Writing Pilates

Have Your Character Toil Uselessly

Bosomella continued to tinker in her room. Miss Borka was deep into preparations for the ball, gown fittings, dance lessons, pine cone sap treatments for her hair and for her skin, olive oil and cream. But she still could not dance, although she knew every step by heart and moved with as much grace as a girl with a limp could muster. And so Bosomella sat in her tower and thought and drew designs and came up with some brilliant mechanic only to realize after days of elation that it would never work. She would never be free. Not if Miss Borka failed to dance thirty days hence. And so Bosomella sank into a fog of creation, spending every waking moment on the one idea she knew would never work. The theory was completely fraught with wrongness. But it was just so delightfully brilliant. And she drew and dreamed and tried to ignore the terrible fact that she had absolutely nothing to offer her hopeful mistress upon the night of the ball. Nothing but dreams and thistle down. Which in the end piled into one huge rancid heap of failure.