A few weeks ago I was visiting Mad Genius Club when I happened across a post by Cedar Sanderson about prompted writing. She talked about a kind of round-robin-ish shared writing prompt group. The idea is that a bunch of people share prompts and they get randomly assigned to different people.
I never fail to be amazed at the stuff that shows up in the WritingPrompts subreddit, but I’ve never contributed there. The volume is overwhelming, and often by the time I’ve gotten around to choosing a prompt, there are a bunch of really good responses, and I get intimidated by the talent I see. Consequently, I don’t write anything.
But I need to write more, and I need to write faster. This idea of an assigned prompt with a deadline seemed tailor-made for me. So I headed over to More Odds Than Ends and tossed my hat in the ring.
My prompt this week came from Jennie Posthumous, who writes at http://www.jfposthumus.net. Her challenge:
“A pinch of poison, a few hours, and a grave later the deed was done and none would ever be the wiser.”
I let that rattle around for a day or so, then started writing. It ended up at 6,000 words, and I’m not sure what the wordcount limit is for comments at MOTE, so I posted it on the public side of my Patreon. Click here to read “Substitution.” I’ll warn you ahead of time that if you’ve read my previous stuff, you’ll likely be a little surprised at this one. It’s a lot darker than I expected it would be at first, and the language, while it doesn’t meet Goodfellas standards (296 f-bombs in a 146-minute movie!), does get spicy, as it were. Hope you enjoy it.
I also sent a prompt (that’s part of the game) and it went to Cedar herself.
There’s a camera on your desk that you’ve never seen before.
I’m probably only going to do these every other week, until I can really get up to a decent writing speed. I really enjoyed this challenge, but I’ve got other projects to get out.
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