Monday Moment #77: a writing prompt for your work-in-progress

(If you’ve already read this then skip past all the italicized blah-di-blah and start writing.) Monday Moments are writing prompts for your work-in-progress. They are questions that come from my experiences and are my favorite way to find out more about my characters. I find I learn a lot. Some of it I use. Some of it I don’t. But I always, always get to know my character(s) better just by answering the question. I hope you do too. )

I headed out to the great out of doors over the weekend.

(I believe in my last post I said I planned on still meeting my writing goals while away. I'm calling myself out now. Didn't happen! But I'll add it to my catch-up list for this week.)

We went to the beautiful Salt Creek State Park. I'd never been there before. It's quite an amazing place, especially its tide pools. When there are negative tides (in our case between 7:30 and 8:00 am) all sorts of amazing critters are revealed, including something I'd never seen.

There's an area called Tongue Point. It's a cropping of rocks that is exposed when the tide is out, pretty much the shape of a tongue sticking out at the Puget Sound. At the tippy-tip of that tongue was this amazing site.

That starfish was a the size of a basketball! I wish the camera could capture their true colors: the orange of the starfish, the purple urchins, and the green anemones.

But, I had seen all those things before (not that I didn't love seeing them again), but this next thing I had never seen...

Is it just me, are those things a bit creepy? My first reaction was they looked like a sea cockroach. My second was that they looked prehistoric. It was like I was looking at an exposed spine.

Chitons! That's what I learned they were later. And a chiton is the most primitive of all mollusks, so I guess I wasn't so far off about prehistoric bit.

What is something that your character sees or is exposed to that they've never seen before?