A Study in Lapidary

During the process of digging the foundation for our first home, the builders upended all kinds of rocks and debris from the site that would eventually become our basement. Included in that debris was a sizable chunk of stone containing dozens of fossilized shells. We asked the builders to save the rock for us, and from the time we moved in until the time we moved out—a period of about seven years—that stone occupied a visible spot at the side of our house in the flower garden. Our first three children were still very young then, and we would spend time nearly every weekend looking at the tiny fossils in that chunk of rock and trying to imagine where they might have come from.

I’ve since learned about lapidaries. A lapidary is a person who cuts, polishes, and works to bring out the richness and beauty in a piece of stone. Often these stones are precious gems—emeralds, sapphires, rubies—but paleontologists will sometimes employ lapidaries to help them extract delicate fossils from rough stone and make them more visible.

I’ve been stressing out a little over this 52 Week Challenge, wondering how in the world I’m going to find the time to take this on. So here I sit writing on my iPad at 4:30 in the morning. I didn’t have to drag myself out of bed and trudge over to my writing desk either. Somewhere in the dark recesses of my mind while my body was sleeping, my subconscience was busily working out a solution of how I was going to to manage my time and what I was going to write about.

My alarm never even went off this morning; it’s still set for 6AM when I normally wake up for work. At some point in the quiet hours of the morning, my subconscience (my Muse?) thought about that fossil in our side yard and made a connection. You see, I’ve always thought of story ideas as pieces of fossil sticking up out of the ground. My job as a storyteller is to kneel down in the dirt with my picks and probes and brushes, and figure out what kind of fossil I’m dealing with. Maybe it’ll be something tiny—like those fragments of seashells stuck in our chunk of stone. Maybe it’ll be a Velociraptor or Tricerotops or T-Rex. You just never know what you’re dealing with until you start getting your hands dirty and begin digging those bones out of the ground.

So at 4:30 this morning, my mind made the connection, my eyes popped open all on their own, and I simply had to get up and start writing. You see sometimes the writing is just like that: sometimes you get to be the cowboy, and other times you’re the horse being spurred along at a galloping pace. Either way, as soon as the image of our fossil rock popped into my head, there was no getting back to sleep. I suddenly understood what this challenge was going to be for me and how I was going to do it. I’ll write 52 tiny stories—works of flash fiction—stuff I can dig up out of  the ground in a couple of days, then cut and grind and polish up as best I can before presenting them at the end of the week.

You won’t get to see them right away though. Sorry. I’m going to submit them for publication first, and the rules of submission say I can’t publish them anywhere else, not even on my own personal website. But I’ll certainly tell you all about them and how things are going. One every week. And guess what? I already have an idea for the first one. Another thing that woke me up so early this morning.

Once a story makes it through several rounds of rejections, then I’ll post it here and you can read it in all its glory. In one year, I’ll take the stories that didn’t publish and combine them in some kind of anthology, similar to what Phillip McCollum did. I’ll call it A Study in Lapidary and it will be a collection of exciting gemstones that once started life as just a bunch of rock chunks half-buried in the mud. That’s the plan anyway, at least for now as I sit here at my desk drafting it up while it’s still dark outside.

I hope you’ll join me on this expedition. Let’s grab our picks and brushes and start digging, shall we?

M