On the days that I forget to bring my music with me as I run I find that I notice random objects and start putting a story to them in my head to pass the time.
The one constant item along my running route is the back cover of a Harry Potter book.
Somehow, I forget that it is there until each time I pass it by - and then the story continues from where it left off.
It goes something like this:
There is a land in the future where lies are forbidden - even in the form of books. Fictional books are considered fabrications of untruths and over time they are banned and destroyed entirely. The only writings which remain are personal records written by the people who inhabit this place. Many years pass and we meet a young girl who has never heard of fictional stories or characters. One day as she walks through a wooded area she notices a flash of faded colors near the base of a tree. She makes her way over and picks it up - it has writing on it which tells of a land where magical things happen. She begins to wonder where this land is and how she could get there because it sounds fascinating. She goes back to the place where she found the book cover and searches for more to the story. She eventually somehow finds a water-stained, worn and haggard copy of the book (in a hollowed out tree stump? In a hole dug out of the earth beneath a boulder? Maybe some of the pages are missing?) and thinks she is reading someone's history.
That's as far as my brain has taken it. Are these fragments of a real story that I've heard about and forgotten or is my brain really creating all of this?
I need to know which road I should take from here. The easy road, which consists of finding the book already in existence - or the hard road, which means I need to continue my brain-writing. Because either way I am engrossed and can't wait to find out how the story ends.
