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, December 21st, starting at 3am PST, and will run all day.)
The Prompt
“There was a boy singing a Christmas carol at my door last night. I should like to have given him something”- A Christmas Carol
This holiday themed prompt comes from The Seventh Sanctum, “a site that provides random generators to inspire people, help them name characters, design settings, etc. It comes from Steve Savage’s continuing obsession of decades - how randomization produces creativity.” Created by Steve Savage all the way back in 1999, he has an easy to use site that provides randomly generated suggestions from story prompts, to character names, to song challenges.
This month’s prompt is brought to you by his “Envisioner” and asks readers to visualize classic stories with a twist.
Time to Evision
A fusion of the legend of Cassandra and the story of ‘A Christmas Carol’.
Happy writing!
Good Luck Promptlings!
If you have questions or suggestions, feel free to comment or send me (Reina Cruz) a DM.