Congratulations
Cascade! What a runaway win!
Well done Cascade and hard luck to Phyrebrat who put in a terrific late sprint.
You see how you ruined everything with your 'must-stop-voting-for-phyrebrat' ethic?
Thank you,
Victoria for the write up, and particularly
Void, Parson and
Cat's Cradle for such lovely comments on my piece.
My thanks to the votes from
Parson, Cat’s Cradle,
Void,
johnnyjet, ratsy and
Bob Senior 
and mentions from
Juliana (for the very close second
),
DG Jones,
TitaniumTi,
Jo and
Kerrybuchanan.
My vote went to the erstwhile Perp,
Tim James for a story that just screamed authenticity, had a lovely little circular feel, and written in the most wonderful Middle English. The feat here was not only the tale itself, but the comprehensibility of it. I was truly gobsmacked, and hideously green with envy.
Thanks also to
DG Jones for taking the effort to place our tales. You're more or less right, although mine was set in two time periods and two places, one of which was of course London, and 1666.
As soon as I heard about the genre, I had decided to do something on Joan of Arc. I usually let my ideas float around for the first 2 or 3 weeks and then write them. But I also read the stories as they were posted. When Juliana went to the Dark Side and posted her Jeanne D'arc piece - and it being so lovely - I thought I'd have to change it. I wanted to use something Folklore-y and involving bread; On The Great British Bake Off a couple weeks ago they were cooking some regional bread (I think it was Eastern European), and said that if it split, it was a bad omen. Instead of Nostradamus, I wanted to make it more provincial and less Royal, and also kind of settled on The Great Fire of London. Whilst I was researching it, I found it was claimed (and refuted) that
Old Mother Shipton from Knaresborough in Harrogate had made some prediction about the Great Fire so it went from there.
Regarding the doggerel: Initially I had just written it as straight prose, but it seemed a bit meh...
When I was a kid I loved
The Dark Crystal and had the artwork book by
Brian Froud. It had this rhyme in:
When single shines the triple suns,
what was sundered and undone,
shall be whole; the two made one,
By Gelfling hand, or else by none.
It's stuck in my mind and rather than the prediction happening offscreen, I realised I could make most of the narrative in the rhyme, so I extended it to six lines and hoped for the best.
All false modesty/humility aside, I thought my entry was unremarkable so the votes and lovely comments have really, really cheered me.
And thank your lucky stars that Cascade won and not me... I was going to be rather unpopular with a genre choice; one that would have rivaled
Chrispenycate's
DG Jones - what an excellent month of entries your choice of genre and theme inspired (Although, mate... that theme seemed so simple on the surface but was really difficult to work in). More of these more challenging genre/themes please!
Congratulations to everyone who joined in and again to
Cascade.
pH
