This Week's I.P. is...

By luigi_pagano

Mon, 18 Nov 2024

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It was Friday afternoon. I switched on my laptop and went straight to my favourite website. I was pleased to see that the blog posts had been updated with Story and Poem of the Week and Inspiration Point.

The report praised contributors for the wonderful work submitted during the week, mentioned various authors who had posted outstanding poems and pieces of prose, and eventually announced the winners' names.

I looked for Leo Toast.oi, my pseudonym, but that name was absent.

Recalling the teachers' inevitable verdict during my school days, I said to myself, “I must do better,” but I had to agree that the chosen people were talented writers and worthy winners.

I tackle the I.P. as a sporting challenge. I see it as a diving platform on which to bounce a few times before plunging 10 metres into the water below achieving the perfect dive with only a tiny splash.

Regretfully, this time there was no springboard to bounce my ideas off when I read the suggestion which was “The Inspiration Point this week is: one of your own choice.”

Right away, I was flummoxed. I had previously relied on a defined theme to set my brain into gear but now that the responsibility had been placed on me, my mind went absolutely blank.

The list of topics was so vast that I could not decide what to write about.

Help, (I use the term with some reservation), came from an unexpected source. A voice piped up from behind me.

“Why don't you follow your fellow authors' example who relate their pets' adventures”, said Terry, “and write about me?”

“But you are a terrapin”, I said.

“Am I not your pet?”

“As you have taken up residence in my garden, I suppose that you are but I can't think of any derring-do situation in which you could be involved”.

Call yourself a writer?. Use your imagination.”

***

It was now Saturday and I was burning the midnight oil, looking at a sheet entitled 'The Dynamic Adventures of Terry the Terrapin', still bereft of ideas.