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I am conducting a test on stylized writing, and this is the first part of the first chapter of the 9 I have so far. I’ve never written anything very light before, and I thought I’d give it a go. Note that the end of this chapter was cut off due to exceeding the character limit:

It is not an easy thing to admit you’re going nowhere. Yet that was just what young Jiminy Ellworth had to do.It is also incredibly and unfathomably embarrassing to have been christened ‘Jiminy’ as a boy. Yet that was what his parents had done. So, with his uneasy and incredibly embarrassing life, young Jiminy found himself searching for some kind of employment.

“Too young!” called the bartender.
“Too tall!” called the tailor.
“Too thin!” called the baker. Jiminy was almost distraught.

What am I going to do?” he said, thinking out loud as he sat, dejectedly, on the side of the street. “I,” he sighed, “am going absolutely no where.”

“You mustn’t talk to yourself like that,” said a strange, creaky voice, “Or people will fancy you funny in the head!”

Jiminy jumped. He hadn’t expected the voice, certainly not one addressing him directly! “I’m sorry?” he questioned, shifting his position to see who it was.

“You’re forgiven,” answered the voice. “For what?”

“For,” said Jiminy, before he paused, thinking. What was he sorry for? “For talking to myself?”

“Oh,” said the voice, “Was I talking to you? I was talking to myself.”

“You were talking to yourself about talking to yourself?” Jiminy turned full around, looking at the voice.

It was coming from a strange-looking, wrinkly old man with a wispy white beard and a pointed cap. He was bent over, his eyes magnified with his round, wire-rimmed spectacles. They were green.

“What?” said the wrinkly old man as he lowered his face close to Jiminy’s.

Jiminy stared back at the old man. He was very confused.

“My name,” said the old man, “is Higwick. At least, I think it is. It’s what my mother said. But you can call me Duviant Dubois. Or perhaps, if it’s Wednesday, simply Gock.”

“Gock?”

“No, it’s Tuesday,” said Higwick-Duviant-Dubois and only-on-Wednesdays-Gock. “Tuesdays means tea.”

By this point, Jiminy was beyond very confused and moving steadily towards thoroughly dumbfounded.

“Tea time!” called the old man. And he sat down –plop!- right next to Jiminy on the curb, plugged his nose, and shook his head from side to side.

Immediately, a little blue cotton cloth appeared, set with all kinds of things for tea, bread, marmalade, cream and sugar, and one very small cake with a ripe strawberry on top. There were no plates or saucers, just two blue tea-cups and one crotchety old tea-kettle, which was spitting and hissing like a trapped cat.

“Stop that,” said Higwick, “I don’t like having you wedged behind my ear any more than you do. But we must learn to deal with rain on the morning, mustn’t we?”

And the kettle stopped.

“Right,” said Higwick-Duviant-Dubois, “Pour yourself some tea, there, lad.”

Jiminy figured the entire exchange was completely ridiculous, but that wasn’t any reason he shouldn’t get a cup of tea and a piece of bread out of it. He grabbed the tea-kettle and made to tip it into his cup.

The tea poured up. Not down, but up. A thin line of steaming brown liquid was floating in the air.

Higwick flipped his tea-cup over above the stream of gravity-defying tea and caught it all, before whacking the kettle with his full cup of tea, sending it sloshing everywhere, and saying, “Spiteful! Difficult! Nut!”

Jiminy was agape. Either this tea-kettle was housing a bad fairy, or this man was a wizard!

“And no language like that, either!” squawked not-Gock (because it wasn’t Wednesday), “You’ll curdle the cream!” He gave it another smack. “You know it offends Mr. Garden Hoe!”

Or he was completely crazy.

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