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.