Glowing Review, and a Prompt

I think that was the best sentence yet!

So, we have created the character of Madame Butterfly:

Madame Butterfly, a disturbingly womanly dragon, seemed mystified by sudden changes and fleeting ghosts from Nowhere. Her Nowhere was communicating telepathically with a primal Entity deep within metaphysical meaning, wordless. Then little distortions started interfering with the flow, and thus sad feelings overwhelmed Madame's soul. Bright orbs showed visions emerging from mirrors surrounding her ever more.

(PLEASE CONTINUE to explore the life of Madame Butterfly in the comments section!)

PART II:
I am curious, given the limit of 56 words, which is how many we used to create her character, if we could make an entire story, a microfiction piece. If you've read Migue's latest post, you can see where several writers created entire stories in 6 words, so it should be possible! This time, each person is responsible for his/her own entire 56 words. I am giving a prompt below. POST YOUR STORY wherever you like, but also post it here in Continuum! If you do not have access to create posts, hit the "contact me" button to the right, and we will fix the situation.
Have fun!

**Given the character of an elegantly-gowned young lady, write a story in the hard-boiled detective genre, using the subject a bucket and the theme man versus the supernatural.

Word limit: 56
Time limit: 2 weeks (deadline is March 23).**


I got this microfiction prompt template from:
http://www.wgz.org/chromatic/projects/microfiction/

Save Madame Butterfly!

photograph by, Sarah Moon

Madame Butterfly, a disturbingly womanly dragon, seemed mystified by sudden changes and fleeting ghosts from Nowhere. Her Nowhere was communicating telepathically with a primal Entity deep within metaphysical meaning, wordless. Then little distortions started interfering with the flow, and thus sad feelings overwhelmed Madame's soul.

Collaborators, Don't Give up Now!

All right, we're on our way to a paragraph, here...Let's give Madame Butterfly's telepathic communication a purpose, shall we?

Madame Butterfly, a disturbingly womanly dragon, seemed mystified by sudden changes and fleeting ghosts from Nowhere. Her Nowhere was communicating telepathically with a primal Entity deep within metaphysical meaning, wordless.

A first word....?


I thought I might add a bit of inspiration here, now that we have a character. I was thinking....
a disturbingly womanly dragon...


The above drawing is Milton Caniff's Dragon Lady, drawn for Terry and the Pirates, a comic strip from back in 1934. He based the drawing on Joan Crawford. The eponymous Terry was a kid who had inherited a treasure map, and the friends he took with him on his journey. Lai Choi San, the Dragon Lady, was one of the many dangerous pirates they came into conflict with along the way--but perhaps the most dangerous, as sometimes she appeared to be an ally, and other times, a villain.

Anyway, nothing wrong with pirates, and we needed some kind of visual stimulus, right?

Collaborators, Continue to Unite!!

Let's allow Madame Butterfly an entire paragraph of existence, at least, shall we? So here, we have the first sentence. I added an "ly" to woman, in order to pull disturbingly and dragon together, and dropped the "ly" from ghostly for the same sort of reason. Any other suggestions are always welcome.

Madame Butterfly, a disturbingly womanly dragon, seemed mystified by sudden changes and fleeting ghosts from Nowhere.

SECOND SENTENCE, FIRST WORD:

Her...


NOTE: a suggestion has been made which seems to me (zoe) very helpful:
"After reading the first sentence of "Madame Butterfly" (I contributed with a "woman"), I thought that, if you write "nowhere" as "Nowhere" it becomes an imaginary place. This way, the "womanly dragon" will interact with a defined imaginary place and not to nowhere, that is difficult to imagine for a person. In this sense, the second phrase "her nowhere was communicating telepathically with a ..." could be continued mare easily... maybe! :S This tale seems to belong to the fantastic literary tradition.. "
--Rosa

Collaborators, Unite!

A week ago, I discovered the blog of the author of one of my top, top favorite books. The book is The Manual of Detection; the writer is Jedediah Berry, the blog is The Third Archive. On the blog, I found this post:

"Some weeks ago, Wah-Ming Chang and I started writing a sentence together. We took turns writing it, one word at a time, in the comments section of this post, and completed it yesterday. Here it is:

Mr. Bluemoon, of that exceptional tribe named for its perpetually growing sense of devotion towards miniature galaxies, never once imagined he himself would stand, with thirteen engines sounding like thirteen ghoulish mourners, aboard the Flying Wastrel, hand flat against the lever that directed heaven’s temperament.

We’ve decided not to abandon Mr. Bluemoon quite yet, so the rest of his story will be written right here, using the same method. I for one am curious to find out what happens to him."

Ladies and gentlemen, this is, as I recall, a collaborative projects blog...and we have been lazy. I suggest that this is the perfect task for us. Each person contributes one word every day, and we will meet back here to pet and coo at our first sentence.

Just add a word in the comments section. Once there is a complete sentence (the person with the last word also adds the punctuation), we will start the next post, which will contain the first complete sentence, and so on until the end of time. Or something.


FIRST WORD:
Madame