Lemons from lemonade

I like to make something good come from something bad -- lemonade from lemons and all that... (though personally I prefer eating a straight lemon to drinking lemonade, so if it were up to me, that expression would be reversed... except you can't make lemons from lemonade, so that pretty much defeats the point of the saying... plus I'm pretty sure I'm nearly alone in that preference.... Anyway...)  I was supposed to work today, but I was informed yesterday that I wouldn't be needed on set after all.  I was bummed.  But if I were working I'd have to go to bed early.  So since I didn't have to, and since my fiancé was out all evening and I had the apartment to myself, I used that time to start writing a short story.  I wrote an outline, and then when I was stuck for how to open (intros have always been the hardest for me -- In school I would write my essays starting with the second sentence or sometimes even the second paragraph and then write the beginning at the very end), I decided to pull a random book off the book shelf and use the last word of the first sentence to launch me....  But that word was "grind"... and there was just no way I could cleanly work that into my young-adult story....  So I pulled a different book off the shelf, and that word was "morning," which worked much better, and 24 hours later I have the first 5000 words of what's turning out to be a rather long short story, have stolen not one but two story elements from a play I wrote when I was eight years old, Googled the rules to a game from school I couldn't quite remember the specifics of and seven minutes later realized I'd been reading on grandparents.com, and sent off my first 5000 words to my brilliant-writer mom for feedback, feeling like I'd given life to some beautiful characters who wouldn't exist had I been working today and like I couldn't wait to find out what was going to happen to these characters next -- and getting invested in my characters and wanting to find out what's going to happen to them is the coolest feeling I can get as a writer.  Oh and then I thought of an idea to turn it into a trilogy.  And how I would go about casting the film version.

Moral of the story?  When you lose work, write.  And don't discount your eight-year-old self's literary instincts.  And grandparents.com has some pretty cool information.