A second fruit drabble:

Mulberries. The adults hated them, messy weed trees. The birds loved them and showed their love with purple streaks down the sheets on the clotheslines. The berries were sweet but flat, needing more sourness, more character.

I am sitting in a mulberry tree. I am foraging for food. I am a survivor of a shipwreck, about to meet Robinson Crusoe. I am a more adventurous Jane, finding food in the African jungle. I was tied up by counterfeiters, but I wriggled free and am making my way to the cops. I am a purple-tongued, sticky, freckled Indian with blonde-streaked braids.

Just spent an hour and a half editing the Lucy manuscript.

Call me Susan the Adverb Slayer.

Indubitably.

t snerk

There are still quite a few left in the text. Like Buffy, I can't stay out of bed with the enemy.

Call me Susan the Adverb Slayer.

Seriously?

I like adverbs just fine. I just don't like them when they're filler instead of meat.

Am, that's lovely! I wish I could digest raw apples, damnit; they always look so good.

Deb, thank you.

I'd written this anyway, and was hesitating over whether or not to post it, but having heard that, I think I will.

- - -

Bursting at the seams as I press my spoon down on the skin, the baked apple is a winter treat: brown sugar and raisins filling the hollow centre where the core used to be, with rich fruit juices (grape, a hint of pear, and of course apple) soaking upwards.

Inside, the flesh is soft—not too mushy, not too floury, but almost melting—and pale; steam rises in scented curls. The juices have seeped into it; the sugar met them there; they've blended, sweet and heady, in a hot cocktail that's the closest to heaven my cooking has ever come.

- - -

I love the witch's garden drabble, especially the first paragraph about the comfrey.

Ginger, that's nice work: very tight, with a lot in it, and I like the final line. And the one about Jane.

I like adverbs just fine. I just don't like them when they're filler instead of meat.

The ones I'm slaying are filler, trust me. Something about using a first-person narrator made me abuse qualifiers like seemingly, apparently, clearly, obviously, etc. when Lucy was describing her observations of others.

Susan, I was teasing - I generally go back and trim some of mine.

And really, I could have said "I make a habit of going back and trimming some of mine" but I use adverbs a lot in my own speech. They're part of my speaking voice, as well as my writing voice, and I tend to strangke a bit without them; it's like trying to speak F2F without using my hands. Hard.

Because I'm the moderator and I can squeak a drabble in under the line....

****

I was in love with J. for 5 years, spanning the end of high school and all of college. Whether he ever loved me back was debatable, but I still made him as large a part of my life as possible. I adopted his favorite music, speech patterns, and food preferences, right down to his habit of eating every bit of an apple -- core, seeds, and all.

When it was clear that he loved N., not me, I was bereft. More than that, I couldn't bear the idea that one day I might get over J. I didn't want to get over him, because that might mean he wasn't meant to be my one great love, and I was positive that he was.

Recently, I inadvertently bit too deeply into a crisp Fuji apple, getting a mouthful of seeds and papery core. I spit out that mouthful instantly, repelled by the seeds' acrid taste.

And....the fruit drabble is closed!

This week's challenge is courtesy of Deb, and refined and tweaked a bit by comments from Connie, P-C, and others.

Drabble a *key* paragraph of a story. You may not be working on a story right now; that's okay. Make something up. (Who knows? Maybe it'll inspire you toward a new story/novel/screenplay.)

It can be the opening paragraph -- that was Deb's original suggestion, because so many writers get stuck on how to begin. It can be the final paragraph, because, again, that's a sticky place.

It can be any paragraph, really, as long as it functions as a key part of the story. Maybe the paragraph where the protagonist's dirty little secret is revealed to the entire town council. Maybe the paragraph where the antagonist lets down his guard, just for a moment, and reveals his human side.

As always, anything goes. And if this topic really throws you, and/or you dislike it with a laser-like intensity, I offer up an alternate drabble topic: keys.

Or, hell, do both topics. Go wild. Just write. The drabble's the thing.