When the country had to go into quarantine in the early part of 2020, people had to find distractions to pass the time. I remember hearing that baking sourdough bread received a lot of press at the beginning. I find most activities involving the kitchen (baking, cooking, dish washing) to be lugubrious, so I needed a different outlet. One would think I could have warmed up this blog again, but I didn't. However, I did discover a regular writing contest I started participating in July.
NYC Midnight is an online site that offers story prompt challenges in a variety of styles and word lengths. Participants pay a small fee to enroll in a challenge that has a set word length, time frame, and three prompts. The shorter micro-fiction stories usually have a 24 hour period to write an original work with a randomly selected genre, scene, and required word. Longer challenges have longer time frames and different prompts. Genre is the common prompt, but the others could be a character or an action. Each story has to fit within the word count and time frame and be shaped by the prompts. What I like about the challenge is having a direction and a deadline.
The first challenge I registered for was 1,000 words. Each participant was guaranteed to have two rounds to submit stories. The first two rounds would be scored and the writers with the largest total points would move to the third round. The top performers in the third round would move on to the fourth and final round. The Top 10 of the final round would win prizes.
The genre of my first story was Comedy. I think of myself as a funny guy, so I thought the challenge was right in my wheelhouse. The object I needed to include was an apple. Okay, I could make something funny out of that. The final prompt was the scene, and the random generator gave me a car wash. WTF?!
I received the prompt at 11pm Central time on Friday and I had 48 hours to complete a 1,000 word short story with these prompts. After the jump is my submission: "One Bad Apple."
