Here are the selected writing prompts for April 2019! Everyone picked 8, put them in any order they desired and wrote a 5,000 words or less short story, poem, play, limerick, or song. Here’s your chance to discover how different your writer’s voice is. No two stories are alike!

  1. These are not my pants. 

  2. There's a strange woman at the window.

  3. Air, precious air.

  4. Hero finds a bloody knife in significant other's home.

  5. Hero's significant other is missing.

  6. He pulled the sword free, then dropped it as it screamed in pain.

  7. The door opens on the last person you want to see.

  8. My accordion isn't possessed.  It always sounds like that.

  9. Main character receives news that he/she did not anticipate 

  10. character wakes bound, gagged & with enemy looking at them holding a knife/dagger.


You, Growing Up

by Samantha the Writer of Shameless Plugs Podcast

Sometimes you grow up with a father who has a brain tumor.

She, the tumor, sneaks up on you, staring through the window. You scream, first because you are scared and then a second time because you are slowly realizing that she’s going to come around to the door and invite herself in and take up residence in your home and she’s not going anywhere, ever.

That’s what inoperable means.

It’s news you never expect to receive. Not at sixty, not at twenty-nine, not at four. How do you explain to a four-year-old what inoperable brain tumor means? “Daddy has something in his head and it’s not going away and it may make him act a little stranger for a while. But everything is going to be okay.” That’s how you explain it.

But even at four you realize that things are about to change and you immediately grow up and you know that you breathed your last precious breath yesterday.

 

Sometimes you grow up because your father has a brain tumor.

You choose books. Your dad loves reading and since that is something he can still do the two of you read together. He lets you read things that are probably to old for you and you learn big words and you use them to impress your friends and alienate everyone else because kids are mean.

But you read everything, the two of you sitting on the back porch eating up donuts and books. You read about magical musical instruments that can talk and swords that can talk and animals that can talk because sometimes you forget you have a voice.

You are especially drawn to stories about people gone missing: siblings, grandparents, moms and dads. Your too young, even grown up now, to understand adult relationships and what they mean but you notice the way your mom looks at your dad and you understand that sometimes people can be right in front of you and still be missing. You wonder if you should be sad or not because isn’t this just normal? You, growing up.


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