People in my writers group look at me funny when I tell them I warm up my muse by working on 100-word stories to picture prompts on “Friday Fictioneers”. That just doesn’t seem serious to some of them. Well, that’s the whole point – I’m playing. But I’m playing with my creative mind, preparing to get down to the serious stuff.

Since I retired, discipline isn’t the problem — I mean the discipline that used to be involved in just trying to find the strength to either write after a ten-hour day or get up at the crack of dawn before a ten-hour day. Once I retired, that just fell away. It takes no discipline for me to wake up to a new day, sit on my glassed-in breezeway (sunny or not), drink coffee and read a good book. Then, primed with caffeine and a dose of literature, I get dressed (pjs are deadly for me), sit at my desk and start with either the aforementioned prompt, a journal entry or maybe I’ll work on a friendly blog post. Then, as I said, I get down to the “serious” stuff of writing novels or short stories. (A lot of my short stories grow straight out of the prompts, etc., but for some reason, never the novels.) Sometimes I could cry to think of so much of my life being wasted on “earning a living”! But, of course, it was never really wasted – it all goes into those prompts, journal entries, blogs — and the serious stuff.

Maybe if I had tried warming up with prompts or journal entries from the beginning, I might have found the strength I needed. Because the real discipline is in getting the muse to stick around if the serious stuff starts to bog down in the middle. But that’s another story.

Another 100-word story from a picture prompt. This picture warms my heart when I look at it. Thank you, Rochelle Wisoff-Fields. Strange how many of these I write in dialogue, and yet usually dialogue is the hardest thing for me to write!

“How long do you suppose she had this old thing?”

“I remember her typing on it before I was in school.  Every night with a glass of wine.  She said she was writing her own stories and offered to read them to me, but I never had time to listen.”

“Look!  A drawer full of envelopes.  They’re manuscripts.  There a note attached to each one.  ‘Thank you for your submission.  It does not suit our needs at this time’.  Look at the postmark on this one.  It’s from forty years ago!”

“Are they all rejections?”

“Looks like it.”

“Oh, Grandma.”

As always, please click on the frog and share your own story!

Here’s my story via this week’s photo prompt from Rochelle Wisoff-Fields and Friday Fictioneers.

The boy craned his neck, staring upward at the outlandish sign.

“Grandpa, how’d they put that car way up there?”

“Probably used some kind of a crane.”

“Why’d they do it?”

“You’d have to ask the guy who put it there.”

“Is he in that there diner?”

“I doubt it.  It’s been closed for a lot of years.”

“How come he didn’t take the car down, then?”

“Maybe he lost the crane.”

The boy pondered the sign for a moment.  “You know something, Grandpa?  I hope he never finds it.”

“Me too, boy.  Me too.”

A 100-word story from a photo prompt. Thank you Rochelle for keeping us primed.

Your bare foot strikes a rock, and agony flashes through your tormented body.  Far away across the sunlit field you’ve seen a big red barn.  But it runs from you and then swims back.  Is it real?  It has to be.  You fight to place each foot carefully.  If you fall, you won’t get back up again.  Not before the drug drags you into insanity.  Somehow you know that.

I love you, he said.   Another lie, you know that now, too.  But you don’t want to know.  You can’t let yourself believe it.  Not yet.

Don’t fall, don’t.  Keep going.

Join the fun! Just click on the frog and post a story of your own. Then read others to see how they did. It’s amazing how many different ideas pop up from one photo.

A 100-word story that floated up from the swamp of my forgotten past. Many thanks to Rochelle Wisoff-Fields for another great prompt. You always get my imagination going.

PHOTO PROMPT © C.E. Ayr

Will crawled out of his little tent at dawn. His eyes sagged with weariness.  “Are they gone?”

“No,”  I said,  “but they’re quiet.  Probably sleeping off all that screaming loud television.  Why do people try to get away from it all by bringing it all with them?”

“Tom wanted to strafe their RV with his old M16.”

I laughed.  “Better wake him.  It’s time to leave if we want to beat traffic.”

“He’s gone.  Said he couldn’t sleep anyway and had something to do before he went home.”

That’s when I saw the bullet holes in the side of the RV.

As always, you can join the fun! Just write a 100(or less!)-word story and post it on your website, blog or social media page. Then click on the frog and follow the directions! And read the other stories — it’s amazing how many different interpretations there can be of one photo. As many as there are people in the world!

When Amazon was new, I thought it was a wonderful way to get people reading. I still think it’s even better than those lurid paperbacks and comic books in the mid-twentieth century which caused a lot of sniffing and sneering amongst the literary crowd but enabled folks to read things they couldn’t afford before.  Now Amazon and Kindle make inexpensive (read cheap) books even more available.  After all, we are a fast-food nation; fast-food-books was inevitable. 

But even in the heyday of paperbacks and comics, books with more depth were still easily available too. Now Amazon is training authors to use the best system for them to make money, not for readers to experience good books.  Authors are being pushed into a system of faster and faster candy mints and throw-away thoughts.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve got nothing against candy mints. They have their place. But as a steady diet they really stink, and that’s where Amazon keeps trying to lead us. There are a lot of good books on Amazon.  And I’ve read a lot of the millions of “bad” books.  Many are no worse than the paperbacks and comic books of the old days, and most are not a bad way to spend an afternoon.  But too often I feel like I’ve wasted the time and money no matter how small the amount.  How do readers find the meat & potatoes if the Amazon table is drowning in candy mints?

When I’m not reading, all I want to do is write, but I don’t want to turn my books over to the agent-reader-editor-publisher-galleys-in a couple of years-‘sorry, you didn’t recoup the advance’ thing either. And then have a big-name publisher drop them into the ‘out of publication’ (i.e. author-untouchable) bin if they don’t make enough money in the first six weeks.

With Amazon, books never go out of publication.  On the other hand, the Amazon system is geared toward authors who can pump books out as fast as they can. And then do all the marketing on their own or pay for it to be done.  And it takes constant research to keep up with what’s the latest best thing — Ads?  Newsletters?  Blog posts?  Blog hopping?  Swapped reviews?  Guest posting?  Goodreads?  Facebook author page? (“Add your business address so customers can reach you!”  What, my bedroom? Not on Facebook!) More and more I’m seeing authors begging their readers to leave a review — “just a few words!” — because this is what the Amazon algorhythm monkey understands.

My last book to be published went up on Amazon a few years ago.  You can still buy the first one.  But I’m not a fast writer, and I’m never going to finish the next book if I’m spending my days trying to game Amazon and their constantly changing “bestseller” algorhythms.

The other day I listened to a young working mother refuse a free bag of fresh veggies from someone’s garden, saying “Thanks, but I like to buy stuff that’s already washed and chopped up.”  One Facebook group that I follow because it discusses new mysteries and suspense novels seems to have devolved into posts listing all the books they read this month, or this week, or today, like it’s a competition.

I’m a full-on capitalist and welcome competition, but I don’t know how to compete in this new world.