Working on my novels, I don’t usually write anything short-form enough to share on a blog/newsletter like this, but I started taking part in a weekly virtual write-in recently and might as well share some snippets.
If you’ve not been to a Write-In before, it goes like this: the host gives prompts, along with a short timer (a randomly generated number of minutes between 3 and 10 in our case), and then everyone tries to write something inspired by the prompt within that time. Afterwards, they are given the opportunity to share what they wrote before the next prompt round begins. Writing on paper is recommended, to stop the temptation to edit. Write-Ins are all about getting over the desire to make something perfect by forcing you to make something fast instead.
It is not usually necessary to create an ongoing narrative joining all the prompts together into one story, but some of us like an extra spicy challenge.
Warning: raw first-draft work ahead, and the stories have time-skips between prompts so you’ll have to read between the lines.
October 18th – Story 1
1. Text prompt: “down to earth”. 5 mins.
"Look mate," Edin said, gritting his teeth against the atmospheric turbulence rocking his evac pod. "You're the one who got in here with me. I didn't invite you."
The tolorian rolled its wet lizard eyes at him and then shrank up against the bleeping life support terminal. "Wrowww," it replied. "Wraa wraww-ow."
(We read our writings out loud, and I added a lot of sass to those wrowws, just so you know.)
2. Image prompt: human in yellow raincoat sitting on rock overlooking a winding mountain road. 7 mins.
The jacket was supposed to be water-proof. Standard-issue, of a shade so bright a yellow it could be picked up by search-party sensors half a quadrant away. While the latter was true, and Edin was still blinking out the blotches in his vision from opening the field box, the water resistance was proving less than ideal.
Rivulets dripped down the insides of his sleeves and down his back, to pool on the cold stone under his even colder arse. This damn planet was soggier than a carfa eel in Spring. And all he could do was sit here, watching the primitive terrestrial transports go by as he waited for his own lift to arrive.
"Wraa," said the tolorian.
Edin could only agree.
3. Text prompt: “a fool and his money are soon parted”. 4 mins.
"Wra-a-raa," Worval said, arching its spine. The scales around its eyes flashed purple in annoyance.
"Yeah, well, forgive me if my knowledge of the tolorian xenti to earth dollar exchange rate is a bit out of date," Edin replied. He'd apparently paid half the value of his ship for a taxi fare to New London.
Or, not really, since his ship was now worth about four fifths of naff all. If anything, it had minus value since he'd have to pay to have all of Earth's new satellite junk cleaned up.
(My old uni lecturer used to say “four fifths of naff all”, and I endeavour to use this phrase as often as possible.)
4. Text prompt: “human architecture”. 6 mins.
The shining doors slid open not with the slick whirr-and-click Edin was accustomed to, but with a judder and a thunk.
Worval gave him a doubtful look, and together they peered into the tiny room behind the doors. Finger-smudged mirrored panels covered three walls, with a hand rail all around and a panel of manual buttons announcing destinations from 1 to 12.
Before Edin could gather the courage to step forwards, the doors juddered again and slid closed.
"Wearrr?" Worval suggested.
Edin nodded. The stairs it was.
(I already had a lot of respect for flash-fiction writers, but I definitely have more now.)
5. Image prompt: hands decorated with intricate henna patterns. 6 mins.
They were running out of ideas. After three hellish days trapped on this primitive, polluted planet, Edin was starting to think Worval was right. Maybe a tolorian beacon ceremony wouldn't be so bad. Yes, he'd be marked for life, basically soul-bound to a lizard. Yes, everyone would know. Sure, they'd take the piss.
But also, maybe Worval wasn't that bad. Maybe he kinda liked the little scaley dude. Maybe they'd built more of an understanding between them in three days than he'd had with anyone else in his life.
So long as Worval was with him, he could cope with the stigma against people covered in colourful little patterns of scales. With Worval, he could cope with anything.
(One thing I enjoy about this kind of quick writing, was that I didn’t have time to think up lots of ideas and weigh them against one another. I just had to go with the first thing that popped into my head and run with it.)
6. Text prompt: “unusual souvenirs”. 3 mins.
The beacon worked. A passing dense hydrogen freighter was due to beam them up an hour from now, and suddenly their thoughts had changed from the panic of survival to the panic of picking out a souvenir for Edin's new lizard-in-laws.
"Silk?" he asked, holding a bolt of the smooth fabric close to his pocket so that Worval could feel.
"Wrawww."
Not that, then. They walked the busy market until a horrible smell arose. A dead rat lying on the pavement.
"Wraaaa!"
(Coming up with an idea and executing it in 3 minutes was pretty hard, and I am consumed with the desire to edit.)
7. Image prompt: person running through wet mud. 7 mins.
Edin's breaths came in bursts, the quarry cliffs in flashes of vision through his mud-soaked eyes. He couldn't count the number of times he'd fallen; the times he'd got up, checked that Worval was still tucked into his ragged shirt; the times he'd resolved not to give up.
Not yet.
"Wraw-oww," Worval said, for the hundred-thousandth time.
"No," Edin replied. His teeth chattered and his knees shook. "I'm not leaving you."
"Wa-aarrrr."
Edin was too exhausted to feel elation, to feel anything. His fingers and his heart were both numb. He wrapped both around the tolorian anyway. "I know," he said. "Me too. That's why I can't go."
The freighters - onari, hunters and centuries-long enemies of the tolorians - thumped behind, reminding him to keep moving. There were kaolin deposits up ahead, star-white, capable of blocking the onari DH-sensors.
(I was writing away desperately, trying to round out my story for this last prompt, but didn’t manage to finish. Now we will never know if Edin and Worval escape the onari.)
October 25th – Story 2
I was tempted to continue Edin and Worval’s story in the following Write-In session, but I was working on my middle-grade horror novel that week and really wanted to keep writing with a middle-grade protagonist voice, even if it wasn’t the same character or story.
1. Text prompt: “too late at night”. 7 mins.
"You can't go now," Soba hissed, winding around Edith's wrist to look over the edge of the open dorm-room window. "It's passt curfew."
The school gardens lay dark and still two stories below, except for the black trees bending in the wind, and two long strips of golden light spilling over the lawn. A shadow crossed them, back and forth: on patrol. Madame Elvier, pacing in her study downstairs.
Edith gripped the cold windowsill. The ground was far, and she'd only learnt the featherfall spell last week. Soba's soft white scales slid over her knuckles, and she nudged her snake familiar back up onto her sleeve. "I have to," she said, glancing back at the rows of beds in the room behind.
"Your ssisster knowss how to look after hersself."
Any other day, Edith would have agreed, but after what she'd seen today, she wasn't sure of anything.
(Look, I just like animal companion stories where the companion is a reptile, ok?)
2. Text prompt: “first pair of shoes”. 3 mins.
"Thiss iss an affront to reptile-kind across the sspectrum." Soba lifted a leg, straight up, then forwards an inch and straight back down. Soft leather tapped against the wooden floor.
"Sorry," Edith said, though in truth she was only sorry not to have a camera. "Nadine says it'll wear off in a couple of days and you'll be back to a snake again. In the meantime, this'll stop any more exposed-rusty-nail disasters."
Soba the temporarily-lizard flicked its tongue in irritation.
3. Image prompt: headless mannequin torso. 7 mins.
Edith had opened the door to Madame Elvier's laboratory convinced that she was ready for anything. Ready to find her sister. Ready for cauldrons bubbling on every surface, foul smells and ingredients in jars. Eyeballs, maybe.
She was not ready for the bodies, headless, hanging from meat hooks in the ice-cold room. Dozens of them. She stood in the doorway, staring. There was no blood. No mess. It was all as meticulously clean as Madame Elvier's office.
"Hurry," Soba said, reminding her that the patrol was due any second.
Reluctantly, she pulled the door shut and stood trapped with the bodies. "What if Nadine's here?" she whispered, raising her lantern. Silvery light glowed against the nearest torso, which was grey-blue, dotted with little black hairs.
"Isn't that why we came?"
"No," Edith said. "I mean, what if she's... here?"
(I was a bit thrown by that image prompt, as I’d meant to write a light-hearted story. xD)
4. Image prompt: a snowy mountain with a winding snowboard track. 9 mins.
Edith measured time with the spider and the woodlouse. Or rather, she watched them and had no idea how their movements related to time. When she'd first been thrown into the dusty storage room, the woodlouse had lain curled up at the bottom of a pile of ash someone had swept into the corner. The spiderweb sat at the top of it.
Every day - at least, Edith thought of these cycles as day and night - the spider would skitter lightly down the ash, without leaving a trace, to stand over the woodlouse. If it was eating the thing, it was too slow for Edith to see. The spider just stood there for a time, and maybe dragged the louse a little further up the hill, and then went back to its web, or into the crack in the plaster wall. The woodlouse left a trail, like a sled track in snow, slowly creeping further every time the spider visited.
The woodlouse was halfway up the slope when Edith jolted upright at the sound of the lock clicking. The door swung open and she raised a hand to shield her eyes from the light.
"Edith!"
She didn't need to see, to know that voice or to recognise the arms that wrapped around her, pulling her tight. "Edith, I'm so glad you're okay."
But Edith wasn't okay. She shoved her sister back. "Glad?" she said, incredulous. "Glad?! This is all your fault. If I hadn't gone looking for you, Soba would still be..."
She wiped her tears angrily, couldn't bring herself to finish the sentence.
(In this Write-In, I think I did a good job of giving the impression that I knew more of the story than I wrote. I actually have no idea what happened to Soba, or how it’s the sister’s fault. Also, woodlouse and spider segment inspired by the actual spider and woodlouse on by bathroom windowsill, whose progress I note every time I go for a wee.)
5. Text prompt: “a fool and a liar”. 4 mins.
Madame Elvier's leather chair creaked as she sat back, a catlike, self-satisfied smile clawing up her cheeks. "I commend your efforts, I really do," she said.
Soba lay curled up under the glass bowl on her desk, a threat to keep Edith from lunging over the top of it and strangling the old woman. Nadine sat quietly beside her, hands tied in her lap.
"It was so easy to distract you," Madame Elvier continued. "The fool and the liar, how could you hope to best me?"
"I'm not a fool," Edith spat, and the woman raised her eyebrows.
"Why, of course not, Edith Silverlake." She flicked her hand, and a piece of paper appeared in it. A familiar piece of paper. "You, my dear girl, are the liar."
(At this point I was accused of following the Moffat school of writing, in which you try to end every scene on a cliffhanger, and never come back to explain any of them… Which is fair.)
6. Image prompt: mossy stone statue with palms up beside an open-mouthed face. 5 mins.
Edith had not set out to become a Bad Witch. She hadn't planned on letting anyone know where her magic really came from, or using it in the ways it sang to be used.
She'd kept it hidden all these years. She would happily have done so for all her life. But she'd been born Bad, and no matter how long she pretended at Good - for the sake of her family, for her soul, for her familiar - it was always a pretense.
Madame Elvier screamed, raising her hands, but they halted before they could reach her face. Stone skin, moss hair.
Edith didn't want to be a Bad Witch, but that was simply what she was.
A Bad Witch. A killer.
(I was doubly determined to write an actual ending for this story before the time ran out, and did better on that front than the week before.)
I love Write-Ins, both the writing part and the bit where I get to listen to everyone else’s stories. It’s a great challenge, trying to come up a narrative off the top of your head on a time-crunch. If you get the chance to participate in one, I heartily recommend it. Especially if you’re a perfectionist trying to nudge yourself out of your comfort zone.
Hope you enjoyed this post!
Non Hughes 
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