Welcome Promptlings to The Spark! It’s time to be weird, fantastical, daring, and deploy your creativity. Imagine monstrous beasts, conniving ghosts, and characters with mysterious motives who may also control weapons of wonder. All of this wondrous speculation originates from your imagination. The task is yours. This is The Spark!
The Rules
The rules are simple. You will be presented with a prompt. It could be a required first line, a task that will challenge your craft, elements required in your story, or a genre specific prompt. You will have two weeks to write a short story under the rules of the prompt. We’ll host a Gathering to celebrate what’s been accomplished and highlight your stories at the end of two weeks. You can share them on this thread, as well as The Pitch at the end of the month. This is an opportunity to find writers you admire, befriend, and learn from.
When sharing your creation, give us the title of your piece, genre in the form an emoji (see below), a brief teaser, and a link to your work. While most of the work will be posted on Substack, you are welcome to share work that fits the prompt that has been shared elsewhere (Wattpad, Simily, Amazon, etc.), but we do ask that the piece be available to readers for free. The Spark is an opportunity to grow in your craft and share your work with other speculative fiction writers.
Genre Emoji Index
👽- Science Fiction
🔮- Fantasy
💀- Horror
🔥- Dystopian
🍫- Magical Realism (Like Water for Chocolate, get it??)
👀- Weird Fiction
(The Gathering discussion thread will take place on Sunday, June 21st, starting at 3am PST, and will run all day.)
The Prompt
For those who don’t know (which is the majority of the community), I am expecting our second child this month. It has been a season of transitions. Not only through the pregnancy itself and preparing our toddler for a new sibling, but also a transition in my own career (going from a full time teacher and part time writer to a full time mom and part time writer).
All of this change and preparation included accepting and planning for a period of time where I won’t be writing. I have hit pause on my writing groups, scheduled emails ahead of time, and pushed back due dates on my projects.
Taking a break from writing is not a decision I take lightly. I like to say that writing supports my mental health and that’s why I need to make consistent time to get it done. And writing really does support me in that way, but the perfectionism in me also expects a certain level of productivity and taking a break disrupts that plan.
All of this preparation has gotten me thinking about other times I’ve stopped writing: several years while I was in college, the pregnancy and birth of my first child. There are so many reasons writers step away from their work, but it’s often an experience not talked about. Stephen King’s 2,000 words a day sounds so much more impressive even if returning to writing after a long period of time is just as monumental of a task.
Ellen Frances recently wrote about her experience when she stopped writing on her substack Ellen Wrote a Book. She spoke beautifully about the challenges that come along with taking a break and then returning to writing. I encourage you to check it out.
Not writing is not a failure. It is a common part of the process, whether the choice is intentional or not. Most of us have experienced a dry spell or a shift in priorities. So, for this month’s Spark, I wanted to open the floor to our community to share your own experiences. Whether you stopped writing decades ago or have find yourself no longer getting words on the page now, what led to the words stopping? What was the journey back to the page like? By sharing our own experiences, we can get to know our community better and maybe pick up a tip or two for our own writing process.
Your prompt: Tell us about a time the words stopped. What led you away from the page? What did that silence feel like? And when you found your way back, or if you’re still finding it, what did that journey look like?
This month, we’re trying something new for The Spark, a nonfiction prompt. No invented worlds, no fictional characters. Just you, your experience, and the truth of it. How you interpret and respond to the prompt is up to you.
You are tasked with writing about your own experience as a writer, whether that be in the form of a personal essay, a poem, a fictionalized version of your response, short form video, a comic strip. Write as much or as little as feels true. There is no wrong way to answer this. This is not a craft exercise. It’s an opportunity to share and get to know your Lunar Awards community a little bit more. I appreciate all of you who take on this challenge and share a bit more about yourself with the community.
Good Luck Promptlings!
If you have questions or suggestions, feel free to comment or send me (Reina Cruz) a DM.
[All the best for your new child!]
Rather than do a full article, which, as you'll see from the next sentence, would be exceptionally depressing, I'll just do a comment.
The period when I have stopped writing are always and intimately linked with my periodic bouts of extremely bad depression, from which I have suffered since my early adolescence. Depression is possibly the wrong word. It's more like 'enervated', or 'total lack of enthusiasm for anything which under normal circumstances gives me pleasure'.
It is exactly the same with reading. That may be the worst part of true depression. When I am simply not capable of even reading. My brain doesn't want to do it.
At other times, it's ok, and in fact, this yo-yo-ing can be very productive. An image I would use is of a bow being slowly strung back. One starts to feel the tension growing until one lets loose.
Perhaps my being an Aquarius with a Sagittarius ascendent has something to do with all this.
And I would love to do more sparks/prompts, but I am at the mercy of my inner workings. I have, however, at the very least, learned not to stress myself out about not writing. 'This too shall pass' and all that. Because I know there will come a time when I am able to write something again, and that whatever it turns out to be, it will be good.