This came to me as one of those "woah, that'd be a cool idea to write about" ideas I got after reading the poem "Pied Beauty" by Gerard Manley Hopkins. The basic premise was: what if a man lost his ability to see the beauty around him, and what would it take to bring it back? And, hey, I figured I needed some extra practice with color description as it was, so why not just turn this into a big writing exercise where I super-saturated the text with color words?

When I started this, I honestly didn't think I'd get more than 1,500 words in (that's about where my less-than-stellar ideas tend to taper off and die), and the first day I sat down to write this, that's about where I stopped. It was a few days before I went back and looked over it again, and in the second day I nearly doubled the text, bringing it up to around 3,000. There was a long, frustrated week of re-writing and soul-searching to figure out -where- this idea was going, and how to end it, or even how I -wanted- to end it, but after about a month of staring at the word file and fighting the urge to cut and run, I finally was able to bring it to a resolution just, -just- shy of 6,000 words.

I'll be honest: this isn't my favorite piece as a whole, but I really liked a few passages here and there and I worked hard enough on it that I felt it was worth at least posting.

Let me know what you think!