. She probably drew plans of it, played at decorating the rooms and planting the garden while looking through catalogs, that sort of thing. In the dreams the house is also inhabited by the imaginary lover from those days, the idealized guy she wanted to meet. Though physically he looks a lot like her ex, in all the important ways he's the polar opposite. Of course, since he's a dream figure, he's also part of herself.

How exactly the glass house and the dream lover enable her to recognize the creative possibilities of real life I never worked out in any detail. Nowadays the whole concept seems self-indulgent. And could a glass blower make a suitably elaborate house, that a woman in her situation would still find affordable? Maybe not, unless he was a magician, in which case - magicians always want something.

Which makes this a much longer story.

No comments:

Post a Comment