Went on a walk to the lake with my beloveds today hoping to help myself brainstorm a response to day 7 of Story-A-Day May. It didn't work, but I got to reflect on how lucky I am to live where I do.
And when I got home, a message from my kiddo gave me the plot inspiration I needed. The story is decent enough that if I ever make a short story collection from my faerie world, it will include a revision of today's product. So that's pretty yay.
Rea sat at the computer and happily typed out a story about how she punched a Nazi in a crowded bar and then skied off a twenty foot cliff, totally nailing the landing. Even though in real life, she would have simply yelled at the Nazi and never jumped anything more than ten feet.
She was completely unaware that in another world, Andy was curled into a ball of depression triggered by being asked to write about her defining characteristics.
Today's Story a Day prompt seemed harmless enough. Write a story of someone who is basically you but responds to a situation in a way you wouldn't. Okay... But the warmup was to write an introduction of yourself. And that resulted in a lovely file to share with my therapist.
The story wound up only being 80 words long and was pretty meta. I'll share it in the next post.
As I've mentioned before, these are backstories. I was originally planning to end with her getting the tickets and being all adorably hopeful, but I was a little sad, because I knew the LI was slated to break her heart. (You can't have a second chance romance story without people blowing their previous attempt together.) BUT now she makes a new friend who I think is going to wind up being important to her, so I got to end optimistic as well. :)
Today's story is about someone trying to impress her love interest with tickets to see their favorite band. But the band is unexpectedly popular thanks to a recent celebrity-mention and the mostly-sunny forecast betrayed her, so she spends hours standing in a rain storm. Ugh! So much misery! But the girl is worth it. Right?
Today's prompt is to write a story with someone waiting at a ticket booth. BUT ALSO! We were told to do it in 40 minutes, including brainstorming about who's in the story, why they're there, etc.
I managed the bulk of it in 40 minutes. But then I recklessly disregarded instructions to spend another twenty adding details and making the closing lines stronger.
Today's Story-a-Day prompt was to write a 100 word story about an inanimate object.
With only 100 words, I went with a poem about an MC's hockey jersey, now hidden in the back of a storage room but once loved so very much! And quite a melodramatic garment, as it turns out.
The poem wound up 113 words, but I deem this Close Enough. (I could cut 13 words, but then I'd need to restructure the rhythm, and, well, the point of this project isn't to revise things.)
Story-A-Day update:
Today's prompt was a story with two characters wanting the same thing but disagreeing about some part of it.
I wrote a scene with friends who want to go to college together but are looking for very different things in a school. I don't think what I ended up with stands alone as a story, but as an exploration of the backstories and personalities of two of the MCs from My Next Faerie Novel, it went really well.
My plan for Story A Day May is to write various pieces of backstory for the people in my faerie universe, with the goal of learning to love some of the minor characters as much as I love the three I'm having trouble letting go of.
Today's prompt was to write a five sentence story.
So what I wrote is only five sentences. And 461 words. So crazy long sentences that I would never put in a finished work. But they were oddly amusing to write.
It's Story-a-Day May!
I REALLY wanted to get my novel off to the betas before starting this project, but that didn't happen. On the plus side, I'm close. And the goal of the challenge is to create roughs, not publishable content, so they can come out fast and sloppy.
Day One's prompt is to create a five sentence story, which will probably take a lot longer than one might think, but which shouldn't take my entire work day.
Learn more:
https://storyaday.org/
Andy Brokaw