The word for the quadrille today is “troll” or any variation or arrangement of it somehow in your poem.  

The hard part of a quadrille is that it must have exactly 44 words (excluding title). Some people find 99-word stories difficult. A quadrille permits less than half that many words.

I sometimes find this constraint difficult. I run my fingers on the keyboard. I stop when I think I’m done, like what I’m doing now. Sometimes I stop at 20 words. Sometimes at 45. Sometimes 100. Because I’m lazy I rarely get over a few hundred words before I stop. But then, if I’m writing a quadrille, I have to think about what I just wrote and make it fit that 44-word constraint. Admittedly it’s an arbitrary constraint, but it does make me think. After I think about it, I realize that I don’t need those other extra 20 or 50 words. Or, often in my case, I realize I better add some more words.

So. Why the word “troll”? A troll can be all kinds of things, some are bad, some are really bad. Sometimes they are funny and maybe there are some good trolls out there somewhere. This makes the prompt open ended. You can call up your dark side from the basement and give it an airing out or you could bring those wild dreams down to earth and still have something relevant to say.

What I was thinking of when the word occurred to me was the Dreamworks movie “Trolls”. If you have any children around you may have seen it.  If not here’s one of the songs:

If you haven’t seen the movie, there are mostly good Trolls (actually, there is one Troll who technically could be labeled “bad”, but he seems good enough except when he’s about to be eaten) and there are mostly bad Bergens (all but one, and she is rather bad, are actually good but they don’t know it till the end). The Bergens think eating makes you happy (which is strange but they’re Bergens) and they think eating Trolls make you very happy.

Oddly, you don’t need much more than that for a great plot and that description was already too long for a quadrille.

Of course you don’t have to write about happy trolls. I’m going to dig deep into my dungeon where I safely keep my trolls hidden away from the civilized world to see if I can find a particularly nasty one.

So. To get to the point, to participate write a 44-word quadrille using some variation of the word “troll” in the poem. Post it on your blog and copy the link to that post.  Paste that link in the Mister Linky below. In the Mister Linky you will see others who have linked up their troll quadrilles as well. Visit them and see how they’ve handled the prompt.