The 2017 Eternity Authors' Challenge

[Sal]

The Challenge

The 2017 Eternity Authors' Challenge is the first - of hopefully many - general fiction writing challenges.  It is open to everyone on the forum and is meant to be a fun, mostly noncompetitive for now exercise in prose to help stave off writer's block and foster creativity.

Each quarter, a prompt will be posted.  The type of prompt may vary: a set of words, a phrase, a picture, a sound clip, a color...  Some may be vague, while others may be very specific.  Participants will incorporate the prompt(s) into a short story and post them below.  Stories can be about anything and everything.  All genres and styles are welcome.  First person, third person, sci fi, horror, romance, purple prose, and dialogue-heavy - they're all golden.

You may even get a participation ribbon.  (Cue the oohs and aahs.)


General Guidelines

There aren't many rules.  There are a few suggestions which may help participants avoid any confusion, but as this challenge is meant to be a not-so-serious exercise just for funsies, don't sweat the smaller details.  

• Follow the general forum rules regarding topics and language, but remember that you are not limited to the MTRP/NationStates themes of the main Siora forum.  In fact, MTRP/NS themes are discouraged; don't we get enough of that already? Let your imagination run wild, and all that.
  
  
• Stories should be written using the most recently posted prompts.  You can check the end of this post for the current prompt.  Once a prompt is closed, no more stories written using that prompt will be accepted.  (Although you may still post them under the general Writer's Bloc forum if you'd like.)
  
  
• Some prompts may have specific guidelines.  Check the prompt at the bottom of this post for any specific guidance.
  
  
• There is no set length for submissions, but short stories are generally between 5,000 and 10,000 words, so this is a good target.
  
  
• Try to keep submissions contained to one post.  If your length exceeds maximum word limit for a single post and you must break your submission into multiple posts, then include some sort of "part x of x" statement at the beginning of each.  Also, if you must break your submission into multiple posts, try to post them after you've completed the entire story one immediately after the other such that other participants' submissions are not in the middle of yours (ex. If Sal writes a full-on novella that has to be broken into 3 posts because she broke the maximum word limit, she should post them all at the same time, after she has finished the entire novella, and should label them [1/3], [2/3], and [3/3] respectively.)
  
  
• Titles are optional, but encouraged.
  
  
• Feedback on/critique of any submissions, should the author request it, should be done in the "Discussion" subforum of the Writer's Bloc and not in this thread.
  
  
• Participants are free to submit more than one piece for the same prompt. Unlimited submissions, wow!
  
  
• No poetry, please.
  
  
• Primarily English, please.
  

---

The 2017 Quarter 3 Challenge is Open

Participants should choose one of the following pictures on which to base their submissions:



artist unknown


jakub rozalski


museo atlantico lanzarote



Prompt-Specific Guidelines:

• Participants should follow the general guidelines.
  
• Indicate which picture you are basing your prompt on by placing the picture in your submission.
  
• You can write one story about each of the pictures if you wish.
  
• Quarter 3 will stay open until approximately 11:59p September 30.
  

Happy writing!

[Sal]

2017 Quarter 1

Participants should incorporate the following themes into their submissions:




The 2017 Q1 prompt will be open until March 31.

[Flo]

~ 8 A.M.
May 18, 1980

He could hear her stirring. Alli had always been a restless sleeper. Sleeping in the back of a car didn't help, though. The station wagon, his fathers old Ford Country Squire, had room, sure, but it certainly wasn't as nice as a bed. She wasn't awake yet, so he simply enjoyed the morning.

The hatch opened quietly as he stepped into the early morning. He could hear birds chirping. He shut the latch quietly, so as to not wake her. She was grumpy enough in the morning, let alone after being woken up. They had a late night of drunken revelry with some friends, and needless to say the hatchback had more than a few hours of excitement.

It was much needed. He had only recently gotten a new job and it had caused stress in their marriage. Seattle was a little over two hours up I-5 from where they lived in Castle Rock, WA. The job was fantastic, finance was a good business, but the distance was a problem, especially to Alli. Married life could be stressful enough without barely seeing each other. Every time he offered to simply move, Alli became all the more frustrated. Castle Rock was where they were from. It was home. Every major milestone of their life together happened there.

They came to Mount Saint Helens national park nearly every summer together, since they had been in high school. They were sometimes alone, sometimes with friends. It was good for them to get out in nature. It was where they both felt most like themselves -- most together. Even in the midst of a very stressful season for the couple, they wouldn't miss this trip for the world.

Their friends were all in campers or tents nearby. No one was yet awake. It was just he and the forest. He poked at the fire a bit. There were still coals, much to his frustration. He had made them promise to put it out when they went to bed. They were probably too drunk to remember. In the distance he could see the mountain. Everything seemed serene, despite the bulge in the mountain. There were rumors that it could be ready to blow, but nothing substantial.

As he poked the fire a bit, he felt it. The ground began shaking. An earthquake? He stood up as he waited for the tremors to end. One of his friends poked his head out of their tent.

"Paul, is everything alright?"

Paul waved them off. "Just a little one, nothing ser-"

When suddenly there was a large, audible crack. Paul looked up and saw the mountain sliding down. An avalanche of rock. Then, an explosion as the molten rock below the earth became exposed. Black clouds of smoke erupted from the mountain.

Paul stood in awe before being shaken by nearby activity. The others were in a mix of panic and drowsiness. This was certainly an exciting morning alarm. Alli screamed as she awoke and saw the eruption. The scream jolted Paul into action. He quickly ran to the wagon. They needed to leave, now. As he turned around he could see the others doing the same. Some were trying to pack. Paul shouted at them to ignore the things and get out of there. He checked the mirror and saw the cloud growing taller.

After seeing to it that everyone's car started, Paul drove off down the path. They'd soon reach Spirit Lake Highway, where they could drive much faster. Once there, it was a state of chaos, as cars were driving as fast as they could to get away. The sky grew dark in the rear view mirror as thick black smoke spewed out of the hole ripped in the earth.

They were mostly out of danger by this point, though, and soon enough they reached Castle Rock and home. As they stopped and stepped out of the car, they could see the cloud of fire and smoke. Soon, ash would begin falling. Paul hurried Alli inside while he unpacked the car.

It had been such a peaceful morning.

---



Later that day

"Do you think we'll be safe here?" Alli asked, her voice full of nervousness. Outside the window, ash was falling.

"The news says the ash is mostly going east, with the wind. We shouldn't get hit too hard."

"How do you explain that then?" she gestured to the fine grey particles falling from the sky. "It won't last long right?"

"It shouldn't. This is just because of how close we are." He came up behind her to pull her close. "It'll be alright. I promise." She accepted the embrace, though her eyes remained out the window, a stern look.

"You should call into work, let them know you won't be able to make it."

"I already have, Jim understands. He says its all over the news. He couldn't believe how close we were." Paul pulled the drapes over the window, plunging the room into a dim darkness lit only by a nearby lamp. "He gave me the rest of the week off."

She smiled, the first time she had all day. At least she would have him. She couldn't imagine him leaving her alone in this darkness. "Did everyone else get home safely?"

"I haven't gotten a hold of Lorraine and Ken yet, but I'll try again in an hour. They live further north than most of us, so it probably took them a while to get back. Everyone else is home now, from my understanding."

She sighed. What a day.

She moved into the living room, where the television was set to the news. She could see pictures and graphs of where the flow went, and where the ash cloud was projected to extend. She was surprised at how many states would be affected. Just like Paul had said, the cloud was predominately moving east. She noted their campsite, only twenty minutes after they had left, it had been engulfed in pyroclastic flow. She shivered. They could be dead.

Later in the evening, as they lay down to sleep. She pulled him close. Sure, things had been difficult, but this experience had shown her how lucky she was. They looked at each other as they pulled away with a silent promise. A promise to try again, to try harder.

-----

Hope you enjoyed it o/ I originally thought of Mount Saint Helens when I saw ash, and decided to write up a little story about it. It's only about 1000 words, but it wasn't meant to be a long one. The joyride involves them fleeing the scene, while the eggshells are represented by "walking on eggshells" as everyone else sleeps early in the morning. I definitely took some creative liberties with some locations, but I tried to include some details from the actual event as well as local geography/roads.

This is my first one submission like this, so let me know what you think! I don't have a very flowery writing voice so forgive me if it seems a bit clinical

[Sal]

“We should go soon.”  

It was the third time Harlan had insisted, and the third time her girlfriend had ignored her.

“We will,” Tamara promised.

Underfoot, the tired floorboards moaned their protest.  Tamara remembered when her father had installed the flooring, tired of hearing her grandmother complaining about the ugly pea soup color of the carpets that had come included with the house every time she’d visited.  She could still remember the smell of the dusty old carpeting as it was ripped up, and of the electric hot wood as her father’s circular saw ate with acute precision through the interlocking white oak planks.  He was an accountant, not a handyman, but he’d done a job good enough to earn his mother’s approval, and Tamara had liked how the living room echoed with the new floors installed.

Choosing each step carefully, methodically, she placed one shoe gingerly toe-first, allowing her heel to glide down behind it until her weight was fully shifted.  When it held, she repeated with the next foot. Carefully, carefully….

“Seriously, Tam,” Harlan whined still from the doorway.  Despite Tamara’s insistence, Harlan had not taken a single step into the house, and so Tamara felt it only just that she meet Harlan’s demands with the same unyielding ignorance.  “Mom’s going to freak if she wakes up and the car’s not there.”

“Let her freak, then,” Tamara laughed, casting an unconcerned glance back over her shoulder to the petite girl with the strawberry blonde bob.  “Just come up with something.  Tell her you left something over at my place and you had to go get it.”

“It’s not the reason why I took it that she’d care about, you know.”

There.

Frozen in time, in midstep, Tamara stopped and crouched down, easing first one of her backpack’s straps off her shoulder, and then the other.  She sat the olive drab canvas bag in front of her and tugged at the zipper.

Harlan still had her learner’s permit.  Whether she’d gone to her girlfriend’s house or to a crack den, it wouldn’t have made any difference without her mom or someone else eighteen years or older in the passenger seat with her.  And Harlan was a good girl; this wasn’t like her.  She was the kind of straight-As, honor club, community service kid that would self-flagellate over her own mistakes more than anyone else would even consider, and the kind of person who crumpled under the weight of parental disappointment.  This was, objectively, the worst thing she'd ever done.

“Look,” Tamara began calmly, as if trying not to startle away a fawn, “Why not just, like….”  She paused, thinking.  “Just go around the corner and get us some coffee and cinnamon rolls from Marie’s.  You like those, right?  Those really fucking huge cinnamon rolls with the pecans?”  She was foraging through her bag, her attention not on her girlfriend’s distraught, and not noticing her look of abject consternation.  “And it’ll take your mind off of being a total grand larcenist.”  Harlan blanched whiter with dread.

Not that Tamara noticed.

There was a camera in the young woman’s hands, one of the really good ones that had cost an entire middle schooling and half of a high schooling’s worth of allowance.  The kind that had taken her an entire summer of experimentation with ISO and shutter speed and white balance settings to understand.  The kind that made her hands feel naked and hungering without it in them.  As much as Harlan, and maybe even more if truth be told of the fickle nature of high school sweethearts, that camera was Tamara’s treasure.  A truer love she’d never known.

She raised it to her eye and lined up her target in her sights: the remains of a staircase banister, the pineapple-shaped wooden finial rising from the spiral volute sitting atop charred spindles that resembled charcoal sketches.  

Tamara had lamented the weird pineapple-thing when they’d first moved into the home; how dare it have the gall to interrupt a railing otherwise perfectly fit for sliding down?  Her father had explained that hand railings were, in fact, for hands, not butts, and that she would do well to keep that in mind.

It was hardly a pineapple, now.  Rather the blackened remains of a dilapidated Easter egg, tilted and sooty. Above it, the shambles of what appeared to have once been an entire second story had caved in.  

Click.  The camera blinked its eye and remembered the image.

“I guess,” Harlan whimpered.  She knew better than to interrupt Tamara when she’d found her subject and had waited until her girlfriend had brought the camera away from her face.  She was that kind of straight-As, honor club, community service kid, after all.  “I mean, I do like those sticky buns.”

“Great!” Tamara chirped decisively, shuffling around in her deep crouch while scanning the room.  Her eyes lighted on an overhead ceiling fan, its blades drooping sadly towards the ground and all three lightbulbs having long been shattered.  Oily streaks of soot blackened the tatters of ceiling around the fan.  The cool, damp breeze through the broken windows and missing patches of roofing made the chain pull sway lazily side-to-side.

Click. The camera remembered.  The house creaked.

“I’m just….”  Harlan had not heard picked up on the subtle closing argument dolloped onto Tamara’s interjection.  Clearly not.  “I don’t know if it’s such a good idea to leave you here.  Alone.  Maybe you can come with me to get them?”

Deeper into the scorched belly of the house, Tamara moved away from the nervous creature hunched to make herself tiny in the remains of the threshold.  

“I’m going to get photos for this project,” Tamara announced, her voice sounding no annoyance with her girlfriend’s boundless caution, but that being only due to a well-practiced, completely fake coolness.  The zipper pulls on her backpack jangled as she swung it back onto her shoulder.  “You can do what you need to do.”

Besides, who checked their garage first thing in the morning after getting out of bed to make sure the car was still there?  The average person would spend at least an hour by Tamara’s calculations showering, getting dressed, brushing their teeth and taking a piss.  And then there would be the time spent brewing coffee and making getting a bowl of cereal or making some toast.  Hell, it was Saturday; chances were that Harlan’s mom had nowhere to be and would just chill out in her jammies all day watching reality TV and cooking shows.  The only thing that she would even notice would be the sound of the garage door opening, and that could easily be explained away with no more than an ounce of creativity.

Harlan switched from foot to foot.  Tamara could hear the jangling of her charm bracelet as she did that nervous-fidget-thing with her hands.  That quintessentially Harlan thing.  She wasn’t going to leave by sheer force of guilt alone.

The living room had been the most eaten by flames.  The fire department had confirmed that it had all started here.  Probably a flyaway ember from the fireplace, they’d said.  It happened.  It happened, especially, that time of year, which made it all the more troubling. Their new apartment didn’t have a fireplace.  Open flames weren’t allowed by management.  Even the eyes on the stove were electric.  Her dad had smiled at her with a certain burden of understanding.  He always looked so tired back then.

Each of Tamara’s steps brought little plumes of ash rising up from the ground.  They swirled around her feet and into the smoky air.  Even with so many ulcerous pathways to the great outdoors burned through into roof, and after all this time, the house smelled acrid with smoke, and the air was a permanent milky gray.  

Time felt frozen.  

Despite the years, the ghost of Christmas Past still haunted this room.  Melted plastic garland dripped from the brick mantle, and shattered bits of broken ornaments and baubles glinted with mirror red and glitter gold in a little patch of sunlight filtering in from above.  Pine needles, not those from what had been their Christmas tree, but those from the skinny evergreens outside, littered the floor to refresh the festive look.  Other intruders - spiderwebs and birds’ feathers and graffiti - had taken up residence, too, contrasted against the piles of coal-colored dust. Interlopers, but they could be ignored.

Click.  Click.  Click.  The camera would remember as much about this day as Tamara did about that night.  About how she’d first woken up for a glass of water, because she was just too warm for a December night.  About the way her doorknob had been too hot to touch, and how the buttercream-yellow eggshell paint of her bedroom had wrenched itself eerily away from the sheetrock underneath like blistering skin. About feeling that the entire situation was a nightmare, and that crawling into bed and wrapping herself tighter in her comforter would make it stop.  

About the noises - the roaring flames and the snapping support beams and her dad calling for her name and the sound of her door being kicked down.  About her breathlessness and wheezing made her blood pound in her own ears, and the way her eyes had watered too much to see when she was passed out of the window into the bear-like arms of a man in breathing apparatus and reflective gear. About the screaming of a woman that she thought she heard, but hoped she hadn’t, but knew she had.  About being told by her father in the back of an ambulance that it wasn’t her fault, and that her wanting the fireplace lit that night wasn’t her fault, and that accidents happened.  

About the days after when the neighbors and aunts and uncles brought tuna casseroles and overbaked brownies and gross fruit-studded Jell-o moulds, and how they dressed all in black and hugged her and told her sorry.  About the Christmas presents they’d brought for her, even though it was already January and they hadn’t seen her in years and had no clue what she liked.  About the speeches her mom’s sisters gave about how great of a person she was.  About how white carnations had been her mom’s favorites, and about laying her mom’s favorite flowers on a piece of marble that bore her name.

About first feeling the need to document every moment following that day in photographs, good and bad alike, because her mom had been camera shy and claimed to be unphotogenic, and now Tamara couldn’t remember what she looked like when she scowled or whether it was her left cheek or right cheek that had the dimple when she laughed.

All snapshots in time. Some that had faded. Some that should have been burned up in the fire, but instead hung prominently over her mind’s hearth.

Outside, the wind stirred.  A bright blue tarp that had been tossed over the corner of the roof that had been most destroyed flapped audibly, and the entire structure seemed to sway as if it could give way at any moment.  For a building that reeked of fire, it was cold.

Tamara swallowed and looked back to Harlan.

“You know, um, I think I forgot to charge my battery, but I’ve got enough material anyway, so it’s fine.  I can work with this.” Her smile faltered and uncovered her subtextual meaning.  “Let’s get an extra cinnamon roll for your mom for the troubles, okay?  We’ll fill up the tank on the way back.  I have some allowance left over, so it’s fine.”

One day, she’d be ready.  Ready to remember.  One day, but not this day.

Harlan smiled that easygoing, scholastic smile and nodded quickly, already pulling away from the house and towards the car parked on the abandoned cul-de-sac curb.  “Sounds good.”

--

More like joyless-ride for the trip home, am I right? It got kind of gloomy.  My bad. Anyway, yeah: Eggshell paint, and eggshell-delicate floors, because burned houses are not structurally sound - get out of there, small lesbians!  I think the other themes are more readily apparent.  But in case anyone has no clue what I mean by pineapple finial, they exist.

[Sal]

Reminder: Quarter 1 will be closing on March 31. You still have a few weeks to get your Q1 prompt submissions in. On April 1, the new theme will be going up and submissions for Q2 will be opened.

Happy writing!

[Sal]

Esteemed authorial authority, is there a minimum or maximum word count for these submissions? All manner of Vestian writers, from flash fiction to hypernovel writers have shown their interest in participating in this international competition.

There are no minimum or maximum word counts, but please review the first post in the thread for suggestions on breaking up very long stories. And for other general guidelines.

[Sal]

The 2017 Quarter 1 prompts are now closed! Thanks to those who participated, and please look tomorrow for the 2017 Quarter 2 prompts.

[Sal]

2017 Quarter 2

Participants should incorporate at least two (2) of the following themes into their submissions:




Additionally, the author should incorporate the topic of keeping a secret.



Prompt-Specific Guidelines:

• Participants should follow the general guidelines.
  
• The words "iron", "seed", and/or "prayer" need not appear in your entry, but the average reader must see that they have been utilized.
  
• The phrase "keeping a secret" need not appear in your entry, but the average reader must see the theme displayed in one of your characters.
  
• Quarter 2 will stay open through June 30 July 1.
  

[Sal]

I may or may not have forgotten about this, but this current prompt is still open through June 30! I will post a new topic on July 1 July 2.

[Seperallis]

Just a reminder that today is the last day to submit for Q2. Q3 prompts will be posted tomorrow.