William, the obtrusive, callused arranger, bursts into the back room. “This place is perfect, no?” His thick French accent muddles up his little proud giggles. “This place, she is… how do you say? Nonchalant, oui?” He looks over to the beautiful woman adorned with white. She looks towards the floor, paying no attention to William’s antics.
We held our semi-annual Sudden Fiction Contest last Wednesday…
Contestants were given 30 minutes work with the following 3 prompts… Read the rest of this entry »
Without thinking, Oswald creates an entirely fictitious world within his own mind. It happens every day. Inside this world, the cruel and bitter ghosts of his past manifest by possessing what he perceives as the monsters of his present. He flicks on his turn signal as he lets his foot weigh slightly on the brake. He makes a complete stop at the corner, obeying the arbitrary red symbol of his imprisonment that reads so clearly, “STOP.” But there was no real stopping, was there? There was no way to put a halt to the boulder that had already been set rolling in such a fluid, yet all the same, erratic motion.
We thought of Carol again. Neither of us had been able to get the image of her mangled body, or the sound of her mother’s hysterical sobbing out of our minds. They were etched in our memories now. A macabre movie reel that just keeps playing and playing over and over again. Read the rest of this entry »
While the overcast clouds ate through the black sky, I could feel no rain. I heard the humming of the motor, felt vibrations cutting through my body. My skin began to itch and I violently tore at the ropes that were binding me, twisting back and forth like a mental patient in a straightjacket. but it was no use.
I was stuck. Read the rest of this entry »
The awkwardness of the situation was over.
We had met only a few hours earlier and with nothing but the sound of our own breath, the highway through the open window and other peoples luggage being dragged outside our door we had had sex.
Good sex.
Unprotected sex. Read the rest of this entry »
The first time I ever saw Rod Drake was at my uncle Jim’s tin-roof garage on Poole Street, about ten miles down half-paved streets from the center of town. The auto shop was on a desperate looking plot full of rusted-out hulks up to their shattered windows in dead, scraggly grass, and the only other building in the area was a dilapidated shack which my uncle told me belonged to a man who used to be a gypsy. Read the rest of this entry »
Remember a time when you were younger and in a difficult situation…
This is one of 2 writing prompts to work on in the next few weeks (the other one will come next week), and it is a variation on a “trigger word” prompt where you’re given a single word (in this case, a color), and that’s it – just take whatever the word makes you think of and go from there.
However, this version has a “pre-writing” step that’s quick, easy, and often surprisingly helpful…
Read the rest of this entry »
A Whispered Smile
Mandy. Her face, like her name, is crystallized within the contours of my mind. Frozen in her ageless youth. Smiling. She was always smiling. As a child of only seven, I could never quite understand. How could someone smile as they were being tormented by their peers? Read the rest of this entry »
Epitaph
Is it a sin to be alive if I’m evil?
Tell me, dearest, what’s the limitations there Read the rest of this entry »
Here are 6 scenarios (scenes, jumping off points, idea-starters). Consider one, or more than one, and see where you can go with it. And now, the scenarios… Read the rest of this entry »
Here are some new writing prompts. Feel free to post your results by leaving a comment…
