This week’s Fiction Friday prompt: This week’s prompt is a retro prompt from August 29th, 2008 (#70!). It requires a little homework, but was a favourite the first time we ran it. Step 1. Go to a busy locale—a cafe or coffee shop would be easiest. Sit down with a notebook, and make sure you look busy, so people don’t know you’re listening. Now write down random soundbites of conversations.Try to get at least 10 lines or snippets. Step 2. Now use all ten in a cohesive scene of dialogue or as dialogue in a story Step 3. Leave a list of the lines plucked from real life at the end of the story for people to see. The story tells it all. I don’t think I need to … Read entire article »

“There, that should just about do it” he whispered under his breath as he worked placing the last piece of fresh cut sod on Martha Tinney’s grave. She had died a miserable old woman: no children of her own, widowed thirty years, and living off of Social Security tending to twenty-seven cats. Giving the earth a final pat down, he looked up at the headstone Martha Tinney 1923 – 2007 Old bitch, ain’t ya? “Evenin’, Joe!” The unexpected salutation startled him. He quickly turned on his knees to see Tony, the night watchman, waving at him from outside the rusty iron fence that surrounded the old cemetery. The nervous gravedigger smiled at the guard and raised a hand in a friendly hello. For the better part of ten years Joe had worked at Lawndale, … Read entire article »

This week’s Fiction Friday prompt: Include this in your story: “I wish he’d knock on my door instead……..” Jan Weathers is a voyeur. Her neighbor across the hall in 2D, Carrie – Jan never knew her last name – was a sultry twenty-three-year-old brunette that worked in Human Resources at the Serendipity building downtown.  Quite often, men of great beauty would knock on Carrie’s door and because of Jan’s curious nature, a small camera with a side-shot lens had been installed above her own door, pointed directly at Carrie’s.  Perhaps only a handful of gentleman callers wondered who it was that lived in 2E; what job they held; what social stature; what level of wealth they had to necessitate a camera pointing at their front door. What none of them ever realized … Read entire article »

This week’s Fiction Friday prompt: Ted (Theo to his closest friends mind you, although his given name was Theodore) sat in the folding canvas chair under the dimming sky, watching the little pinpoints of light from distant bodies appear as he pondered the log pyramid he had built that day. The warmth of the fire on his feet felt wonderfully refreshing after his quick wade in the meandering brook only feet away from where he camped. A flutter from his teepee’s open door caught his attention He broke his gaze and reached for the Igloo sitting on the ground next to him. Reaching in, eyes fixated on the pyramid beyond the fire, he fumbled blindly for an apple. Again and again his numbing fingers found bottles and cans and plastic bags bobbing … Read entire article »

This week’s Fiction Friday prompt: Pick two established characters, either from your own work or others’. Now write the scene/story of their meeting. I had loads of fun with this prompt, writing it during two lunch breaks and finishing it up tonight. This is by far my longest Fiction Friday story to date. The character William Storey is one of my own creation, from The Tale of William Storey found in Seven Days of Terror – sorry, you’ll have to buy the book if you want to read it. I decided it would be fun to have him meet my favorite Stephen King character, Roland of Gilead of the Dark Tower series. I hope you enjoy reading this one as much as I enjoyed writing it. Through the spot glass he took … Read entire article »

This week’s Fiction Friday prompt: Write about a man with an impossibly bad streak of luck on his birthdays, who, as his 40th birthday approaches, is scared of what might happen. A lonely man paces nervously to and fro across a small room, barely ten feet by twelve feet. His bed is folded down from the wall; it has a hinge on the one side and is supported on the other end by chains. He can fold it up when he needs space for exercise.  A steel toilet is hidden from our view in the far corner by a small knee wall. In the other corner a curtain dangles haphazardly from a curved rod suspended from the ceiling. This rod serves both as his shower curtain rod and his chin … Read entire article »

This week’s Fiction Friday prompt: A covert trip into an attic reveals something unexpected. I felt the need to pay homage to my favorite author again in this week’s Fiction Friday story. I have been wanting to write a story about this very subject for some time and I don’t know, it just seemed to fit. And this is what I threw together. A young freckle faced red head lad crept stealthily from his shared quarters at the Broddick School for Boys that fateful night. He had heard of the mirror in the attic, the one that could take you to places you can only dream to go. It was his mission that night to infiltrate the attic – it was a rarity to ever hear of a student who had – and find … Read entire article »

This week’s Fiction Friday prompt: Use the image to the right as your inspiration. Through squinted eyes I could make out the image of a lone bulb swaying to and fro from its mount above, animating shadows around the room I couldn’t see. My head throbbed; I knew not how I got there. It looked like a pale, faded sun rocking back and forth in the cold night sky. Why was the world around this little sun so dark? Where was the light? It reminded me of a rendering of the solar system I saw in grade school; the sun, sitting there bright and mighty amid a sea of little white dots. I felt like the man painting the picture I saw so long ago, viewing the sun from so far away, … Read entire article »

This week’s Fiction Friday assignment was to “Pick a book of fiction you’d never read (e.g., if you read sci-fi, pick a romance). Open to a random page and read the last couple paragraphs of the page. DO NOT TURN THE PAGE. Now continue writing the story. Feel free to change the genre as you write. “ The story I have chosen is Zeke and Ned by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana, a small, yellowed paperback I found in a dust-covered old metal desk at my previous place of employ when we took over another warehouse and used it for our new offices. It’s been sitting on my bookshelf for nearly a decade now – I’ve never even opened it. I find myself opening this musty old book for the first time, … Read entire article »