draliman on life

It is time for Barbara Beacham’s “Mondays Finish the Story” here at the Drali blog. We get a photo and a starting sentence to prompt us to write our 150 word story.

My title this week is rather ironic since my muse is absent today. I blame it on a very busy day at work. The genre for my story this week, therefore, is “wishy-washy”. It’s a few words over, but after researching the invention date of the typewriter I had to make some last minute adjustments.

The supplied sentence is in bold in my story, and to read this week’s other contributions, click on the little blue froggy.

Copyright Barbara Beacham

The old typewriter had a mind of its own. A mind, and a flair for the creative.

As quill, pencil and typewriter, Underwood (for that was now his name) had steered many of the greats. Where would they have been without him? Austen with her ridiculously-titled “Pride and Peanuts”? Or Tolkein’s “The Hedgehog” and planned three-parter “Lord of the Hedgerows”? Underwood had soon put them straight, working tirelessly behind the scenes. Even stubborn Dickens had been persuaded to change direction only three pages into “A Christmas Singalong With Mulled Wine and Whatnot”.

Now everyone used computers. Pah! Soulless machines. He would never stoop to inhabiting such a beast. A typewriter he would remain.

So he couldn’t connect to Facebook. So what? One of the greatest muses of all time, reduced to a paper weight. Yesterday’s news.

So no-one was more surprised than Underwood when his owner’s son came in from school, threw his iPad on the bed, sat at the desk, loaded some paper – and began to type.