My Short Story Morphs: "A Murmuration of Dragons"

Photo source: The Cornell Lab of Ornithology

Creative writing is not only cognition: seeing from the inside out; it is also synthesis, seeing possibilities
from the outside in. This has happened with the short story I'm currently working on, "Magic Comes to Half Street."

It's new title is "A Murmuration of Dragons," and here's how the title and story change happened.

I ran across the video embedded below while goofing off on Facebook. My short story was lively in my awareness, even if in the background at that moment, and I thought, "What if the starlings were dragons?" A vision filled my mind, thousands of dragons afire with the setting sun, swirling around and above the main character of the story, a foreshadowing of future events and a visual representation of hidden forces at work.

How could I deny such a serendipitous gift?

A murmuration is the combining of "thousands of tiny starlings coming together to swoop and twist across the sky – morphing into one three-dimensional pattern after another; an aerial ballet performed with an amazing synchronicity as the tiny birds move like one huge shape-shifting organism," according to Ecology Global Network writer Penny Stalling's article "Mind-Blowing Starling Murmuration."

We'll see how the new wrinkle to my story works out. I'm optimistic.

Murmuration from Islands & Rivers on Vimeo.