I got something different to share with you today. I was commissioned by Therapy in Motion and the Norman YMCA to do a series of instructional videos to help people live healthier lives at home. The first video premiered on Saturday with the rest scheduled to be released over time.
In the introduction episode, Cindy Merrick and Justin Noel discuss how the idea for the series came about and what you can expect in future episodes. Topics include posture, healthy eating habits, stretching, core stability, strength training overview, simplifying self-care, better balance, basic yoga, and meditation.
In the first episode that premiered alongside the introduction, Cindy Merrick, Founder of Therapy in Motion, talks about the secret of a healthy body. Spoiler: It’s your posture.
Stay tuned for more episodes! Be sure to leave a comment on the Norman YMCA YouTube channel on what you think so far and what you want to see in the future. Depending on well these are received and budgets, we’ll make a second volume.
I hope you learn something helpful with this series! 😀
Peyton was warned the lyre would empower her emotions.
“I need to try a different approach!” Peyton shouted in frustration.
The lyre did come with a warning that the musical instrument would empower her emotions. She thought the inventor meant the expression figuratively and not literally. The golden lyre’s ouroboros body of a dragon eating their tail should’ve warned her this was no ordinary instrument. She tried to play a calming song but couldn’t string together any music against the wind’s angry whips.
She retreated inside her tiny rental cabin in the middle of the forest outside Hochatown.
“That’ll teach me to play a song about my breakup on a magical lyre,” Peyton mumbled, trying to make a joke out of her predicament.
She took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and let her mind drift to happy thoughts of cute baby animals and silly memes as she played a peaceful tune. The pounding winds softened against the wooden cabin until the storm came to a complete rest with the song’s conclusion.
Peyton opened her eyes to the sight of the lyre’s inventor standing before her. Peyton cussed, nearly dropping the instrument.
“What did you give me, Modva?” Peyton demand. “Are you like an actual alien or something? I thought you were in a costume when I met you. And how did you even get in here and find me?”
Peyton met Modva outside a small used bookstore earlier that afternoon in town. Peyton assumed Modva was a human in her late 20s, just like herself and that the light purple skin was cosmetic. She didn’t give the inventor’s appearance second thought even though she didn’t know of any book character who wore a long, white lab coat with black spandex leggings and a black sweater. Two hair sticks tied up Modva’s black hair with rubies encapsulated on the ends, complementing her red sneakers.
“First, as previously instructed, I gifted you with the Winds of Emotion Lyre to help you process your feelings,” Modva calmly and factually stated. “Second, you would technically classify me as an alien based on your definition of being born on another planet. Third, I have tracking installed on all of my inventions to follow up with people. Finally, your door was unlocked.”
Peyton stood silent for a moment as she processed what she’d learned. She marched up to the inventor and thrust the lyre in her arms.
“I don’t know what your endgame is, but whatever it is, I don’t want any part of it,” Peyton huffed as she opened the front door.
“All I was hoping was for you to learn that the journey itself was all that mattered,” she explained as she left the cabin on her own accord, putting up no fight to respect Peyton’s wishes.
“I don’t need some dangerous magically lyre for that,” Peyton scoffed before shutting the door.
Modva sighed. “Let’s try this day again.”
Modva stepped off the porch’s steps and walked down a trail to a free-standing wooden white door with a red frame. She pressed down on the black handle and pushed open the door. The door contained another time and place where the sun shined on the small town. The door had a view of Peyton enjoying the view and beers from Beavers Bend Brewery – before Modva gifted her the lyre outside the bookshop.
Modva adjusted her lab coat. “I need to try a different approach.”
This week’s short story introduces Modva, a new end-timer! As touched on in the story, Modva’s journey throughout time and space involves her helping people with fantastical inventions that reshape reality.
The story came about from a writing challenge where authors had a list of words, sentence blocks, defining features, and a word count limit of 800. The Defining Features were, “End the story the way you start it. i.e. use a cyclical structure” and “an ouroboros is present somewhere in the story.” The Sentence Blocks were, “Let’s get it started again” and “The journey itself was all that mattered,” which I used all of them. I used two of the four words from the word list, “Cyclical, Doc, Wind, and Music.”
Before becoming an International Business Coach, Stacy Eads had been the CEO of a Norman technology company for over a decade when she fell in love with the book, Scaling Up by Verne Harnish.
“I grew Levant 600% of its size while I was a CEO, and I started to figure out that maybe that’s where my true personal niche lies and that I wanted an opportunity to maybe break away, become a coach, and be able to help more businesses than just be an employee of one company in particular,” Stacy Eads said.
For Eads’ presentation for December’s OVF power lunch, she will teach a tool that helps expedite decision-making processes during stressful times, especially with all of the pandemic’s pivots. The OODA Loop, which stands for Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act, has helped her clientele make better designs during moments of fight or flight.
“Whenever they have a year that’s like 2020 again,” Eads explained, “or all of the things that have been happening with COVID-19, they have a tool that they can go back to and say, ‘I know how to calm down. I know how to look at the facts. I know how to orient myself to those facts. Make a decision, act and start my loop again, so that I have a fast, quick decision-making tool that gives me confidence in my business to proceed.’”
Eads said one of the things she loves about the tool is that the first step is to make sure that you observe that you’re observing facts only. She explained that when people are in a crisis mode, their emotions are at play or there is competing information, and they’re unsure which way to go.
“We don’t want our emotions, we don’t want our opinions or what we think is going to happen, but we just want to observe the facts that are around us,” Eads said. “What do we know? And what do we not know? And that initial pinpoint of the exercise is one of the things that I think is the most fruitful.”
Stacy Eads will be speaking at the Oklahoma Venture Forum Power Lunch on Wednesday, December 9, 2020. Be sure to register for the online ZOOM event to learn more about OODA, ask your questions, and network with entrepreneurs in Oklahoma. As an Oklahoma City business coach and somebody who travels among North America helping CEOs, Eads is excited about having the opportunity to speak to the Oklahoma Venture Forum.
“Many of them might’ve even heard of the OODA loop before, but maybe they have not put it into the perspective of how to use the OODA loop within the year 2020, and within the type of anxiety that CEOs are having these days,” Eads said. “The types of pivots that they’re making during this pandemic. So I’m excited to take an old concept that’s been around for decades and maybe breathe in some new life into what the year 2020 has to offer.”
While driving her through the countryside to visit her parents for the holidays, Jacqui realizes there are no stars in the sky.
The lights from the car Jacqui rented barely pierced through the Britain countryside. Delays plagued her flight from the states, and she hadn’t planned on driving at midnight. Regret began to set up a room in her mind for not booking a hotel room for the night, but her parents were eager to see her for the holidays visit, and a free bed is a free bed. While she was exhausted, she knew being in the middle of nowhere shouldn’t be as dark as it was that night. She looked up at the sky.
There were no stars.
The sky was pitch black like someone covered it up. Not even the moon was visible.
“This is some crazy Doctor Who level weirdness,” Jacqui commented.
Jacqui was no stranger to the British sci-fi time-traveling series. Her social media account would reveal photos of her cosplaying as characters from the TV show, usually as Martha Jones, as she bore a similar resemblance. However, she never remotely considered an out of this world experience happening to her.
She reached for her phone stationed in the central dashboard to make sure she didn’t take a wrong turn when a voice from the backseat whispered. “Did you realize the stars are gone, too?”
Jacqui slammed on the breaks. She snapped her head to the backseat where a ghostly being with a human skull shrouded in a crystalline, black-draped hoodie. It waved their four skeletal hands hello. Jacqui screamed and reached for the car door handle.
“Oh, the stars are missing, but I’m what freaks you out?” the being snarked.
Jacqui was halfway out of the car when the snakiness of the being’s tone made her mind say, “hold up…” She decided to reply. “Okay, then, who are you, and what are you doing here?”
“My name is Slayer, and after visiting a parade, I decided to visit a time and place on this planet randomly,” they casually explained as they floated through the car and outside. Slayer looked up at the sky. “From what I know about Earth, there should most definitely be stars here.”
Jacqui stepped out of the car and studied the sky alongside the floating, leg-less being in sympathetic concern. “Yeah, there should be stars here.”
“The stars still exist, though,” Slayer added. “I popped off this planet and checked, but in this time, at this place, they are not visible.”
Jacqui reflected on her sci-fi knowledge. “Could there be some sort of device blocking them from our view?”
“That is a possibility,” Slayed reaffirmed in a monotone. With one hand, they reached through their chest and pulled out a black tablet device through their robe. Slayer tapped around on the screen. “I’m showing a device not from this planet nearby.”
Jacqui grabbed her phone and keys from inside the car. “Let’s go check it out then.”
Slayer took the lead, with Jacqui following behind using her phone’s flashlight. They walked up a short hill before stopping in front of a straw scarecrow dressed in jeans and a button-up red flannel shirt.
“This is it,” Slayer softly spoke.
“That’s a scarecrow,” Jacqui quipped.
Using all four of his arms, Slayer stripped off the shirt and straw from the scarecrow’s chest. Inside was a silver metal box with three black switches and a maxed-out gauge.
“What is that?” Jacqui asked.
“I’m not quite sure,” Slayer mumbled as he reached for the switches. “Let’s kill this machine.”
Slayer flicked all three switches down. The gauge spun down, and the stars and moon flickered back to life, illuminating the countryside.
Jacqui cheered. “And let there be light!”
From further up the hill, an exclamation of pain screeched through the night. With the sky back, Jacqui was able to see a destroyed house further up the hill. The ground rumbled, and the cry got closer, revealing a black six-legged spider the size of a pickup truck with the head of a bison. Steam sizzled off its body like the light was burning it. It grabbed the device inside the scarecrow with one of its two harry tentacle arms while knocking Jacqui away with the other. The arm passed through Slayer, who was unfazed by the attack.
The creature flipped the switches, causing the stars to fade out. The beast was nearly invisible with the lack of light, making the device it held appear as if it was floating. The creature hissed and scurried away.
Slayer floated over to Jacqui and helped her up.
“What was that?” Jacqui forced herself not to scream.
“I do not know,” Slayer answered with a hint of excitement. “We should kill it.”
“Or stop it at least. It looks like any sort of light hurts it. You think a car’s headlights will work?”
“It would stand to reason.”
“Then let’s go.”
Jacqui ran down the hill, with Slayer floating beside her. Jacqui jumped in the driver’s seat while Slayer slipped through the back. The car roared to life with the lights on their brightest setting. Slayer directed Jacqui where to drive, using the tablet to track the extraterrestrial device.
A minute later, down a gravel road, the lights illuminated another demolished house. The creature emerged from the wreckage, hissing at the car. It flung a corpse at the vehicle, which Jacqui narrowly avoided. She spun the car back at the creature, aiming the lights at it. The lights melted away its body, and it retreated down the hill.
“It’s working,” Slayer praised.
“Yeah, but it went off the road, and I can’t get to it.”
“I can fix that.”
Slayer pulled out a shimmering purple box the size of a tennis ball from their chest and attached it to the car’s ceiling. Dozens of veins of purple light wires erupted from the box, expanding in every direction throughout the vehicle before sinking inside.
“What did you do?” Jacqui screamed.
“Modified your car to fly,” Slayer calmly explained.
Jacqui could feel the car lift up from the ground. “Woah.”
“Go!”
She slammed on the gas, and the car flew down the hill. In seconds, the creature was in their sights. She pressed forward, shining more light on the beast until it collapsed from its legs melting. The creature dropped its sky blackening device, causing the stars to return upon impact with the ground. Jacqui kept the car still on the creature as it melted away into a massive pool of black goo.
Slayer floated out of the car and inspected the goo. Jacqui joined.
“Is it dead?” she questioned.
“Yes,” Slayer affirmed.
Slayer returned to the car, pulled out the transformation box, returning the vehicle to normal.
“Well, that was an adventure,” Jacqui declared.
“Indeed it was,” Slayer admitted. “You should get to wherever you were going. I imagine they’ll be here soon enough to clean up this mess.”
“Who’s they?”
From above, a blinding white light blasted down on them. Jacqui felt like a criminal caught in the spotlight.
Slayer slipped down through the ground. “It doesn’t matter. You’ll forget all of this soon enough.”
This week’s short story was inspired by the following writing prompt: “It’s midnight, and your headlights barely pierce through the darkness settled on the road in front of you. Shaking away your exhaustion, you begin to panic as you realize you’re lost. As you reach for your phone, a voice from the back seat whispers, “Did you realize the stars are gone, too?”
Story Artwork by Chen Kang at Design Pickle. Get a discount off your first month of Design Pickle via this affiliate link, which full disclosure, I earn a small commission as a discount for me as well.
Discover more stories following Slayer via the character tag.
After finishing a project for her history class to modernize an ancient Greek festival honoring Dionysus, she jokingly makes a toast to him and the god appears.
“Finished at last,” Shelby cheered to herself, alone in her studio apartment.
Shelby stood up from her two-person dining table where her laptop lived. She stretched her body from the extensive writing session. As a final class project, her history professor assigned everyone to write a report about modernizing a forgotten tradition. She chose the Great Dionysia, which she learned about the ancient Greek festival honoring Dionysus from a video game.
To celebrate, she procured a clean wine class from her kitchen cabinet and poured herself a glass of her favorite boxed red wine. Jokingly, she raised her glass in the air.
“To you, Dionysus,” she toasted. “Hope you like my festival idea.”
She took a sip and then sat her glass down on the kitchen counter. The moment she looked up back at her table, she saw a tall, slender man in a gray suit. She shrieked. The man dramatically spun around like a dancer in an elaborate musical number reveal. His brown, curly hair with a pair of locks rested gracefully on his shoulders. In his hair wear a pair of grape leaves.
“I love it!” the man praised.
Shelby grabbed the pepper spray attached to her car keys and sprayed the man in the eyes. The man did not flinch. He casually blinked when the spray stopped.
“Yeah, that doesn’t hurt us,” he politely explained.
“Who are you?” Shelby demand with a tremble.
The man’s face brunched up, offended she didn’t know. “You just wrote a report about me.”
Shelby’s jaw dropped. “Dionysus?”
“Ding!” he smiled.
Dionysus sat in the gray armchair Shelby had stationed next to the table. He waved his hand over the table, swirling to life in a blue-green mist, two bottles of wine in the air that gently landed on the table. He took one, drinking directly from the bottle. Dionysus nodded at Shelby and nudged the other bottle toward her in a peaceful gesture to join him.
“How did you do that?” Shelby asked in a hushed voice.
“You know what,” he started and then paused to think how. “I just kind of made them appear. God of wine, et cetera, et cetera. Would it help if I turned into a fox to prove who I am?”
Shelby nodded. Happy to put on a show, he snapped his fingers, and in a poof of purple smoke, he reappeared as a red fox with the same suit top.
“Ta-Da!” Dionysus announced in a charming tone.
Shelby fainted, falling on the floor. Dionysus sighed and snapped back into the human form.
“I was hoping to talk and make a few suggestions for your festival, so I’ll just edit your document while you take a nap.”
This week’s short story brought to you by wine and this writing prompt: “You’re sat alone, with a glass of wine in hand, and decide to jokingly toast the Greek God Dionysus. You did not expect him to appear before you in human form, create two bottles of wine, and take a seat next to you.”
The game mentioned in the story is Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, which has made me fantasize about putting on a modern version of the festival. Hope you enjoyed this fun little story.
Story Artwork by Nona Calingasan at Design Pickle. Get a discount off your first month of Design Pickle via this affiliate link, which full disclosure, I earn a small commission as a discount for me as well.
