The Happy Old Book
- Creative  Mood Writing to Inspire -

 

Scary mood:

A book of leaden bulleted type, of cruelest coldest ink, sat mired in table dust. Around it there were no marks, no lightening of the dirt. Time had passed unremarked. The ‘snow’ was both clock and calendar. Traffic droned mere feet from the grimy panes, muting birdsong to almost nothing at all. Ariah inched closer to it, closer, closer… Until the stench of its mouldy cover dared encroach on her brain. 

Scary mood:

In a cover of scarred animal hyde, every page end was a filthy grey. The once gaudy writing was vanishing in the meanest of twilights. Ariah turned it in her hands before holding it up to the age-bitten mirror. Curious. The book had no reflection. Every ounce of her screamed, Don’t open it! Just don’t open it! But reading books, opening them, was a habit. Creak!

Happy mood:

If both page and ink were made of sunny rays, the book couldn’t have been more light. Hundreds of pages though it was, it could have been a daisy on Ariah’s palm. She held it aloft and twirled around. This book was her shangri-la, her doorway into a world made of laughter. In those times of trouble, that book had become her sanctuary and friend. Wherever she was, it was too.

 

Happy mood:

The book cover could have been woven from the first petals of springtime. Whatever lay within was of such worth to the writer, to their community, that it had been bequeathed this velvety-aromatic protection. Without turning a page her heart made a skippity-skip, a twirl of joy, a fairytale leap! It must be an original, written by a fairy’s hand! Ariah ran; she ran through the misty rain to her treehouse and up the ladder. This would be one to savour, on her cushion, snacks at the ready.

Sad mood:

‘Twas typewriter born a time long forgotten; every page had been anger-battered with a casuality of iron rods - clunk-clunk-clunk, clunk-clunk-clunk.  The crudest of ink had soaked its pages through and through. Its sepia pages had descended into the most woeful of brittle conditions, fragmenting into rough edged leaves. The only touching fingers came from winter’s hand; at times it was as if the wind howled its prose in spectral fashion, deliberately disregarding the syntax. Perhaps it would have gone on that way for time out of mind, but Ariah came and everything changed.

Sad mood:

The book had rained onto the park bench one paper-drip at a time, or at least that is how Ariah imagined it. Born of a storm cloud dense enough to cut out all light, she mused. Though all about it the wood was drenched and rotten, from front cover to back, the novel was as dry as it would be on the hottest of summer days. To her adventitious fingertips it was baked to such a searing heat that she retracted her hand with a scream. Sadness. Anger. Danger. What in the world could create a book such as this?

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