Last Week’s Story:

Last week’s story turned out kind of weird. Ever since I read and recommended Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, I’ve wanted to set a story in the Mongol Empire. So I set “Artifact” in the late Mongol Empire, with Geghis Khan himself dying and the main character, Batu, being recruited by his uncle to take part in one last campaign against China. But then Pinhead from Clive Barker’s The Hellbound Heart (inspiration for the Hellraiser films) showed up. And then it got weird.

Now, to publish this story would be a copyright violation (Pinhead is still under copyright to Clive Barker himself, I believe), so it will never see the light of day, but it delights me.

And that’s the thing about writing, for me. I write partially because I have fun doing it. I don’t (yet!) have the financial success or the notoriety that others have, but that’ll come, with a little hard work and some luck. I also write because I just want to see what the stories are going to end up like; and that reminds me of what the great satirist and fantasy writer Terry Pratchett once said: “The first draft is you telling yourself the story”.

This Week’s Prompt:

Bear with me here.

A couple of years back, I joined the Codex Writers’ Group, an achievement that I didn’t think I’d qualify for until I sold “How the Old Ones Saved Christmas” to the LOLCraft anthology (see my Bibliography page for details). Every year around the holidays, there’s a Secret Santa event, and this year I received this fancy box of dice:

Pretty fancy, eh? I especially like the dragon on the lid of the box.

Now, each week I’ll be rolling that super-fancy D4 to find out which Story Engine deck I’ll be drawing from. The following is the guide to the decks:

1: Main Deck

2: Fantasy

3: Science Fiction

4: Horror

So this week, I rolled a 2, so I’m drawing from the Fantasy deck. Here is the prompt:

A true-hearted dragon wants to lead a final desperate charge for an orchard, but they will never know peace again.

As I’ve mentioned before, one of the things I love about writing prompts is how varied the interpretations can be. For example, a bunch of us in Mur Lafferty’s Discord server hold an every-other-week “Kick in the Pants” workshop, where she gives a prompt and we interpret it and write 1,000 words or for thirty minutes, whichever comes first. A few weeks ago, the prompt involved two people finding a working radio station in a post-apocalyptic worlds; my little piece involved two kids finding a working radio station and telling poop jokes on the air while giant kaiju wreck the world. Others used a totally different approach. I love it.

For this prompt, I already have ideas for a contemporary fantasy that I think will work out really well. I just have to figure out a method of writing these stories that doesn’t involve starting late in the week and finishing in a flurry on Sunday morning.

This Week’s Recommendation:

This week’s recommendation is Gentle Writing Advice by Chuck Wendig. Chuck has written some fine books on writing before (not to mention many excellent novels — I particularly enjoyed House of Accidents), but he says that this might be his last. Which I appreciate, because it both validates and invalidates at the same time all the advice he has given so far.

In brief, Wendig says that most writing advice is bullshit, but bullshit fertilizes.

So if you are or know a writer, buy this book.

Have a good week, all. And, as always, be safe, and be kind.