Non Hughes

More writings from the weekly write-ins! As a refresher, a write-in is a fun event/activity meant to challenge your creativity by making you come up with and write ideas on the spot. The host gives random prompts, and the participants then try to write something related to that prompt within a very short amount of time (3-10 minutes in our case).

I like to challenge myself further by trying to write a single coherent story for each day, adapting direction and theme depending on what comes up in the prompts.

You can find stories 1-6 in my previous write-in posts in your inbox if you were subscribed to my newsletter, or on my blog site!

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December 7th – Story 7

1. Image prompt: three women drinking wine in 50s costume. 5 mins.

    "Darling, it's Chateaux Neuf du Pape. You're supposed to enjoy it." Lai prised the glass out of Della's claw. "If you want to get pissed, go find some Chardonnay or something."
    "We were married nine months," Della said, sliding sideways on her chair until Lai poked her straight. Della was usually the photo-ready one of the group, the always-put-together one, but now her pretty beaded headpiece sat askew, framing wild hair and uneven clip-on earrings. "Nine months! Does time mean nothing to that man?"
    "I'm quite certain it doesn't," Lai replied. What was nine months to a time traveler? But then, Della didn't know who Jack really was. She didn't know who Lai was, either. No one did.

2. Text prompt: “two against one”. 2 mins.

    "If you marry someone, you should know that's for life," Erika chipped in. She liked to make her opinion heard on all matters, especially ones that were none of her business.
    "Exactly," Della said, and looked around for her glass as Lai placed it on a passing server's tray.
    There was no point arguing against them both.

3. Text prompt: “keeper”. 5 mins.

    A racket sounded across the room. Shouts, the crash of an overturned table, accompanied by smashing plates and glassware. Lai's two companions jumped, but she took a calm sip of her wine - a beautiful full-bodied red, something they didn't have in the sweet 3370's. Half the reason she'd become a Keeper in the first place was for easy access to food that wasn't stuffed full of synthacrose.
    She stood and smiled at Erika. "See that she gets home safe, will you?"
    "Sure, doll," Erika said," but where're you going? It's barely ten."
    It was three minutes past ten. Two minutes until Alicia VonDamp was due to be killed for the sixth time, unless Lai finally managed to prevent it.

When you write what seems like a really fancy name on paper, and then read it aloud and realise it’s Von Damp. That was a great moment in the zoom call.

4. Text prompt: “the fatalities were unfortunate”. 10 mins.

    Lai dragged aside a half-melted copper statue that had once formed the shape of Tolkien, and which was now more an artistic blob with hints of eye hollows dripping down its torso.
    "Alicia?" she called. "Madame VonDamp?" The crumbled plaza was filled with debris.
    "What the bloody hell was that?" came an annoyingly nasal and high pitched voice. "Diatronium blasts, in this age?"
    Lai's heart leapt. There was no mistaking that voice. "Madame!" She spun, trying to see where it had come from. Her eyes skimmed over the bodies. She'd tried five times with bloodless solutions, before coming to the conclusion that fatalities were unfortunately necessary on the sixth attempt.
    Madame VonDamp stood, brushing plaster and stone from her expensive-looking purple wool coat. When she saw Lai, she froze, then sighed. "Keeper, huh? What do you want? I retired, you know."
    "I know."
    The woman's red-painted lips curled as she stepped over the remains of her bodyguards. "You lot have gotten sloppy."

5. Text prompt: “uh oh, uh oh, uh oh”. 3 mins.

(Prompt given by a very adorable child on the call. 10/10.)

    "Bit of an uh-oh, don't you agree?" The woman took a long cigarette out of her pocket and lit it with an almost-convincing casual air. "Three of them, really."
    "Sorry?" Lai asked.
    "Three uh-ohs by my count," VonDamp went on. "One: diatronium placement. You could have gone a bit closer to that pillar, collapsed the veranda to shield the restaurant, save ten lives. Two: calling out my name. You could have pretended not to know me. I might have taken you into my confidence."
    Lai ran a hand through her hair. She'd heard that the old guard could be preachy. "And three?"
    "Three: saving me." Madame VonDamp punched her in the face.

6. Image prompt: a mountain landscape with a bright orange sky. 6 mins.

    Lai took the punch so hard she phased five hundred years for a moment, into the post-solonium period when humanity had taken briefly to the skies, leaving the ground to nature. When the controller snapped her back into place, VonDamp was already halfway across the plaza. "Wait! Don't run," Lai called. "I just need to ask you some questions!"
    Damn it! She'd put all that effort into saving the woman, and hadn't considered that she might not be grateful. "I saved your life," she shouted, running after her. "Please!"

7. Text prompt: “delicate”. 5 mins.

    Alicia VonDamp had delicate fingers: pretty, long fingers with shiny almond nails and skin smooth as marble. They tightened around the grip of a 1911 cold pocket hammerless, not so delicate.
    Lai raised her hands. "Woah. Questions, that's all. I'm just here to ask you questions."
    "About what?" VonDamp asked, holding the gun steady, and Lai couldn't help but stare at it.
    "About the time war."
    The last thing she saw was a delicate finger pressing the trigger.

December 13th – Story 8

Warning: this story contains many many spiders. If you don’t like spiders, I suggest skipping it… Also, don’t judge my quickly made up name, I didn’t know what the genre would be when I started writing.

1. Text prompt: “it was this or murder”. 6 mins.

  Gavert could accept one or two spiders in the house. Three was a stretch, especially at this size, and four was frankly unacceptable. They were far past those paltry numbers now though. He almost laughed, remembering when his problem had been four, as he leaned against the kitchen counter waiting for the kettle to boil.
  It clicked off and he grabbed it, then paused when he saw an eight-legged monstrosity laying across the teabag at the bottom of his mug. "We used to put guys like you outside when I was a kid," he told it. The kettle hovered in his hand. A bit of hot water... He could tell Eva it was an accident - didn't mean to kill the poor thing...
  It stared up at him with nine unblinking eyes. He put the kettle back in its cradle, and tilted the mug, tipping the spider out. It pattered across the worktop and disappeared behind the toaster.

Considering that I got a snake soon after I started writing reptilian animal companion stories, and that I currently have an empty tarantula terrarium in the boot of my car (that I already tried to give away), I hope I don’t end up getting spiders because of this.

2. Text prompt: “inclusive design”. 10 mins.

  Every time he thought that things had gone too far, they went further again and he felt silly for thinking the previous step too much.
  What would you like for breakfast?
  This was certainly too much, this little card with shaky handwriting, placed on his bedside table. He turned to ask Eva about it, but her side of the bed was empty. Well, as empty as the bed ever got these days. He nodded to the pillow spider then turned back to the note.
  Another spider stood with one leg resting on top of the card. It was wearing a little bow-tie. It tapped its foot on the card impatiently.
  "Um, toast?" Gavert said, unsure if this was another dream or not. Even his dreams were full of spiders now.
  The creature released the card, which fell forward, then dipped its leg in a bottle cap of dark liquid. Ink, he realised, as the spider swiped a mark across the back of the card. Slowly, mark by scratching mark, it wrote: jam?
  He nodded, quite sure now that this was a dream. The spider bowed, then leapt up onto a long piece of blue yarn stretching from the bedside, out the door and round the corner. It skittered along the line, out of sight, and Gavert finally took a real look around. More lines swept across the room, all different colours like a map of the underground.

3. Text prompt: “your connection is unstable”. 3 mins.

  "We can't have all the lines converging on the living room lamp," Gavert argued, hands on hips as he scowled at the high-vis construction crew crawling over said lamp. "We need to spread out the connections. Look."
  He nudged the lamp with a knuckle. It rocked, sending shivers along the entire yarn rail system. All around the room, spiders leapt into the air or dropped on thin silk lines, where they swayed, waiting for the yarn to settle again.

4. Image prompt: wooden medieval stocks. 6 mins.

  With so many critters skittering about, it was hard to move around without nudging or squishing them. Gavert did his best, but the ever-increasing numbers did nothing to help, and the inevitable happened: a squashed spiderling, a tiny little baby.
  He'd barely had time to say "oh shit" before the clan descended on him, and the next thing he knew he was tied by neck and both wrists to the headboard. "Eva!" he called, but she must have gone out for the weekly shop or something. He kept trying anyway. "Eva! I think they're putting me on trial, darling!"
  It looked like that to him, anyway. A little court of spiders gathered at the bottom of the bed, one wearing a curly judge's wig made of fluffy lint. It tapped its foot on a tiny plate, three times like a soundless gavel, and the court came into session.

5. Text prompt: fingerless gloves. 9 mins.

  Three days after the trial - whose process and outcome remained a mystery to Gavert, other than the fact he'd been set free - the butler brought him a pair of fingerless gloves. A square card lay between them: it's cold out today.
  He gave the spider a numb, twitching smile. "I don't suppose you've seen Eva, have you?" he asked. She'd been around, he was sure, or at least he'd heard the shower run in the mornings. She always left for work before him, and often stayed late. It wasn't unusual to go this long without seeing her. He just couldn't shake this feeling...
  The spider took two steps towards the nearest ink-filled bottle cap, but then two more spiders crawled up the hallway dresser. Beefy ones, with thick legs and hard black carapace. The butler backed away from the ink.
  Unnerved, watching them from the corner of his eye, Gavert donned the gloves, then frowned at a scratch against his palm. A second, smaller card lay inside one of the gloves.
  Take me with you, it said, and on the back: please.
  He glanced at the butler. It tapped its foot again, that same impatient gesture as always. Take me with you.
  So he did.

6. Text prompt: in the wrong place. 3 mins.

  The moment he grabbed the butler, thousands of legs started to move. He fell back as one of the beefy spiders leapt at his hand, but managed to get the front door open and stumble outside. A wave of spiders crashed against the threshold, none daring to step into the snow just outside the door. The butler crawled up his hand, onto his coat sleeve.
  Don't put the spiders outside, Eva had told him, they die in the cold. There's no harm letting them hang around inside.
  He hadn't put them out, and now he was the one left standing outside in the cold.

December 20th – Story 9

This story contains 0 spiders.

1. Text prompt: when to start panicking. 5 mins.

  "Now?" asked Iralo, clutching at the frayed edge of his drenched woolen cloak.
  "No...." Gitte spoke in a low, long whisper, one that insinuated that the answer might be yes very soon.
  The horse charged faster towards them, leaving a trail of stone dust and white froth in its wake. Its eyes were yellow and wide, its strides frantic.
  "Now?" Iralo squeaked, but Gitte shook her head. Her fingers tightened around his arm. "Nooow..?"

2. Text prompt: but a dream. 7 mins.

  It was nothing but a dream, Iralo told himself. That was what happened in stories, after the story was done. It was just a dream - and his a nightmare - and soon he would wake up on that first morning three weeks ago, having learnt some key life lesson, and think, phew, it was just a dream. And then he'd get out of bed, and he'd find some token, some piece of what happened, leaving him wondering...
  He'd throw it out, he decided. There was no token of this experience he'd want to keep. He'd throw it out; burn it and bury the ashes.
  He kept thinking this, waiting, waiting to wake up. But, of course, it was not a dream at all, and there was nothing to wake up to but darkness.

3. Text prompt: your interest rate has been updated. 4 mins.

  Ten drops, the yellow-eyed horse said, in that voice that was not a voice, the one that sounded like gravel being crushed in Iralo's head.
  Ten? Dismayed, he almost argued with it. Yesterday it was four, he wanted to say, but no one talked back to the yellow-eyed horse.
  Ten drops, or you can pay the balance.
  Iralo didn't have enough blood in his body to pay the full debt, so he swallowed and took out his pin.

4. Text prompt: as if the earth was something precious. 6 mins.

  The yellow-eyed horse, after collections, would take each drop to a bare box of dry mud at the center of the camp. There was no water in this desert, so Iralo thought at first that it must be using their blood for hydration, to grow some plant or crop, but no sprout ever poked its head from the dirt.
  The box became darker over time, richer with the blood, but still nothing grew, and Iralo came to understand that nothing ever would. There was no seed, no sapling. The way the horse tended to the box was like a pet, a treasure, as if the earth itself was something precious.

5. Text prompt: incorrect ripeness of a banana. 3 mins.

  No one paid their debt before their lives ran out, so the camp was littered with ripe sun-browned skins leaking liquids, stench and flies.

Ew. I refrained from reading this one out loud in the session.

6. Text prompt: a serious portrait. 7 mins.

  Iralo, in his last days and sensing their approach, sat with his back straight, just so, one elbow resting on a rock as if it were a writing desk and he a famous poet. He sat very still and stared at a point in the distant horizon, where the flat desert rose to a spiked, stony outcrop.
  He pretended that he was not dying. He pretended that he was having his portrait painted, and each time he caught himself slouching, he pretended that the artist had told him off, and squared his shoulders again, re-focused his gaze on the outcrop, and kept posing, kept pretending.

You know I love long, trailing sentences. 😀

7. Text prompt: mesmerising. 3 mins.

  There was no tunnel, no other side, though Iralo wasn't disappointed by this. He'd lived through hell, and all he wanted now was peace.
  The desert swayed gently in front of him, mesmerising, steady as his own slowing heartbeat, like a cradle rocking him to sleep. He closed his eyes.

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Man, I killed off a lot of characters this month. Must be the December Darkness getting to me. Luckily we just passed the shortest day of the year, so it’s all uphill from here!

This is my last post of 2023. I’ll get 2024 goals up next week, not sure what will happen after that. It was an interesting challenge to write this newsletter through to the end of the year, and I had fun, but I finished the zero draft for my next book so I’ll be quite focused on the first draft through the start of the year. Thanks for reading!