Promptapalooza

 Over the last two days I’ve been digging into the reaches of my mind and pulling out very short summaries for very short stories.

 Why did I do this? Because I’m writing a book, and I’m actually doing it instead of what I’ve done before, which is to start a novel and then lose confidence twenty thousand words in. No, this is going to be short and sweet and prove to me that I can actually write and publish a book.

 My plan for this is to write a hundred one hundred word stories, and that always looks weird when I write it out. So in order to make my task simpler I initially came up with twenty themes for my stories, five stories per theme adds up to one hundred stories. Seems simple.

 However, my initial pace of work was something like three stories per day, and puts a long estimated publishing date on a book that barely peeks over ten thousand words long.

 So I’ve taken a leaf from my friend Kelly’s book (yes, that Kelly) and created a list of prompts for myself. Now Kelly is a big figure in a couple of fan communities, so she can just put out the call for prompts and they come flooding in.

 Me though, I’m not a big figure in fandom, I barely even exist there to be honest, so I have to come up with these things myself.

 Doing ninety three in two days, most of which were done yesterday, was quite a challenge, but definitely worth the time and effort. I ended up being inspired by a whole bunch of things, by TV programs, Greek myths, fairy tales, the bible, it’s a real hodge podge of  stories, but I like that variety. With such a broad scope for topics, this book will show my full range.

 Since the hardest part of the process was coming up with something to write about, this should up my rate of writing to the point where I’ll get this finished and ready to publish by the end of the month.

 It might be a good idea to always have a list of prompts hanging around for when you might be suffering from writer's block, because even if you're struggling with a novel, you can always quickly produce some flash fiction to keep yourself in practice.

 There are lots of lists of prompts on the internet, it's just a case of looking for them. If you're lazy, though, the LiveJournal group 100-themes has a list of prompts that covers a whole bunch of topics and would make a good starting point for the newbie prompt-challenger.

 Of course, officially joining the challenge and using fandoms for it is entirely up to you.

 Current story count: 8/100