Yes, time is our master…a brutal, cynical master that laughs as we squander our precious gift from Chronos. “We swears to serve the master of the precious. We re-edit the first paragraph a dozen times, wanting to get it perfect before going on to the much scarier chore of character and story development. We convince ourselves that a few minutes of Facebooking will build our platform a few minutes that drag on for hours. We productively procrastinate, using our one ring to do just one more Google search for that critical background. Our frittering seconds become minutes become hours become years. Time is the “one ring to rule them all.” We are always searching for it, then wasting its awesome power when we have found it. Neither hobbit nor Sméagol nor golden band, my precious is time. Not that I ever had One Ring to lose, mind you. “Curse us and splash us! My precious is lost!” The writer’s prompt said to write a response to the one-word prompt, “Precious.” I chuckled to myself upon realizing my first thought was of Gollum hissing “My precioussss” in the Lord of the Rings movies.

Lord of the rings click and drag