I’ve been tagged by Jane to participate in a free style writing challenge. Being a crazy overachiever, I tried to freestyle write for more than ten minutes and so consequently found myself desperately wishing for the time to be up, and struggling because it was not up yet. I should know better. 🙂

These are the rules

1. Open an MS Word Document
2. Set a stop watch or your mobile phone timer to 5 or 10 minutes, whichever challenge you think you can beat
3. Your topic is at the foot of this post BUT DO NOT SCROLL DOWN TO SEE IT UNTIL YOU ARE READY WITH YOUR TIMER!!!
4. Fill the word doc with as much words as you want. Once you start writing do not stop.
5. Do not cheat by going back and correcting spelling and grammar using spell check (its only meant for you to reflect on your own control of sensible thought flow and for you to reflect on your ability to write the right spelling and stick to grammar rules)
6. You may or may not pay attention to punctuation or capitals. However, if you do, it would be best
7. At the end of your post write down ‘No. of words = ____” so that we would have an idea of how much you can write within the time frame.
8. Do not forget to copy paste the entire passage on your blog post with a new topic for your nominees and copy paste these rules with your nomination (at least five (5) bloggers)
**Just adding, in case anyone is like me and genuinely fails to understand rules when there are any: I thought the idea was to try to write beyond five or respectively ten minutes as in beating your own set time, but now that I am thinking about it, I think you’re supposed to write within the limits of five or ten minutes and stop when you feel like throwing something. For me, that would have occured around minute 8, if truth be told. I was not actually trying to see if I could freestyle write for fifteen minutes. Oh well, I am much better at improvising than following set directions. As usual.

My topic was: You’ve inherited a small fortune. You can move to any part of the world you like. Where would you go?

And my answer which makes me sound like a third grader (maybe from all my analytic dissertation writing?) rather boringly follows.

If I inherited a small fortune I would definitely move to Ireland to live. The landscape is incredibly beautiful, I can speak Irish with people in Galway for instance which would be awesome as I learned for fun, started learning for fun in Grad school, because I really didn’t want to be doing what I was supposed to be doing in grad school anyway and I also very much would like to teach my children Irish. It’s important to me that they grow up knowing much about where they came from, at least half their family. So what better than to let them grow up in Ireland? I could have time to visit all the sites from the Iron age I’ve been longing to visit, spend lots of time exploring bogs and forests and climbing mountains and maybe even have enough land to get an Irish wolf hound (they need quite a lot of space to run around,) and I would feel like I had come home, I am sure. I’d be so excited to move there. In fact I always had a dream to spend three months there, and sometimes even pictured myself living there on my own which is definitely why this is just a dream which will not have any basis in reality. But with asmall fortune I could find a lovely house in the country in which to live with Allegro and a friend or two and be able to pay someone to drive me around and take me places, as I’m not sure about the public transit situation in most counties and I’d want to be able to be as independent as possible. I’d make sure to make friends, and go everywhere I have always wanted to go. I would also hang out with my ancient family over there all the time and it would be awesome to learn about what the land looked like in their time and what it meant to them to live off the land and have a natural relationship with it that we don’t have in this time. Having a sense of place as they did and reverence for life, and developing that sense within the very landscape they shared would I think be a phenomenal experience. I’d really enjoy the opportunity. And finally I think I’d have tons of fun, and write this book called Braillic, which my mom and I thought about writing last year, about raising a child who is visually impaired who is also a druid which we would somehow link to our Irish ancestry and various locations we’d venture into. Perhaps I’d modify that idea a bit if I had enough money to live in Ireland in the first place, rather than attempt authoring a book with some obviously minimal excuse for doing “research” in the country.
472 words in 14 minutes and 15.7 seconds.

Seriously, I should have made up something as well such as living on the moon or in a deep sea vent with giant squid and heat resistant microorganisms. The truth is I’d rather not live in either location, unless also postulating I would not be human.

I’m not so randomly picking on:

And I’m asking them to write about…Don’t scroll down to find out until you’re ready to go

*

*

*

*

*

If you could have the experience of living as a nonhuman animal for one day, what would you be? What would you do? Why?