Story: The Mission

“Would you stop that?” Sam hissed, his voice hardly at a whisper. “You’ll ruin the whole mission with that racket!”

I jumped, barely suppressing a shriek. I hadn’t even known he was there. “Sorry, I - “

“Hush!”

I obliged. Satisfied, he inched gingerly away from me, turning his attention back to the gloom.

There was nothing to see beyond the confines of our crate. I knew that. Nothing that could hear me shivering with anticipation or fear. Nothing that wasn’t in a cage, anyway. Not a single creature would approach us, whether from curiosity or malice, for the next several hours. Still, I wanted to do right by the mission, and the mission required that we remain both silent and watchful.

Short Prompts, Short Stories

Last week, the dreaded writing bug crawled up into my bed, walked across my pillow, and laid eggs in my ear. Or, to put it another way, I found myself wishing to write something.

On these occasions, I like to prime the pump (or cleanse the palate, or flush the eggs from my ear) with a little short form writing. An important element here is that I write something from scratch, rather than use an idea I've had rattling around for a while. The longer I've held onto an idea, you see, the more invested I am in making something really good out of it, which inevitably leads to writer's block. Which, in turn, inevitably leads to simultaneous video-game-playing and sitcom-rerun-watching.

So I turned to Facebook, long a source of unexpected but mostly trivial ideas, and solicited my friends to give me one-word writing prompts. This is what they came up with:

• Skulduggery
• Peace
• Love
• Ninjas
• Restaurant
• Chinchilla
• Callipygous
• Hashbrowns
• Pineapples
• Flamboyant
• Cuckolded
• Mashed
• Awesomesauce
• Doldroms
• Kumquat
• Embarrassment
• Sugar
• Realizations
• Trebuchet
• Little tiny 85 year old man hitting on middle-aged women outside a library. (Later summarized by another friend as "my grandfather")

I have actually created a couple of short pieces, which I'll be posting to the blog as I grow tired of them deem them finished. I'm trying not to spend much time on them. No outlines, no overthinking, rewrites strongly discouraged. All of the prompts being wonderful, I decided to fold several into each story. If you're playing along at home, feel free to guess which prompts created which story. I don't think I ended up using every prompt, and some may pop up in more than one story. Life is like that sometimes.

If you're really playing along at home, then choose some prompts and write me something. Bonus points if your story includes me, but only if I look really good in the end.

Until then, stay tuned!

Update: the first story went up this afternoon. Here it is!