Dodo Au Go-Go

As of 2016, I own a Dr Seuss book.  It's the first one I've ever owned.  Yes. The first. I was an adult before I ever even heard of Dr Seuss. (In my defence, I grew up on an island, and although I definitely wasn’t short of books – I had the Mr Men and Little Miss books, the Ladybird books and hundreds of Enid Blytons among others – but Dr Seuss wasn’t one of them).

There was a Twitter hashtag which did the rounds recently: #tweetjustyourvoice. The idea was to use record an audio of your voice with a visual that didn’t include your face, and then post it onto Twitter so that your communities of tweeps (Twitter folk) get to hear how you sound. I would have probably continued on my merry way, happily ignorant of all things connected to this hashtag, except that it got embraced with gusto by the FridayPhrases community , with a certain FridayPhrases host (the very persuasive @AdeleSGray ) inviting me to take part. If ever there was a hashtag designed to wallop me well out of my comfort zone, it was this one. Why? Thank you for asking. There are several reasons.

A little while ago, in early February, my favourite Twitter-based microfiction game ,  @FridayPhrases , generated the following  #FP  effort from me: Her suitor cuts her at the opera, blatant, cruel. She is publicly silent & slips a snake onto his coach. He likes games; she doesn't lose I quite liked it and thought there might be scope for a longer story sitting in between the words, waiting for the telling. But even better, the brilliant @HopeDenney2 quite liked it too. When we realised we both thought it could be developed into a longer story, we, of course, had to give it a go! So we did, and we each came up with very different interpretations. Hope's story is immediately below, and mine is further down the post. Enjoy!

One of the joys of playing FridayPhrases is when I fall in love with the little idea/image/mood composed for an  #FP micro-fiction  so much that I can't let it go straight away and I end up playing with it for ju-u-u-st a little bit longer. Sometimes, it escapes my head and ends up on paper as a piece of flash fiction.

I go on about this all the time : I'm a huge fan of the Twitter microfiction game run by @FridayPhrases , where the aim is to write stories on the optional theme in Twitter's 140 characters or less, using the hashtag, "#FP". Last year, I made a list of my favourite FPs out of all the ones I'd written in 2014. I'm doing the same again this year. As per last year, it's interesting to see the common threads throughout my year's FPs.

Before you start reading, it helps to know that Indi is the girl on the right and Bodie is the boy on the left. Indi: Our humans putting weird Things on our heads... Hey. You have treat? I want treat.  Bodie: Omnomnom. Treat yum, but stupid Thing on head. Hurry. Chew treat. Get Thing off head. 

It's often rainy or overcast when the kangaroos come out to play. And they did just that last week, coming as part of a casual mob, grooving around the green grass for a graze and gossip. ('Mob', by the way, is the collective noun for kangaroos).  See the one under the tree, sheltering from the rain (top right)?