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I'm pressing the pause button on my weekly prompts using the Create a Story book. There are a few reasons for this. The main one is that I want to get my next book released, and I'm afraid this is drawing what little energy I have away from that.
There's more to it, of course, though the underlying reason is true. I really want Fortune's Price out by the end of June and that leaves me just about five weeks to get the work done. It's written and edited, but on a reread I felt there were some places I needed to look at closer, and I need to focus for that. But there are some underlying frustrations. The prompt shorts aren't getting an audience and I'd hoped for a more interactive exercise. They haven't been creative tasks as much as technical ones, I think in part because they are so brief, and have so many constructed requirements. 500 words. include fifteen specific words. Specific genre and prompt. The creativity becomes bound rather than freeing, and feeling bound isn't a sensation that is helping me right now. So, I'm putting it on pause, and maybe I'll come back to it after a break, perhaps with less binding restrictions (freeing myself from a need to use all the words, or perhaps longer spacing between prompts to allow for longer stories). I might also dip a toe into a different kind of prompt, with something like the The Story Engine Deck or the Deck of Worlds. Stay tuned for that. In the meantime, coming soon, Fortune's Price. I'm determined to get this done and released, since I've had it written since literally before COVID hit.
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So this one is life experience, from Create a Story page 74. It didn't go the direction I expected and though there are a couple of life experience stories I have that resemble these events, it sorta picks and chooses elements from several to create a whole—which I suppose, if someone was writing my life or creating a screenplay of it, they'd probably end up doing, so I'm not going to feel bad for it. For life experience first person just feels right, so that's what I did. We'll see what comes for next week.  Schoolyard BullyI didn’t want to be here. Surrounded by Trevor’s goons. That wasn’t my way. But Eric had taunted them just a little too much. Intention doesn’t really matter, only results. The results were goons surrounding us. And Trevor was someone I couldn’t deal with. I had no influence. Nothing he wanted. Which just made the waiting feel stupid. The result was inevitable from the moment Eric had gone too far. There were too many to run from. Running worked when you had a lead, somewhere to go—somewhere to hide. Without those things, and given a group, as Trevor had and we did not, it became math. Someone was always faster. Between Eric and I, that was Eric. So he ran, darting between then, knowing I couldn’t, and left me to reap the rewards of his behavior. Their reactions, predictable to a fault, were abandonment by a few to follow the cause of the fiasco. I couldn’t hope that they would catch him. That would be wrong. But some small part of me couldn’t help wishing for consequences that might balance his actions. To be fair, in effect, he’d reduced the number of people that I had to face. I might appreciate that if there were not still too many. If Trevor, as much a skinny, weak kid as Eric, wasn’t standing behind them, pretending he was a threat as though power was some preordained destiny. I never much liked Trevor. I didn’t hold much stock in anthropomorphising people into mousy, foxy, built like a horse. But if there was ever a young man who deserved the moniker of weasley—and not in any modern Potteresqe connotation—it was Trevor. None of them considered me a threat, of course. I might be big, but I was a gentle giant, the kind that didn’t even like to curse out loud. Eric had known me long enough to know there was something percolating under the surface. If he’d ever guessed at the many possible things it might be, he’d never said. But he knew there was something. Perhaps I was being generous in thinking that Eric had any thought for something beyond his own safety. He had, after all, left me to face these goons by myself. No one would mistake me for simple, but many might think me unworldly enough to miss that Trevor was more than a bully. He ran drugs through the school. How serious I could never be sure. Weed certainly. LSD, probably. Other things? Yeah. But I couldn’t be sure what, except it wasn’t heroin. The kids went to the dorms just over the hill to get that. My parents would probably be appalled that their kid who spent most of his time listening to celtic harp music knew that much about drug culture at school. The fists started to fly. It didn’t take long. One boy, bloody and screaming on the ground and the rest ran. Eric was right to worry about what got under my skin. This one came in at 500 words, which honestly surprised me, since I was still having trouble at 200 and then BAM, I was wondering how to end it in the word count. Yay me? Anyway, this catches me up, so all I need is to make sure I write one this week to be back on track.
The continuing saga... I got this one done a little early, from Create a Story, page 51 - a romance prompt. Maybe since this one completed early, I'll manage to catch up and get the skipped week done this week and have a clean slate. We'll see. In the meantime, here it is:  Fortune’s KissWhen you’re little, running around the fair, gorging on cotton candy and sneaking your way on rides that you can sneak onto in a local carnival while you couldn’t at a proper amusement park, you don’t notice the seedier parts of carnival life—the housewife struggling to maintain control over too many kids, and only half of them her own or the way no one ever seemed to win the big prizes in the ring toss. It was only when I was older that I noticed the little people wore scarves that hid their ears or that the fortune teller was a proper witch. It was apparent enough if you looked past the shady light on the table illuminating the crystal ball. Enough to repulse if you could make out the shapes. But it was a carnival, so many stayed and had their fortunes read, letting it pass with a grimace as they held out a hand for the witch to work her magic, reading the lines of the palm like a spell woven of sorcery and fairy wings. I was old enough now to be losing my appreciation for the carnival. Cotton candy loses its appeal when every teen is judged by the perfect bodies on social media every day. When every outfit has to be perfect. I gave up on being perfect a long time ago. Which had a lot to do with the carnival losing appeal, since it was all about doing things with friends. Which is how I found myself in front of the witch, and how I knew the various suspect floating things in jars were far more real than most visitors might suppose. Only a glance—a fingernail drawing across the lines, and she spoke. “The kissing booth at every carnival is enchanted,” she said. “A first risk can bear fruit, it must, for that risk has cupid’s power bound, but which risk is never guaranteed.” I pulled my hand away. “Not that desperate.” She shrugged. “It’s still twenty bucks.” Which was how I ended up glaring at the line. The boy and girl in the booths were perfect. I’d been watching for hours. Long enough to see the boy take his doublet costume off and rinse off under a hose to cool down. The attraction was too real to pretend. “A first risk,” I whispered to myself, losing myself in the way his lips swooped. I didn’t even notice paying the ten bucks for charity. I barely noticed the attendant shake his head. “You can try kid, but it’s up to him.” The girls in line snickered. My heart skipped as I got closer. He was in front of me, lips kissed full. His cheeks reddened. But he still leaned forward, one hand helping my head know which way to go. Suddenly I knew what being lost in a kiss meant. Maybe there was some magic. Because afterwards, breathless with wonder, he pressed a paper with his phone number into my hand. Again 500 words, though I confess this one was edited down from about 525 to hit that mark so exactly. I also think this one could have gone on longer, had I not been in the depths of work on several critical work projects. Maybe I'll come back to it. Till then, we'll see if I can get caught up this week.
Had hoped to catch up from my week of recovery, but it didn't happen. This week is a fantasy story, coming in again at the 500 words I've been keeping the stories at. This one I think could have run longer, but it's a hard time for me at work. Maybe I'll come back to the idea another time. This one is from page 100 of the Create a Story prompt book. Curious to see if anyone guesses the prompt without the book though. The hard word to fit here was actually the most obvious. It didn't fit the story and so I'm sure some of you will pick it out.  Death’s Library“Alarm in the crypt.” Fabius Leonidus shrugged nervously. “Disarm the fences.” “What?” “Do it now.” The cameras showed only darkness. He stilled the guards before they could turn on the floodlights, even as the fence alarms sounded. “Sir!” Power had a price. “Leave it.” “Why?” Fabius turned and walked swiftly away from the control room. The library looked like any other. In some ways perhaps it was. Enough to seem the same, at least. His was a dynasty of ages. Ancient and free from the shackles of mortal power. No mortal power. He slid a book back and the wall of shelving slid back, silent as a whisper. He walked into the corridor and down the stair, the shelves sliding silently back into place as he descended. There was no faster way. Not for him. Step after step, deep into the darkness that been an unforgiving lure so many centuries ago. He couldn’t help but remember that terror. The piercing pain of fangs. Horror and ecstasy. To suck the blood of a mortal was both, for the immortal who did it and the mortal who felt their life drain away. A mortal felt the call of death, the nearness of it, and yet the euphoria of the bite—even centuries could not erase the embarrassment. When he’d descended far enough, he found what he’d expected. The coffin, a great stone sarcophagus, had been torn asunder. Now the master was awake, and hungry and seeking blood. The first after a waking always died. There was always a story in some tiny publication they weren’t able to suppress about a return of the great Dracula. Dracula hadn’t been great. Dracula had been foolish. Fabius shivered. He sought out the protected box that fed a line back up to the control room. “Initiate suppression protocol. Fence defences can be reactivated. No patrols on the grounds.” They didn’t ask for identification. Even if they hadn’t recognized his voice, this phone rang on its own line, and was meant to be obeyed without question. His climb back up to the library was slow. The ages of the world settled upon him like a mantle of concrete blocks, weighing down each step. Each one was a name he’d forced himself to remember. Name after name. Death after death. He had fed the master with his blood and his memories and the horror and pleasure had never stopped. For so many, for most everyone else, that horror meant pleasure, yes, but it was also death. For him it had meant centuries of life in the service of death. He knew every name. He spoke them, quietly, one after another, as he climbed, until he reached the library. He sat and he waited. The library might look ordinary. But within the pages of every book were the greatest secrets the world knew. Secrets that came from around the world for him to catalog and place in the hands of his master at a whim. Death was coming. Again the 500 word limit here was more about being busy than anything. This story could have gone longer. I think a lot of folks would have wanted to meet the vampire and I think that might have been cool. I know I'm still a week behind. We'll see if I can catch that up, but I'm also trying to find the necessary time to get Fortune's Price out if I can. More soon!
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Ashavan DoyonWriter of the mysterious, fantastic, and the romantic. Sometimes sappy. Often angsty. Always searching for the sexy. Stories about men who love men. Categories
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