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I decided to make one up on my own again: Imagine a regimen/routine your character goes through every single day. Write it out from their perspective. Let them get to the end…

Morning has yet to break when I rise. I can imagine the wisps of it lighting the darkness all around me. I am not fully conscious myself, but it is time for my day to begin. I always run before dawn. I have never seen anyone past childhood run for any reason other than fear, but to run brings me joy. I run past the stables where the Henley and his brothers will prepare the hay in a few hours. I dash towards the lighthouse along the crooked paths marked by round flat stones. I dash back, the sweat whisking from my body and my clothes. I return before my parents wake. I set out the feed for the chickens and the cattle. Afterwards I let our own horses out to trot and graze. When they’ve left I sit cross-legged in the quiet of the stall and close my eyes. I breathe deeply, ignoring the smells. I release my breath and imagine a world far away from here, far away from the frigid oceans of the Fallands. I imagine a place where I can run from day to night and I focus on that great expanse. I know it lives somewhere in my future. I know I will reach it and be free.

As if adding an (r) to the end of a title makes it somehow different. What does make this write different is the prompt! This one is courtesy of Self-Publishing School from their list of fantasy prompts. Here we go… Write about a character whose world is dying. The actual earth is sick and killing all the plants and probably life as they know it.

The soil of the Rhivan is not fertile. Once, long ago, that soil could be tilled. It could bring life. There were bugs that turned in the dirt and seeds that would take root. This was long ago, perhaps two-hundred years according to the old-ones. Now the Rhivan brings only blight. Worse still, it was only the beginning. It took a long time for us to discover that it was our own world that was killing us. She’d good enough reason for the act. We’ve beaten down her forests, turned grass fields into farms, made roads carved from stones and set them upon once fertile ground. We built houses from timbers. We killed the animals of the forests and pushed the insects so far from our cities that even the pleasant ones did not dare venture too close.

We did not deserve this world, and the world knew it. So she revolted. A rot began from deep within her veins and we were powerless against it. The cats were the first to die; they were so plentiful and fat upon the discards of our city. Our world killed poisoned what they ate and it poisoned them. By the time we realized it we were too far gone to try our magics to slow it. What would we have done anyway? When that which houses all you know and love turns against you, where can you turn?

For a long time I used friday as a freewrite and I focused on a word of the day from Merriam-Webster. Today that word is Winsome (generally pleasing and engaging often because of a childlike charm and innocence) and the write will be about that word…

I think each of us have what I would call a ‘True age’. Mine is probably mid thirties. Perhaps even as late as 38, though I’ve only seen 27 thus far. I feel like the mid thirties is when we are past the idea of settling down and into the reality of the thing, spending our hours with family and raising kids in the image of what we thought we could be and not what we ended up becoming.

When I met Sandra I thought her true age might hover somewhere around fourteen. I was off by a few years, and not in the direction I’d initially hoped. We met at a bar far from the glitz and roar of the college strip. I’d been coming there for nearly half a decade already–since I’d first decided to drink and quickly realized that I didn’t want to drink with other college students. She was one of those college students. She had long red hair that curled at the ends and wore a green dress that made her seem more like mannequin than girl. She looked perfect. She looked innocent and beautiful and just the kind of magical I’d always thought couldn’t be quite real. I must’ve been a little tipsy because I said, “I thought redheads only wore green in movies and on TV.”

She’d been about to ask the bartender for something but she stopped, mouth open, and looked right at me. Then she squinted slightly and wrinkled her nose, a look I quickly came to know as her trademark ‘what the hell?’ face. She said, “Don’t be an asshole. It makes you look uglier than you already are.”

Everyone in earshot broke down in laughter. Everyone but me, of course. Now I was the one open mouthed and surprised.

I am not using a pre-developed prompt today. I saw a note I made years ago about the concept of Digital Organisms and thought about the idea in a school-centric way. So, here is my prompt: What if you had to take home a digital organism and care for it the way you take home the school pet?

“We should call it Freddy!” That was Jelisa’s voice, loud and plaintive. I’d liked her in the second grade but never since. My fourth grade class was gathered around a clear silicon orb. We watched the light inside it pulse and move like one of the Lava Lamps on the old time Youtube shows my mother liked to watch.

“No, Sam!” Henry said. He wasn’t a bully, not exactly, but he was big and bossy, and expected that people would listen to him. Instead more of my classmates chimed in, shouting out a dozen names ranging from simple boy or girl names to the kinds of thing you’d name a pet pig or a gerbil. Finally Ms. Macklin raised a hand to her mouth and blew air into her cheeks until it they puffed out like a bubble. All of my classmates quietly did the same. I did it too.

“Jai, what do you think we should name it?” She said, once the class was silent.

It took me long enough to answer that a few people in the class started to giggle. She never called on me, so I really didn’t know what to say when she did. Finally I said, “I don’t think we can name it yet, Ms. Macklin.”

“Why not?

I studied the shape moving inside the clear dome. It was just zeros and ones, an empty construct that hadn’t even been plugged into the internet yet. I said, “It hasn’t decided what it wants to be.”

Ms. Macklin smiled. She said, “Very good, Jai. It hasn’t chosen a host or even a form. We cannot decide those things for it. That wouldn’t be fair.”

The class groaned, and I swear a heard a few kids mutter bad things at me under their breath. Ms. Macklin continued, “That doesn’t change our responsibilities here, children. We still have to take care of it. Someone is going to have to take it home tonight.”

Tonight’s prompt is courtesy of the 2022 February Flash Fiction Challenge. The Prompt: For today’s prompt, let’s write about something being regifted.

It didn’t make sense for me to offer them to her.

When I first came upon the find I was surprised. You don’t see many Hollylite 36C’s anymore. They were short lived models–composed of some kind of tecto-silicate foam that is hard to come by and even harder on the body should it break free. Hollylite composites remain the dream of plastic surgeons everywhere. Imagine an implant that feels as real as natural tissue, offering no suggestion of falsehood at any point in the process save actual lactation. Of course, that was the catch wasn’t it? Lacatal reactant implants were supposed to allow women to complete the feeding cycle, interacting with the appropriate glandular interfaces to allow for natural breast feeding. Unfortunately, they didn’t react to lactation the way they were meant to and this led to often painful scenarios for the mother and child both.

That I was offering them to her now was more about me than about her. Sure, I could lie and tell myself she wanted to get implants. What she wanted was to feel desirable to me. She was, mostly. She was everything to me and I did desire her. We’d lasted these past two years without need of implants and the sex was very good. Standard, perhaps, but good. I don’t know, maybe I thought implants would brighten things up for us. Maybe deep down those neural pathways I suspected that the Hollylites might dissuade her from wanting kids. Truly, I do not know what I was thinking beyond that moment of nostalgia when I found them, felt them, and wanted to have them. I wanted her to have them.

Some Thoughts:

1. Yikes. Okay, some stories don’t need telling and some protagonists are junk. I don’t know where that came from. At least I got it all down and let it pass through me.

This one comes from Filling the Jars. The key line:  “Something moved in the distance.”

Something moved in the distance. It was mot a thing I could see. It felt more like a flicker in the corner of my eye and when I turned to see it all that was there were the shadows of the late afternoon moving between the trees. I looked up then, glancing from tree top to tree top, then anxiousness in my face evident to those around me. We weren’t supposed to be this deep in the briar wood–not since the general’s decree.

Some Thoughts:

1. That one stunk. It fell immediately into a fantasy look, but I didn’t have a since of who was telling the story. This is a classic case of what I am reading/listening to filtering into the creation process. There is a scene in the woods with a character that I’ve just heard and that was in the back of my mind at the very least. Let’s try again tomorrow with fresh eyes and thoughts.
2. Finally started doing a draft deepdive in Madden 22 and it is interesting. It is made more interesting by knowing my kids are also in the league and trying to discern talent. It is a corner heavy draft and based on where I am in he 1st I am deciding between the best Tackle in the draft and the best out the gate CB. Honestly, I think there are more good CB’s in the draft but this one has the potential to be hidden dev (heck, they all do!) given his True rating of Top 5. I didn’t get a true rating on the LT, so I am winging it there. Still, I think if I don’t get him then another CPU will. I may just have to take that chance though.

This Prompt comes from 642 Tiny Things to Write About. Finish this sentence: The smell of an orange reminds me of….

The smell of an orange reminds me of the southern shores of Erros where the groves sit close enough to the ocean that you can smell the saltwater. I haven’t been since I was a boy of nine. In those years I hardly wore clothes at all, so quick was I too dirty them either in the muck lining the groves or the waters down the hill to the south. My father picked oranges his entire life. When they were not in season he worked at plucking cabbage until his fingers were stiff with the repeated actions. He told me, “Boy, you should never do as I do. You should learn the ways of books since we were both spared the gifts of magic.”

I didn’t see magic as much of a gift then. I only knew of the priests that roamed the lands conjuring healing spells for the faithful. The other children would talk of magisters who came from the west–from the place we came to know as the Reach. They were dirty men with poor morals and hearts that thought only of gold. It was a curse to be touched by magic and not touched by the one true God. If I had only known then how wrong the stories were–how much they witheld–my life would have been different. My life would have been safe.

Over the course of the next 31 days I will be freewriting exclusively. This is being done in order to test and create prompts for my creative writing class. I will try out each of the prompts in an attempt to figure out which are the best prompts to use. To that end, I will consider several prompts each day and do one of them a day. At the end of this period I hope that I’ve gotten myself back up to ‘writing speed’ and maybe even discovered a little bit about what it is I want to say as a writer–which is largely the point of prompts.

The way it works is you look at all of your responses to the prompts and you try to find the common thread. It may be a type of character or a condition or some other such thing. The award winning author Matt Haig almost always has a character dealing with suicidal ideations, as my partner explains. This is part of the story he is telling. So what is yours? What is mine? These prompts force us to draw a bit of that poison out of ourselves and see clearly what it is that infects us with this need to tell stories.

I want to begin to tell my best stories. I am at an age where I am done waiting for that right time or fall more luck to fall into my lap. I need to be telling stories now and getting everything off my chest while this remains a possibility and there is the possibility of enjoying knowing that the stories are being told and shared and perhaps appreciated by some.

So, I finished the Sex in the City “Spinoff” And Just like That. At least I think I did. Not to give it away, it ends with the idea that there could be a next chapter–for everyone. This doesn’t mean there is any real sense of closure save for this present chapter in their lives is over in a sense and they are all going to move forward into the next adventure. I suppose that is the way it is supposed to work in a series. Leave the fans to wonder what happens next. I still wonder what happens next for the Gilmore Girls. That last bit was beautiful and sad and fulfilling… or I was buzzed and emotional when I watched it… or both.

But I buried the point back there. Or didn’t say it at all. There are a ton of shows trying to tell the next chapter. The idea of ‘limited series’ is a rarity. People are trying to develop franchises because a franchise can demand higher (and long lasting) add revenue. This, to me, argues that they are trying to do the soap opera method and not telling a close-ended story. Can you do both? Apparently only with a reboot, spinoff, or prequel in play. See ‘Grownish’ for example of the spinoff. The upcoming reboot of Babylon 5 argues that reboots can bring solid revenue should one build that cult base during the first go round.

All of this is to say that a lot of stuff is being made right now that isn’t new or some new take on the old but a way to build revenue and make money and I am not sure that is a good thing.

Next week will be the return of freewrite friday. I’m kicking in off with 7 straight days of freewrites starting Monday. I’ll do one a day until I run out of steam (or something else catches my interest). This is the beginning of building back my connection to the creative. I feel I’ve lost a bit of that and lost a bit of intelligence and drive as a side effect of all that. I need to read better stuff. I need to seek out new knowledge as opposed to leaning in to the stuff I already know. I need to be productive and interesting in a way I used to be.

Some Thoughts:

1. Part of the problem is I fell too deeply into this football world. It became a passion of knowledge and I spent so much time learning how to become an offense designer that I entirely forgot that I wasn’t and, moreover, I was done coaching.
2. I wonder who I’ll be in 20 years.
3. I wonder if i will be.