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[Sappho]

Camp NaNoWriMo ends today (I'm just about to crank out my last 1600 words!), but I've found a challenge for May as well: Story A Day month.

The idea is that every day in May, you write a story. It can be of any length. A one-page story, a one-paragraph story, a one-sentence story, as long as it is a full story with a beginning, middle, and end. I'm looking forward to it. Rather than stare at the same novel I've been working on since November EVERY SINGLE DAY, slowly growing to hate it as the damn thing just won't end, I'll be able to do something different every day, and I can adjust the length to my available time and level of inspiration. And every single day, I'll FINISH something. That moment of pride when you know it's done, I'll get that every single day.

They offer writing prompts each day, and they do sell some e-books with more, but obviously you don't have to buy them.

When you're a writer, it's really important to write every day. This is a great way to do that, get lots of ideas, learn and grow, without committing to a longer story. I'm looking forward to it, and I'll post my stories here every day; who's with me?

Writing Prompts
There are two sets of writing prompts: the official ones provided by Story A Day, and the unofficial Bay12 randomly generated prompts, provided starting on day 3 because the official ones tend to be... not actual prompts. Feel free to choose which prompt you want to use, or combine them both.

Spoiler: Day 01 (click to show/hide)

Official: Getting Home (provided by Neil Gaiman)

Spoiler: Day 02 (click to show/hide)

Official: Magnetic Words
"Imagine your protagonist has just opened a large magnetic poetry kit. Which words call to him/her? Will s/he put these words on the refrigerator in a random scattering or compose a sentence? Share your words and sentences here."

Spoiler: Day 03 (click to show/hide)

Official:
"Work the words vermillion and musky somewhere in the next 250 words you write."

Bay12: Funded Cheating

Spoiler: Day 04 (click to show/hide)

Official:
"Write a story of around 2000 words."

Bay12: Imperative Obsession

Spoiler: Day 05 (click to show/hide)

Official: Shame
Bay12: Acquired Confirmation

Spoiler: Day 06 (click to show/hide)

Official: "Set aside a full hour to write a short story. Start and finish the story during that time."
Bay12: Static Food

Spoiler: Day 07 (click to show/hide)

Official: Write the story that accompanies this ending line:

I clicked off the safety, swearing that if she showed her face here today, my room would be the last one she ever entered.

Bay12: Hierarchical Enlightenment

Spoiler: Day 08 (click to show/hide)

Official: "Write A Story Where Everything Hinges on Your Character’s Most Desperate Desires"
Bay12: Medical Folk

Spoiler: Day 09 (click to show/hide)

Official: "Write A Story Set In A Hospital
(or any other high-tension setting, if you’re not familiar with hospitals)"

Bay12: Unsupported Floor

Spoiler: Day 10 (click to show/hide)

Official: Choose a piece of music from the list below. Listen through it once or twice and get your mind in the mood of the music. Then start writing.

Danse Macabre by Camille Saint-Saens
Fanfare for the Common Man by Aaron Copland
Egmont Overture by Ludwig van Beethoven
Piano Concerto No. 2 in C minor, Op. 18 (II. Adagio Sostenuto) by Sergei Rachmaninoff
The Planets by Gustav Holst (choose one movement)

Bay12: Shimmering Pamphlet

Spoiler: Day 11 (click to show/hide)

Official: "Write A Story Wrapped Around An Action Scene"
Bay12: Sullied Hat

Spoiler: Day 12 (click to show/hide)

Official: "Write A Story Told Almost Completely In Dialogue"
Bay12: Undisturbed Conservatism

Spoiler: Day 13 (click to show/hide)

Official: "Write A Story Rich In Description"
Bay12: Same Plight

Spoiler: Day 14 (click to show/hide)

Official: "Write A Cinderella Story."
Bay12: Young Neurologist

Spoiler: Day 15 (click to show/hide)

Official: "Write A Story Told In The First Person"
Bay12: Funny Federation

Spoiler: Day 16 (click to show/hide)

Official: "Write A Story in the Second Person Perspective"
Bay12: Uninteresting Joy

Spoiler: Day 17 (click to show/hide)

Official: "Write A Story in The Third Person, Limited Perspective"
Bay12: Supernatural Lifestyle

Spoiler: Day 18 (click to show/hide)

Official: "Write A Story From The Third Person, Omniscient, Perspective"
Bay12: Amid Raving

Spoiler: Day 19 (click to show/hide)

Official: "Write A Story From Multiple Perspectives"
Bay12: Legal Grass

Spoiler: Day 20 (click to show/hide)

Official: "Write An Epistolary Story (i.e. One Told As A Series of Letters/Documents)"
Bay12: Agnostic Mail

Spoiler: Day 21 (click to show/hide)

Official: "Write A Non-Linear Story"
Bay12: Capital Happiness

Spoiler: Day 22 (click to show/hide)

Official: :Use These Words In A Story: Lettuce, Happen, basket, Winter, Sister, Monster, Supper, Subject, Puppet"
Bay12: Bubbling Deep

[GiglameshDespair]

I want to, but my exams are right close. So after the 8th I'll be able to do them.

I know it doesn't quite count, but eh.

[Comrade P.]

I'll just watch

[Digital Hellhound]

Ahaha, I can start a story a day just fine, but there's no hope of actually finishing any of them. Might still try, starting after the 12th or so. I don't suppose they offer a nifty graphical visualization of your progress, ala NaNo's graph?

(Congrats on Camp NaNo, btw! I'm thinking of participating in the summer one, wanna try and repeat my actual success last November.)

[Sappho]

Sadly, no, no shiny graphs. They do have a place where you can report your success each day, but they emphasize that the challenge should be very individual. If someone can't write every day, just set a personal goal. The most important thing is to write often and to FINISH what you write. You can't really consider yourself a true writer if you don't finish what you start. It doesn't matter if it's any good, or just a pile of garbage. All that matters is you finished it, and if you decide it's worth it, you can always fix it later.

A piece of advice, given to me by my university honors program sponsor / German professor, which has stuck with me all through the years: Just get it done. You have the rest of your life to get it right.

[moocowmoo]

One day I was reading bay12 forums, and stumbled upon a write a story a day thread. For agonized seconds I struggled in battle with a phantom warrior named Commitment. The duel raged for at least 10 seconds, then finally ended in a stale mate. Both sides went home - I, to my homeland known as Mediocrity, and Commitment to his fairy castle in the sky. The end.

[sjm9876]

...I'm intrigued. They'd inevitably all be <1 page long for me, but hey, it's a start.

[Sappho]

Yeah, it doesn't matter how long they are. Mine will probably mostly be no more than a few paragraphs, though I do have a couple of ideas for some longer ones and it would be nice to spend a day here and there writing proper ones. Then, when the month is over, time to go back over them, pick out the good ones, edit, and start submitting to magazines.

[Sappho]

The first prompt is up, from none other than Neil Gaiman.

"Getting Home"

Ready, set, go!

Spoiler: Edit: My short story for the day (808 words) (click to show/hide)

How many years had it been since Andi left earth? She had lost count.
She just hadn’t thought about it in a while. Oh, sure, she would make small talk about it all the time at work, just like everyone else. The locals, the ones who were born here on Aysee and called themselves “natives” even though their parents were all immigrants, always thought it odd how the expats could spend just as much time criticizing earth as they did praising it. Depending on the mood and the topic of conversation, earth was either a mess they were glad to be rid of or an example that the Aysees really ought to learn from.
Twenty-three. It had been twenty-three years, she realized.
They still got messages from their friends and family back there. Andi’s parents had sent frequent mails through the interGal system at first, usually asking her when she would come home for a visit, but they came less and less often over the years. Eventually, they must have resigned themselves to the truth: their daughter wasn’t coming back.
There was always a reason. An excuse, really. It was too expensive. The travel took too long, and she’d have to sell her little house and pack up everything until she could get back. It was a lot faster to send information across space than people. Anyway, she had work to do. She was busy. That one was difficult to argue with. Busy can mean so many things.
She had intended to visit eventually, of course. When things settled down, when she had the time. When she could deal with seeing her family again. When she had built up enough psychological strength to fend off their guilt trips and misguided attempts to “help” her with her life. As though she weren’t an adult, approaching middle age now, fully in charge of her own life.
It wasn’t like they were going anywhere. They were getting older, sure, but not so old that anyone expected them to pass on anytime soon. And they certainly weren’t going to leave that ugly house they loved so much.
Andi remembered the last time she had seen it. It was a cloudy, gray day. Cold. Winter. There was snow here and there, but mostly everything was just gray and wet. Even on sunny days, earth’s sun was never quite bright enough for her. Alpha Centauri had an extra sun. It didn’t snow here. Everyone had to wear extra-strong sunscreen all the time, but seasonal depression just wasn’t much of an issue on Aysee. Earth could keep its snow. And it would, basically forever. Her parents could be happy in their unstable climate, and Andi could enjoy her suns.
She could visit when she was good and ready.
It wasn’t like they were going anywhere.
Andi avoided the earth news, as a rule. It was always sensationalized. There was no way of verifying any of it, not without a very long and very expensive trip through space, and she was absolutely convinced that it was mostly propaganda and sales pitches. Stuff to get the ratings up and sell the Aysees more junk they didn’t need.
Everyone was having the same conversation when she got to work, ready to face another daily grind. She dodged small talk on her way in, but couldn’t help overhearing the same few words again and again. Unbelievable. Tragic. Impossible. Gone. I can’t believe it’s all gone. She heard that whole sentence, verbatim, several times before she finally noticed how many of her coworkers were crying, and how many were obviously trying not to cry.
She tuned in long enough to get the important parts of the shocking news. She turned and walked straight back out the door.
Much to her own surprise, she didn’t cry. It had all been so far away. So far behind her. Another world. Another life. She hadn’t spoken to her parents in months, not even a mail. She booted up her computer and loaded up the interGal comnetwork. It was all still there. All their personal pages, all their photos and inane comments about food and impotent political statements. All of it was stored in the satellite cloud, and would remain there until the machines broke down.
She had planned to go back and visit them eventually. They were always asking her to come home.
She stepped outside into the cool night air. The suns had set and the stars were out. She craned her neck upwards and stared and stared, searching until she found it. Yes, there it was. Sol. The brightest star in the sky, the closest one in the whole universe. That was the funny thing about interGal communication. Faster than light. She’d be able to see it for another… almost four and a half years before it disappeared.

EDIT2: A question for everyone. I've set up a blog to post my stories. It would be fairly simple to also post the stories in epub and mobi formats. What does everyone think of that idea? Would it be at all worthwhile? Just in general, if you find a good literary blog, do you ever wish that you could download the stuff to read on an e-reader instead of having to use a computer?

[Sappho]

Spoiler: Story 02: "Magnetic Words" (click to show/hide)

The kids sat around in their tree-house looking glum. They called it a tree-house, anyway. It was an abandoned warehouse, all boarded up because the roof had caved in. When they broke in for the first time they found nature taking the place back over. There was grass on the ground, and a young sapling had taken root right in the center, like it was the king of all the other plants. That’s how they got their inspiration. That’s how they found out what all the grownups had done.
At first, it had gone so well. Even the youngest of them, six or seven years old, could draw a tree. They worked in pairs with spray-paint cans. One did brown, the other green, just a rough shape, enough to get the point across quickly. The older kids would do a quick stencil to go with it: REMEMBER ME?
Within a week, half the city was covered with little trees. It all looked so much brighter. There hadn’t been much green around there for a whole lot of years. They all felt pretty good about themselves until the police started their crackdown. A few kids had gotten locked up overnight to teach them a lesson. Parents were called out of their drab gray offices where they worked their boring gray day jobs to pick them up, losing money and making them all kinds of angry. They increased the patrols, always on the lookout for anyone suspicious. It got harder to find a place that wasn’t being watched.
The kids started getting sneaky then. Everyone knows when you tell a kid not to do something, it just makes them want to do it even more. They got pushed, and they pushed back. Grownups were always underestimating how clever kids can be, assuming they knew more just because they were older. But all the kids knew how dumb they were. They watched for all the wrong things.
They’d get all the black and brown kids to dress up in baggy jeans and hoodies with the hoods up and walk around looking nervous. That always caught the cops’ attention. A nervous-looking white kid might need help, but a nervous-looking brown one was almost certainly up to no good. That’s how they thought. That’s how stupid they were. The dark kids would lure away the cops while the white ones would move in and get the job done. It worked for a while.
But grownups had ways of making up for their stupidity. They talked to the city government, went on and on in public speeches about the menace of juvenile vandals. As though they had done anything to hurt anyone. The only thing they had done was make the grownups feel guilty about how thoroughly they’d destroyed everything natural.
There’d been parks, once. Trees. Real ones. Ones that grew up out of the ground and made the air a little sweeter. Then the parks got smaller and smaller. New buildings went up. People talked a lot about Progress and The Economy and Population Density and other stuff like that. Everyone was sad to see the parks go, but it was Necessary. They all pretended that the declining air quality was due to smoking and old car engines. They made new laws about smoking that everyone ignored. They built a new fleet of city buses. Then they just carried on and everyone forgot about it, as though it had always been that way. More buildings kept going up. Old wooden ones got torn down, replaced with Modern Architecture. Concrete. Glass. Metal. There was metal everywhere.
When the cameras went up, the kids started to lose hope. Those things were always watching, for Public Safety. They tested them, just once, and Oliver had gotten picked up in under two minutes. He was 13 and brown, so they were talking about trying him as an adult and putting him in real jail.
So the kids sat around in the tree-house and looked glum and tried to come up with new ideas.
“We could do it everyone at once.” That was Sasha. She was 12, and she was the one who had found the tree-house in the first place and started the whole thing. “They can’t take us all to jail, can they?”
James rolled his eyes at her. “Well they wouldn’t take you to jail because you’re a white girl.”
“Yeah,” nodded Buddha, grinning. They called him Buddha because his parents were from India and they couldn’t pronounce his real name. “They’d probably write up a whole heartwarming story about how a gang of criminals corrupted your fragile little white mind and give you a bunch of extra money for college.” A few of the kids laughed half-heartedly.
“Don’t laugh at us! That’s not fair,” retorted Laura, offended at the suggestion. She was Sasha’s little sister, only 8 years old.
“No, it’s not,” agreed James with a sigh.
No one had anything to say to that. They were quiet for a few moments, staring at the little tree and feeling sorry for themselves. Finally, Lisa, the oldest of them all at 14, slammed her fist into her palm and stood up.
“This is stupid,” she declared. “Those stupid grown-ups are ruining the whole world and punishing us just for saying we don’t like it. There has to be something we can do.”
“Not without going to prison,” groaned Buddha. “There’s no way to paint anything now without getting caught.”
“Why do we have to use paint?” asked Tommy innocently.
“What else can we use?” countered Laura.
There was another silence, but a productive one this time, as everyone thought about that one.
After a few minutes, Jose jumped up and clapped his hands on his head. “I got it!” he cried, then jumped up and down excitedly for a few seconds while everyone else demanded to know what he got. “All the buildings, all the new ones, they got metal all over them!”
The other kids nodded, following him so far and wishing he’d get to the point.
“Magnets! My dad’s company makes magnets! Those super-strong ones they use to build cars and stuff! He brings home boxes of them all the time!”
The next day, they met again, and this time Jose brought a few boxes of thin, heavy metal bars labeled neodymium magnets. “I tested one on the way here. Looks like they use the right kind of metal in most of the buildings. I couldn’t get them back off once I stuck them!”
They spent the whole week writing on them with super-permanent markers before their first test run. They could stand facing the cameras and just toss them in the direction of the wall, and they’d stick. They wrote on both sides, so it didn’t matter which side landed and stuck. The cops tried to get them for it, but the judge said a magnet just couldn’t be vandalism because it was technically not permanent, but the cops with their big clumsy adult fingers could never pry them off. They talked to the building owners and suggested painting over the metal, but no one wanted paint on their modern architecture.
Before long, the whole city was covered with a few simple magnetic words: MOMMY, WHAT’S A TREE?

[Tiruin]

PTW
This post will contain the links or spoilers of every 31 days of May and 31 stories in between.
Yeah, self. Be more confident.
You can do it.
I guess this'll cure your world building woes. :v

[sjm9876]

EDIT2: A question for everyone. I've set up a blog to post my stories. It would be fairly simple to also post the stories in epub and mobi formats. What does everyone think of that idea? Would it be at all worthwhile? Just in general, if you find a good literary blog, do you ever wish that you could download the stuff to read on an e-reader instead of having to use a computer?

Depends on the content. For short stories like these, I'm happy to read them on screen. When it starts breaching what i can comfortably read in 20-30 minutes is around the point I'd quite like to be able to download it.

Unrelatedly: Spent half an hour staring at the screen (total. breaks were taken) to end with a complete failure of inspiration. Ah well. That's how it goes.

[10ebbor10]

Well, for people not inspired enough to do anything creative, you can break apart other people stories into tropes or something.

[forsaken1111]

ptw

[Sappho]

Today's prompt is to work the words "vermillion" and "musky" into the next 250 words of writing. Honestly, I'm finding these prompts to be... just terrible. Too specific, not abstract enough.

Yesterday's was "Imagine your protagonist has just opened a large magnetic poetry kit. Which words call to him/her? Will s/he put these words on the refrigerator in a random scattering or compose a sentence? Share your words and sentences here."

Terrible. Just terrible. Worst of all, when I posted the link to my story on the storyaday.com site, the person who provided that prompt read my story and then expressed utter confusion as to why I didn't post my randomly-selected magnetic poetry kit words as well, or show my characters selecting their words and making a sentence on the fridge. I replied, that's because I didn't do that, because it doesn't interest me at all. (I didn't say "because that's stupid" because there's no need to be disrespectful to another person, even on the internet, but really that's what I was thinking.)

These are supposed to be prompts to inspire writers to get a story written each day. Not specific writing assignments. They should be broad enough to inspire all writers, regardless of genre or interest.

I reduced yesterday's to its title ("magnetic words"), which worked fine. Today's is not so easy to get around. Too specific, and they're not even fun words. Those are awful words for a specific task like that. Who uses vermillion or musky in a conversation? I would never be interested in writing the kind of fiction that included those words. And I have pretty broad tastes. It's like the prompt-giver is trying to force everyone to write bad romance novels.

I'm currently bending my mind a bit trying to find a way to follow the "prompt" (although it's not actually a prompt, it's a writing task) without having to either write those words into a description (ugh) or create the kind of character who would speak that way (double ugh). 250 words is basically two paragraphs. Maybe three, if they're really short. (Aren't these supposed to be prompts for writing an entire short story?) On the other hand, I'm considering ignoring this prompt and just writing a short story of my own devising.

Anyone else have any thoughts?