Empires Rising and Falling

I actually got some writing in last week. Real writing I mean, something besides blog posts and the prompt story. And how did I do this? By choosing to ignore my email and Facebook in the morning.

For me the best time to write is between breakfast and babysitting, you know, after I finish a whole list of other stuff. Suddenly it occurred to me that empires wouldn’t rise or fall if I failed to check my email first thing, same goes for Facebook. Instead I used that time to write.

That worked for pretty much two days in a row. Monday and Tuesday I spent the time between breakfast and babysitting writing my blog posts for those days, and Friday I had grocery shopping and a coffee date.

But I really think I’m onto something here. What if I got my blog posts done the night before, like I used to, and waited until later to check my email and Facebook?

It sounds good in theory, let’s see what happens when I put it into practice.

Prompt of the Week

Well this is annoying. I really, really like The Story Shack for generating story prompts, but every time I tried to click on it yesterday I got a security error and I couldn’t find a way around it. I’m kind of bummed about it. If I’m ever able to access it again, I’m going to download a bunch of prompts, just to have them handy.

So, for this week at least I’m going to have to find a different prompt site. First I tried a site called The Plot Generator. There were a lot of options for generating ideas and I tried Create a Paranormal Romance Plot in Seconds and Create a Smelly Troll Plot in Seconds. The resulting prompts were okay, so I saved them, but not quite what I was looking for.

Next up was the site called Writing Exercises and Prompts where I clicked on Quick Plot Generator, Random Plot Generator, and Random Scenario. Of the three, I liked Random Plot Generator the best. It gives you some details to work with, but not as much as I got from the previous site.

On to Springhole which is more geared to RPG, but it was still kind of fun. I tried the Creepypasta & Supernatural Horror Plot Creator, the Fairytale Plot Generator, and the Really Random Plot-o-Tron - Medieval-esque Fantasy Edition. While they were fun, they still weren’t quite what I was looking for. I want something quick and easy, so I’ll definitely go back to this one when I’m in the mood for something longer.

Finally, I tried the Seventh Sanctum writing generators. These generated ten choices at a time. I tried the romance story generator with fantasy as the category and received ten interesting ideas. Then I tried the writing challenges generator and got ten more interesting choices.

Are you starting to see why this blog post was late today? :-D

In the end, I went with the random plot generated by the Writing Exercises and Prompts site. It gave me:
Main character: A woman in her early thirties, who is very reckless.
Secondary character: A man in his early twenties, who is very compassionate.
Setting: The story begins in a church crypt.
Situation: Someone is being blackmailed.
Character Action: Your character has to do some quick thinking to keep ahead

Feel free to play along, or if you prefer, try out one of these generators on your own.

When Crime Pays

I have to admit I had a wee bit of fun with this one.

And I apologize to any programmers out there for the liberties I took with the job description. Programming is hard work—if it wasn’t everyone would be doing it. Obviously I don’t know a whole lot about it, but I do know a few programmers and I am in awe of them. :-D

Word count: 600
Genre: Crime
Character: A programmer
Material: A pencil
Sentence: "It was her!"
Bonus: Your character is imprisoned.

Sometimes my job can be really boring. A lot of what a programmer does is just sit in front of a computer screen looking at mile after mile of code streaming past, watching for errors – so mind numbingly boring. It’s no wonder I started amusing myself by taking a stroll through the bank’s computer system. I wasn’t looking for anything in particular, I was just curious.

Their firewalls were okay and security was pretty good, not as tight as I could have made it, but that’s not what I was there for. I was just there to upgrade the accounting software to the new system and figure out why it didn’t work with the old system.

I was pretty sure I had all the kinks worked out between the old and new programs, but I wanted to wait until it was running for a while to make sure. On a whim, to pass time while I waited, I decided to check the rest of their system, just to make sure everything else was running smoothly. I was doing them a favor, for crying out loud! I never expected to find anything amiss.

But wouldn’t you know it, a red flag went up on some purchase orders for pencils. You’d think with the bank finally getting on board with the computer age the number of pencils they were going through would be reduced, but that wasn’t the case. So I took a look to see why pencils of all things were a problem.

Not only was someone buying an excessive number of pencils, they were pretty pricey ones at that. Then I took a closer look. The pencils themselves weren’t expensive, but the bank was being charged an outrageous amount for them. And there was a big discrepancy between what the bank was being charged and what was paid to the manufacturer. Where was all that extra money going?

I should have just reported what I’d found right away, but I didn’t know how to do that without admitting I was poking around in something I shouldn’t have been in the first place. Instead I started tracing the money to where it was going. It was all going into a single account in the same bank – the idiot embezzling didn’t even have the sense to stash it in an offshore account. Taking an even closer look I discovered that the stealing had been going on for years, well before the bank started using computers.

Right about then someone complained about my work, that I was incompetent and took too long at my job. One of my friends warned me that the head teller, who’d been with the bank from the very beginning, was trying to get me fired.

That snide bitch hadn’t liked me from the moment I stepped foot in her bank. I played it cool though and continued with my job. And I still curious about who’d been accumulating all that money. Imagine my surprise when I uncovered the culprit. It was her!

I knew the ax was about to fall and I’d have to act quickly. So I did what I had to do, then I set a harmless virus to activate when the computer system updated in the morning. It was risk-free, honest. A joke. But it was enough to send me to prison for three years for messing with the bank’s computers.

But that just gives me three years to figure out how to spend that 4.7 million I transferred to a bank in the Cayman Islands.

Backing It Up

You know, it breaks my heart every time I read/hear about someone who’s lost that precious story or even the next best-selling novel because their computer crashed or got stolen, or there was a fire or flood, or the apocalypse happened. And in this day and age it’s so unnecessary!

You never know when disaster will strike. So I tell you all now, BACK YOUR WORK UP!

But wait! Get back here. Don’t go backing up yet, I have more to say.

Be organized when you back your work up.

*cue puzzled murmuring*

Let me tell you a story.

*waits for heartfelt groans to die down*

I’ll try and keep it short.

Really.

Okay, maybe not really. But you need to hear this. So quit belly-aching and just read.

As you know, I’ve been procrastinating spending a lot of time lately cleaning up and generally trying to get my writing files organized. Many writing files. Many, many writing files. While I’ve always been pretty good at backing my documents up, I’ve been pretty bad about doing it in an organized fashion. What I typically did was create a folder on a USB key and then just copy everything (and by everything I mean all my documents, whether I’d changed anything or not and any miscellaneous files, photos, etc.) from my laptop into the new folder on the key and call it done.

These folders had names like: short term 1, short term 2, miscellaneous 1, miscellaneous 2, current stuff 1, current stuff 2 . . . I think you get the idea. This is called laziness (in case you were wondering). The problem with this method is that it leaves me with multiple copies of the same document and I don’t know which is the one I’ve been working on. Did I mention I have about a dozen USB keys and all of them have got stuff saved to them in this fashion? And it gets better.

Not being entirely trusting of the whole USB key thing, every once in awhile I’d back my files up to a DVD. All of my files. Together. Then I’d label the DVD with the current date and stick it in a box. A big box. And now I have an external hard drive sitting in a box just waiting for the day when I get my files all organized so I can save everything to it. You know, unless everything crashes first or I get hit with an EMP or some natural disaster occurs.

The moral of the story, kiddies, is: Save your work and back it up on a regular basis, but do so in an organized fashion!

Prompt of the Week

I’ve been having so much fun with the prompts from The Story Shack that I think I’m going to keep using them until I stop having fun. :-D

Go ahead and give it a try! And don’t forget to check back Saturday to see what I’ve come up with.

Word count: 600
Genre: Crime
Character: A programmer
Material: A pencil
Sentence: "It was her!"
Bonus: Your character is imprisoned.

Happy Days

Maybe I knew you could do it (on Tuesday’s post), but I should have given myself a little more thought. I didn’t remember about the prompt until early Friday evening. And then I sat there simmering in the sweltering summer heat, trying to imagine “winter is long and extremely cold” and failing miserably.

So this morning I turned on the air conditioning and thought about it some more. Then I checked my email and Facebook (several times). Finally I convinced myself that empires were not going to rise and fall on my deathless prose, just start typing and be done with it.

Then I poured myself another coffee and did just that.

Word count: 500
Genre: Drama
Character: A child hater
Material: Not enough money
Sentence: "I'd like a day without punishing you."
Bonus: Winter is long and extremely cold.

The small, squat building was painted a pale pink, the happy colour at odds with what had gone on inside of it. The antiquated playground equipment lay abandoned, the swings hanging still, the monkey bars dusted with snow, the slide listing to one side. A half deflated ball nestled in the frozen sand box.

It had been a long and extremely cold winter, a fact the media reminded people of daily, but if it had not been for that, it might never have been discovered what was happening in that pretty pink building. But the boiler was old, like everything else, and working beyond its capacity. A pipe had burst and needed to be repaired.

Even so, it was by sheer accident the repairman stumbled upon the secret of Happy Days Daycare. He was declared a hero by the authorities. Who knows how far things might have gone if he hadn’t opened the wrong door?

The extreme cold of winter was forgotten as the story caught fire. It was the case everyone talked about – Sophie Fairchild, whom the press dubbed Satan Fairchild, an innocuous seeming woman with a heart of pure, black evil.

Pictures showed her to be short and slender, skin pale and smooth, mousey brown hair held off her face in a bun. She looked almost ordinary, until you looked into her eyes – dead eyes set in a face that never smiled.

The director of the day care facility cited the lack of funding as the reason why a better check of Ms. Fairchild’s credentials hadn’t been made in the first place, how things had gotten so out of hand. The center itself was part of a chain of daycare centers, all of which were currently closed pending the vetting of the other employees.

When the parents were asked if they’d ever had concerns about the day care, many of them shamefacedly admitted they had, but there were no other daycares available. Besides, things couldn’t be as bad as the children described. Ms. Fairchild might not be the warmest person around, but any time they had any contact with her she was unfailingly polite. It couldn’t be easy running a day care by herself. And children often exaggerate, right?

The families of the children involved in the incident were offered counseling. In fact, the number of caring counselors who volunteered for the opportunity to help was staggering, almost as staggering as the number of charges brought against Ms. Fairchild.

During the trial, Ms. Fairchild was asked what motivated her to act as she had against innocent children. She remained tight-lipped, as she had throughout her trial. Some believed her mind had snapped, that she wasn’t really there mentally.

In some respects they were right. When the judge handed down her sentence it wasn’t his voice she heard, but that of her mother. “Just once I’d like a day without punishing you.” Sophie was still waiting for that day.

Dealing With It

I’d like to say I was MIA last week because I was getting copious amounts of writing done, really I would. But alas, I can’t. And the really sad part was that I had the whole week off from babysitting too.

The closest I came to buckling down was cleaning my office. I went in there with every intention of writing – well, truthfully I went in there to sit in my comfy chair and read for a bit before I did some writing, but as I sat there I realized my office was just messy enough to be distracting.

Let’s face it, there’s cluttered and then there’s downright messy. Cluttered pretty much means you have a lot of stuff, but you still know where to find (most) things. Messy means stuff is piled up haphazardly and you have no idea where anything is. My office was messy.

This time I did it right, too. Instead of my usual shuffling papers and piles around, I actually found homes for the detritus on my desk. It wasn’t exactly procrastination, it was a job I’ve been putting off for way too long. And no, it didn’t take me the entire week.

I caught up writing entries in my journals, tinkered with a couple of poems, and took a look at some of the shorter stuff I’ve been working on. And there was a lot of it. An appalling amount really. I mean, between the short stuff and the unfinished novels I have enough to keep me busy for the next ten years without having to start anything new. And how sad is that?

So I came up with a game plan. I made some lists, I prioritized, and I set some goals.

Now all that’s left is to get to work. Thursday.

Why Thursday? Because the daughter is in Washington D.C. until late Wednesday night, and I’m looking after the grandbaby full time until her mother returns. I get Thursday and Friday off for good behaviour, which technically means a four-day weekend.

Now I just need to get my writing mojo back, preferably before Thursday.

Prompt of the Week

I’m going with a prompt from The Story Shack again, but this time I’m going to share what the generator comes up with up front so you can give it a try too. It’s a lot of fun to have different writers all working from the same prompt. And even if you don’t care to share, you can still see how your idea differs from mine when I post my story on Saturday. And if you do care to share, by all means send me your take on the prompt and I’ll post it on Saturday as well.

Word count: 500
Genre: Drama
Character: A child hater
Material: Not enough money
Sentence: "I'd like a day without punishing you."
Bonus: Winter is long and extremely cold.

There you go, 500 words. You can do it, I know you can!

Field of Corn

Once again my week got away from me. I did get a few hundred words on that pesky scene for Wandering Wizards, but that was pretty much it. I didn’t even give my prompt story a second thought until today (once I realized it was Saturday and I hadn’t done it yet).

This was actually a lot of fun. And I did the story in under an hour, including editing time to get the word count down. I'm still six words over, but that's pretty darn close! This prompt came from a site called The Story Shack. Every time you click on the button you get a different prompt so the challenge is to stick with the first one you get.

Word count: 250
Genre: Seasonal
Character: A lonely farmer
Material: A pillow
Sentence: "It's too warm."
Bonus: There seems to be no one left on the planet.

Jake looked out over the acres of ripening corn and bit back a sigh. Best crop he’d had in years, and no one left to see it. No one left to sell it to. No one left to eat it. He hated corn.

Shifting the pillow he carried, he turned and checked on the vegetable garden his wife had planted. The beans and peas needed to be picked again, but he wasn’t even finished eating the ones from two days ago. And he had no idea how to preserve them – that was Laura’s job.

There was a bumper crop of squash ripening on the vine, and the cabbages looked as perfect as ever. Stooping, he picked one – he’d have it with his supper tonight. He’d always loved Laura’s boiled cabbage, she had a real knack for it.

A warm breeze came from the north and made him shiver, and remember. The last thing Laura had said to him was, “It’s too warm,” and then she vanished, along with everyone else in the world. All he had left was the farm with its perfect crops and the pillow with her scent still on it.

The animals were gone too, and the birds. Jake didn’t know why he’d been spared; none of it made sense. The season never changed and the crops kept producing more than enough to keep him well fed. In his darker days he thought maybe he hadn’t been spared at all. Maybe this was a punishment for some past transgression. He’d probably never know.

Excuse #792

After I got the ekphrastic poem written last week the writing pretty much took a nose dive.

I had a little extra babysitting last week, and as I mentioned before, the grandbaby is transitioning out of her naps so that gives her an extra hour and a half to drain the energy from me. Plus the weekend was a holiday weekend for us here in Canada, so I had to focus on getting the house cleaned up. That’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it.

We had some family from out of town come for a barbeque on Saturday and sadly I’ve never been what one might consider a “Suzy Homemaker.” Normally that wouldn’t matter because it was a barbeque – we were going to be eating outside. However, we’ve had an unnatural amount of rain and there was a good chance it was going to rain on our barbeque, which meant people would actually be in my house. Therefore, the house must be cleaned!

And being the anal retentive weirdo I am, a lot of what I did was stuff no one was going to notice except me. But my fridge has never been cleaner, and you can actually see your reflection in the stove. So Sunday I got to kick back and relax and enjoy my clean house. I celebrated by…not writing, but sitting out on the deck to read. Close but no cigar.

However, whilst reading I did get an idea for that scene I wanted to add to Wandering Wizards (the one I skipped over), and I got a brand new idea for a quirky, maybe even funny, romantic short. So at least my mind was on the right track.

Now you’d think that would mean yesterday, which was the actual holiday, I would have been all gung ho to write. Well, it was a thought, but just a passing one. Instead I went down to the local Waterfront Festival. Twice. And then we went down again after supper to watch the fireworks, which is why this blog post is late (I usually try and write them the night before and schedule them, only there wasn’t any night before).

Anywho, while the fireworks weren’t all that impressive this year I did get some (unintentionally) interesting pictures. I took my good camera down with me and put it on the sports setting which is for action shots. But it’s hard to keep still when you shoot 600 pictures in the space of 10 minutes, so some of the pictures came out . . .weird. Those were the best ones of all. :-D

To prompt or not to prompt, that is the question…

Oh! Lookee what I found! Too lazy to go to my office to peruse my writing materials, I did a quick Google search for prompts and found this cool page:
Writing Exercises
This page has a whole bunch of neat prompt generators like Random First Lines, ‘Take Three Nouns,’ and Random Image Generator. There are about 21 of them to choose from and I hereby challenge you to pick one (or two) to give your creativity a boost.

And hey, if you have fun with it let me know. And if you like what you’ve come up with (or even if you don’t like it but still had fun) send it to me at crward(dot)author@gmail(dot)com so I can post it along with mine on Saturday.

C’mon. You know you want to!