Julie's Web Journal

In the spirit of the event I'm posting an unpublished work. Be aware that it's a work in progress and as such is fairly rough.

I suppose a little bit of an introduction to this piece is in order. The idea came to me as I was sitting on a rum sun-soaked beach with nary a cabana boy in sight, reading a tattered paperback book. Honestly: I was on a beach in Nassau, and it was sunny. There were no cabana boys, but my "boys" (Paul and Chris) were swimming. I felt more like reading a book. I was pensive, nay, wistful for what Nassau used to be.

This was our third visit to the city, and I missed everything from our first visit from disembarking the plane in the open air to the wonderful collection of shops and the authentic British pub near the Parliament building. Nassau had become as sterile as every other tropical destination we'd visited. (There's just no good place to snorkel or dive where we live.) Oh, the local dish or local drink or local language (if you can find it spoken) is different, but everything is sanitized for the protection of the tourists - which flock in on large cruise ships, attack the shops, and then go on to the next destination - same high-end chain shops, different people. I don't call that a vacation.

I'm sure it's all very good for the local economies, though.

I dozed off over my book and wondered how tourists from other planets vacation ... and where all the cheap labor must come from. Hence this story was born.

As I said before, it's still very rough, but I wanted to post something unpublished. The only other unpublished works I have in progress at present are promised along with first rights, so it didn't seem proper to post them here.

If nothing else, you'll see how mind-achingly horrid my early drafts are.

So without further ado, here ya go. Don't say you haven't been warned.

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Tags: Writing
Filed under: Writing