The challenge for the recently concluded round of the Three-Minute Fiction contest was: a story of 600 words or less in which one character arrives and another leaves. (The winner and runners-up are posted on the website.) “In the Glade” was my entry.
I love this story. No surprise there: this blog is precisely meant to be a repository of things I have written, crafted, and made that I am proud of and that have been my joy to create (which means this blog is probably going to be dotted with these proud parent asides). But I love this story particularly: for the effort and grief it took to write it (yes, grief is part of the process), for the gift I was given as I was writing it, and for the way so many odd pieces of me came together in one strange place.
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Three-Minute Fiction has a Facebook page where writers, would-be writers, and fans come to shoot the breeze. A little more than a month ago, I posted a question: If you were the judge, what would your story challenge be?
The post generated a lot of responses, some of them whimsical (William Lowe: a discussion of what kind of pizza to order), some of them hilarious (Alan Pratt: a cheese grater must exchange actual dialogue with a main character, gasoline must be consumed as an aperitif and only one mammal may appear in the story), some of them earnest (Emily Smith: a story with a character who has a flaw they do not know about).
I had a lot of fun writing for the contest, and I was aching to continue riding the creative swell, so I decided to take on several of the challenges, to use them as prompts to write more stories, just for fun.
The next five stories in this blog (which I will post as I am able) are what I came up with in response to the challenges.
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