Month: February 2022

This one comes to us from Creative Writing Now. I’ll share the full prompt below:

Three Elements

Choose a set of three elements, and imagine a story that includes all three of them.

1. a hitchhiker, an allergy, and a mistake in a map.
2. a cemetery, a missing dog, and a joke that goes too far.
3. a Halloween costume, a stapler, and a complaint between neighbors.
4. a stolen phone, a love song, and a bet.
5. a dance competition, an engagement ring, and a worried parent.
6. insomnia, a birthday card, and an encounter with someone famous.
7. an eavesdropper, a secret kiss, and a fire in the kitchen.
8. a stuck elevator, a pickpocket, and a promise.
9. a babysitter, a pet snake, and a tow truck.
10. a lit window, a stamp collection, and someone pretending to be angry.
11. a dream come true, inappropriate laughter, and something buried.
12. an abandoned house, false eyelashes, and a lump in the bed.

I chose A baby Sitter, A Pet Snake, and a Tow Truck.

I knocked on Ms. Charlene’s door a little after 11 AM. I sighed, repositioning a loose curl that had fallen across my sweaty face, and then putting my hands back in the pockets of my hoodie. She didn’t answer. I rang it again, looking around. She was the only person I knew within a few miles of here. I felt fortunate that I’d broken down only a few blocks over and was able to push the car this far. Nobody stop to help. Nobody ever does. you see a young black girl pushing a car, you look the other way, right? I don’t know why that is. I don’t know why people have, what I like to call, a preference for helping some people and not others. Ms. Charlene isn’t black but she’s one of those people that other people don’t like to help. It sort of makes us sisters in a strange way. We help each other. At least, I thought we did.

It took two more rings for her to come to the door. She looked like she’d been in the act of getting dressed. She was tugging on an earring and had a blue pencil skirt on and a bra and a robe over all of it that hung open, failing at its job. She said, “Nina?”

I smiled, “Hey, Ms. Charlene. I am so sorry to be knocking on your door right now, but my car broke down, and it is really hot, and the two truck guy said he’d be over an hour to get here and–“

She grabbed me and pulled me into the house and shut the door softly behind us. She was all smiles. She said, “I am so glad to see you! What did you say happened?”

I raised my eyebrows. Its a thing I do unconsciously but I do it so much that I am totally conscious of when I do it. I forced them back down and said, “Car broke down. Can I camp out here and wait for a tow?”

“Can you watch Charlie while you do it?”

… out of time, but this actually felt good and fun and light!

I’m taking a second break from the freewrite fest because I’m sick. Not totally sick. More like a sudden onset of illness followed by a long daze. It feels like being hungover without having imbibed any alcohol. Needless to write, I can’t find an ounce of creativity in these tired old bones today. So, instead I’ll just share…

Some Thoughts:

1. Professional sports have begun to feel like the lead car in a Snowpiercer-esque hype train that starts at age 4. I want my two remaining athletes to get as far as they can, but man the hype cloud is so damn toxic. Is it truly worth it?
2. Speaking of hype — or lack thereof. The Into the Spiderverse 2 trailer has gotten surprisingly little hype. Looks really fun. Loving the interaction between the spiderfolk, and think Oscar Issac’s Spiderman 2099(?) figures to be the villain here.
3. I might have a fever… or just feel like I have one.
4. Been trying to figure out a call sheet for madden to help me get a handle on this 400 play playbook. I don’t know why playbooks in a video game are so large. Who calls that many plays? I have like 27 formations–most from shotgun. Most of the plays I use require on the fly adjustments in order to be successful. I am not 12. I don’t have the time or patience to train for all that!
5. Oh, and as for games.. Sifu is good. It is imperfect in ways. If you get caught in a corner you’re done. Otherwise I enjoy every playthrough of the first level, because that is as far as I am willing to go until I master my style. I don’t know all the kung fu yet!
6. Out.

I believe first person is a wonderful literary perspective, so in honor of that I wanted to put together a freewrite in the first. The prompt I thought up is as follows: Imagine you are someone else on the road driving to work. Where are you going? What have you left behind?

I like the highway. Despite the chaos of cars racing to get somewhere, it is more peaceful than the triplets at home. I decided to go back to work because I wanted a chance to get back in the car and have, for just a half hour, a moment of peace where I controlled the sound and the space; where my mood wasn’t dictated by the people around me. Of course, in electing to go back to work I was electing to dive headlong back into an environment where my mood and my paycheck was dictated by the people around me and each and every one of those people has something to say about the choices I’ve made as a mother. That’s okay, because for thirty minutes the most pressing thing on my mind is whether to go with NPR, an Audiobook, or the whoosh of tires against asphalt.

I have to say that it is going pretty well. I can feel the gears starting to loosen in my head (in a good way though). I am getting down some creative ideas and breaking free of a bit of the negativity that dominates my lifespace by writing about characters and situations that aren’t me or my situation… Until this recap, of course. I think blogging about the personal life is a sure way to stay in that cycle of negativity. It should be coming out through story and character instead of blech there on the page, so I think–njo I believe–I will be doing more freewriting and idea sharing and less of the personal blech. Oh, yes, Blech is a word in my personal reality.

But what about the prompts? Some of them I found useful. I believe all had value thus far, but in terms of putting these down in an academic setting, there are only a few I am interested in reproducing and I certainly looking for more. The structure of the summer class is a 31 day immersive experience that includes 31 prompts as well as several other small thought provoking assignments to rev up the creative engines for producing a short story. Hopefully producing something the writer wants to keep and keeping working to a perfect sheen. To that end the prompts must be as varied as the audience. Though it is a fiction class I recognize that all fiction arrives from someone’s reality (be it through the ether or their own lives once removed) so, I need to find non-fiction prompts that can help stimulate understanding of facets of what makes characters tick–which is us. Which is our own lives and our understanding of the interconnection between lives be they human or otherwise.

In short, I am off to find more prompts.

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.