I’m having a bit of a struggle with my writing. I invented a setting where I think about choices that people make, and how they work out what they are willing to do to make their choices real. Written like that it sounds like any long novel, but in fact I’m writing short stories about a goblin market that appears now and then. If you stumble into it you must make a bargain to get out. If a goblin will trade the sweetest cherries ever grown for your grandfather’s walking stick, great!

Keeping the stakes low keeps the stories short. And the goblins will accept a baker’s dozen of cinnamon rolls in trade for almost anything IF you have them with you. Here’s ten lines.

The argument started when Vanna held out a bunch of green leaves, with a fuzzy texture and white bloom over them. “See what I got? It’s rapunzel salad.”
“No, that’s just lamb’s quarters. This is rampion, the real rapunzel plant, and it’s awfully early.” The second woman, Kitty, was holding a rosette of slender leaves about four inches long. “And, I have roots with it.”
Vanna. “No, that’s just campanula.”
Kitty. “This kind of campanula is also known as rampion, and it is the rapunzel salad.”
Vanna. “I just bought these greens, and the vendor said they are rapunzel greens.”
Kitty. “So did my vendor! And lamb’s lettuce wasn’t around in Shakespeare’s time.”
Vanna. “That’s the point! The witch was really a scientist gardener, growing new things.”

These two women both traded at a stall that sells every kind of plant that was ever imagined as the source of the story of Rapunzel. They don’t realize they were at the same place.

Anyway, I got stuck in the new story about the market. And I’m stuck on the sequel to Death Comes to the Science Fair. So I looked around for inspiration and read a whole bunch of weird stories on Project Gutenberg from one hundred years ago. The writing back then was quite different.

I found a story that included a guy in Texas who chases a fleeing robber in his de Havilland (airplane) with the sheriff in the back of the plane. They fly along the railroad line because they assume (correctly) the robber will also be riding along the line, so he doesn’t get lost in the wilderness. The sheriff stands up in the back and shoots the robber but doesn’t kill him, and the plane crashes (more or less deliberately) and there is another shoot out, because nobody is dead enough.

The robber had taken advantage of a storekeeper who talked too much about when he had money in the till. That’s a component of a lot of trouble, even today. We just don’t settle the business by flying private airplanes around and jumping out of them, which the sheriff did on a different occasion.

I also read bits of a children’s series from the early 1900’s. It begins with a bratty little girl stamping around, and the author insisting that books need to be entertaining, not relentlessly moralizing. Some twenty books later a different heroine breaks her engagement because she thinks she must work full time on getting rid of slums. It felt a little preachy to me… even though the hero of that book tells her that she needs to marry him and he will help her with the slums.

Writing is a peculiar occupation.

Header. Metropolitan museum, Soap Bubbles. Jean Simeon Chardin, 1733.