I’ve never tried anything like this before. Yes, I know, I can hear you now: “Hey, dummy, Inktober is for artists, and you’re not an artist!” Fine. All right. Guilty as charged. However, my wife and two of my kids are artists, and they both asked me to participate in Inktober this year. I told them, “No thanks, I’m a dummy, I’m not an artist.” To which they replied, “Yes, we know you are a dummy, but maybe instead of drawing, you can use the prompts to write stories instead.”
That’s when something popped inside my skull and I saw a flash of white light, not unlike John Travolta in Phenomenon. I tried moving objects around with my mind and learning foreign languages in half an hour, but no luck.
I did, however, come up with the idea of micro fiction. See, I’ve always sucked at writing short. Heck, my “short stories” usually push upwards of ten thousand words. (One day I’ll be a fantastic novelist, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.) So I figured maybe this would be a perfect opportunity to work on my brevity. Tighten things up. See how short I can actually go.
So here’s the plan for my Inktober entries: use the daily writing prompts to crank out micro stories of NO MORE THAN TWO HUNDRED WORDS. Yes, you heard correctly … two-zero-zero. That’s it.
My brain is already hemorrhaging with memories of my Ray Bradbury 52 Week Challenge, which this kinda feels like. So possibly I’m already setting myself up for failure, which is why I will caveat this with the promise that I’m not making any promises. We’re just gonna kinda go for it without any expectations and see how this goes.
The good news is I still have several days until Inktober officially kicks off, and I’ve already got two stories in the bag, with a third one at least started. I don’t know if I’m gonna get all thirty-one of these, but let’s give it a shot. And if anyone out there wants more info on the real Inktober challenge, you can grab all the deets here.
I’ll post links to the stories below as I get them completed. Let’s do this thing!
MAP — skipping this one, as I already used it in PATH
GOLDEN – I wanted this story to be micro fiction, but the story itself — greedy little gremlin — wanted more. This one ballooned into a 900-word piece of flash fiction, and I liked it so much that I submitted it to the markets. Hopefully it finds a home. If not, I’ll bring it back here.
BOUNCE – Haven’t been able to think of anything for this one, so I’m skipping it for now. If anything comes up, I may come back to it.
PLUMP (skipping this one)