Nov
20
2009
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Round 11 Challenge - Put your main character in danger in a new and hostile environment. There should be a struggle for survival through which new aspects of his or her personality are revealed (Word limit – 1500 words)
Read UTAH 10 here (see “Similar Posts” at the bottom of this post for any earlier entries)
* * *
Jacob’s dog, Herb, wasn’t chained up when the FBI agents pulled into the driveway. After seeing the Missing Child flyer at the Halfway House three days earlier, Jacob purchased a shock collar so that Herb would be free to roam the yard and ward off any uninvited visitors.
The plan was effective for fifteen seconds. When the FBI pulled in to find a Presa Canario barreling towards them with flattened ears, they stayed put. Herb was on his hind legs, saliva dripping from his bared teeth, barking and clawing at one of the passenger windows. The agent loaded a dart gun, cracked the window, and shot Herb in the neck. As he slumped to the ground, they all burst out of the cars. Continue reading
Nov
11
2009
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Round 10 Challenge – Kill off one of your characters (Word limit – 1200 words)
Read UTAH 9 here (see “Similar Posts” at the bottom of this post for any earlier entries)
* * *
Janet Garver, the wife of the Super 8 front desk clerk, had lost her daughter in a car accident, so when her husband told her one of the motel guests was looking for her missing daughter, she took it upon herself to assist. Delia needed the help. For starters, she was desperate for income. In her wanderings over the past three years she had blazed through all her savings. If she continued this way she would have to sell her farm over the next year.
Due to the recession and all-time high unemployment, jobs were scarce for out-of-staters. But Janet was close friends with the owners of the Halfway House restaurant on 22A, and after a brief phone call told Delia there was a position for her there as a waitress if she wanted it. Janet assumed Delia would turn it down. The diner was forty miles south of the motel, about an hour commute each way, and the salary was lower than the average in the Burlington area. Continue reading
Oct
31
2009
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Round 9 Challenges (Word limit – 444 words)
1) Incorporate a hoax
2) Incorporate a revelation
3) Incorporate the number four
4) Incorporate Stephen Colbert.
Read UTAH 8 here (see “Similar Posts” at the bottom of this post for any earlier entries)
* * *
“We can watch The Hunt for Gollum or The Addams Family,” Jacob suggested, filling a bowl with Mars bars. No one would come trick or treating but it gave Corey some illusion of harmonious domesticity. He’d learned that from previous Halloweens.
She was turning sixteen in three months. The nightly drinking and hours on the computer had taken their toll: her hair had thinned, her complexion grown sallow and her eyes sunk within their sockets, as if taking refuge from her nightmarish surroundings. She weighed less than when she first came three years ago. She still thought of her mother, but only as part of a gone former life.
Corey looked at the carved pumpkin in the window. “Will any trick or treaters come?”
“I’m sure.”
“You said that last year. And the year before that.”
Jacob didn’t answer. “What do you want to watch?” Continue reading
Oct
20
2009
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Utah’s Round 8 Challenges (Word limit – 600):
* Incorporate a prophetic dream (given by Eros)
* Set your passage on Christmas Day (given by littlestar)
* At least half of your passage should be a flash forward to the end of your story (given by AnnasBones)
Read UTAH 7 here (see “Similar Posts” at the bottom of this post for any earlier entries)
* * *
Canada geese migrating from the south honked overhead as they whooshed in V formations over the greening earth. Corey and Delia interrupted their seeding and straightened their backs to watch with craned necks, humbled by the majestic effort filling the skies with music and symmetrical power.
The fields, fallow for so many years, had again been plowed. The spring planting was underway. Delia’s life had always been intertwined with the health of her farm, but this spring the farm took on more significance than ever before. Since the January FBI raid on Jacob’s cabin that had rescued Corey, Delia had thrown herself into rejuvenating the abandoned acreage.
A nosy few in the community, the ones who lacked imagination, insinuated that Delia was placing her farm’s wellbeing before her daughter’s. But Delia knew that, in some unfathomable, archetypal way, the mending and resuscitation of the farm reflected Corey’s own healing process. Each seed germinating in the greenhouse represented a small victory in Delia’s heart against the morally deformed fiend who had stunted her daughter’s growth for so many years. Continue reading
Utah’s Round 7 Challenge: Incorporate a Steak Knife (taken from Fyor’s Story). Word limit: 600.
Read UTAH 6 here (see “Similar Posts” at the bottom of this post for any earlier entries)
Incorporate a Steak Knife
* * *
“Corey!” Jacob said. “We’ve gone over this a dozen times. The fork always stays in your left hand! Only rednecks switch back and forth.”
Corey stared vacuously at her plate through disheveled hair. With the fork in her right hand, she continued jabbing at the pieces of chuck steak that Jacob had fried up for her 14th birthday.
Jacob slammed his silverware down, grabbed her right wrist, and began prying the fingers apart. “Leave me alone,” she murmured.
“Give me the fork, Corey,” he said between clenched teeth. Once he tore the fork free, he took the steak knife, which was lying in a thin pool of blood on her plate, and jammed the handle into her right palm. He then forced the fork into her left hand. “The right hand cuts. The left hand stabs. I won’t tell you again.” Continue reading
Read Utah 5 here (see “Similar Posts” at the bottom of this post for any earlier entries)
Round 6 Challenge: Incorporate a White Russian and the words “over the line” into your next passage, which should be no more than 500 words.
* * *
The expanse of Lake Champlain opened before them as the black station wagon pulled in to the cabin. Junked cars and trucks lay abandoned about the yard. A black Presa Canario that was chained by its spiked collar to the shed rose to its feet and began growling as they stepped out of the vehicle.
“Don’t worry about Herb,” Jacob told Corey, who was glancing over at the dog nervously. “He’s all bark and no bite.”
The cabin was shrouded in the shade of weeping willows, whose tendrils overhung the lake. Jacob motioned out over the state line of Lake Champlain towards the far shoreline. “Have you ever been to New York, Corey?” She shook her head. “I’ve got a rowboat. Want to row across sometime?”
Corey looked out blankly at the lake and nodded mechanically. He unlocked the door. “Home sweet home,” he said, with a sweep of his arm. “After you.” Her fingers knotted by her waist, Corey looked back at the dirt road and then walked in. Continue reading
Round 5 Challenge: Incorporate this image into your next passage of no more than 500 words. You can interpret this challenge as you see fit.
*click on the thumbnail to see a larger image
* * *
It was a Saturday, normally Corey’s day to shop with her girlfriends at the mall, when Delia drove off in search of her daughter.
Just like Corey, who had run away exactly a year ago that day, Delia didn’t tell anyone she was leaving. But unlike her daughter, she called from a gas stop along the way, explaining to a friend she could no longer wait.
For months Delia had nursed the hope that the police and private investigators would discover a lead on Corey’s whereabouts. But despite their words of assurance, she knew the case had fallen to the backburner and would soon fall off that too. She also knew she couldn’t survive another winter staring with wistful desperation at the empty driveway and jumping with quickening pulse at every ringing phone. Continue reading
Read UTAH 1 here
Read UTAH 2 here
Read UTAH 3 here
Round 4 Challenge: Weave an element of Fyor’s story into your own passage. It should be no more than 450 words.
At one p.m. on an unseasonably cool day for late August, Corey entered the Halfway House diner and sat at a booth facing the door.
The two farmhands at the far booth murmured as she walked in. They’d seen her climb out of the southbound 16-wheeler after it had screeched to a halt. The Halfway House was on 22A, four miles from Shoreham and about eight from Bridport and Cornwall. One didn’t come across 13-year-old hitchhikers in these parts. Continue reading
Read UTAH 1 here
Read UTAH 2 here
Round 3 Challenge: Incorporate the death of a dog into your next passage. It should be no more than 400 words long.
“Who was that man?” Delia demanded.
“Does it even matter anymore since I can’t even get online?” Corey yelled, pushing her cereal bowl away and storming out of the kitchen.
It had been a week since Delia had cancelled the Internet subscription after walking in on Corey live messaging with the hooded man. Corey insisted it was the first time she’d ever gone online at night or spoken with a stranger, but Delia knew she was lying. For several months Corey had been uncharacteristically lethargic, sometimes even dozing off on the couch in mid-day.
Not that Delia was over-protective. Free-range was as much her philosophy for childrearing as for animal husbandry. She vocally criticized the Dutch authorities’ decision to prevent a 13-year-old girl from sailing around the world alone. She believed children grew strongest and healthiest when roaming under open skies.
But her love of freedom didn’t extend to the Internet. Delia, whose childhood consisted of mud, chalk, hula hoops, and heaps of dried leaves, couldn’t comprehend how kids could spend their days riveted to a 17-inch screen. To her this seemed the denial of life, a technology of death, a furtive oppression that swaddled its seductive form of bondage as human connection. It made her recall the parable of Plato’s cave. The shadows on the cave wall were now illuminations on a screen.
There had once been a time when Corey and Delia went out into the cornfield every new moon to gaze at the stars and Delia would narrate myths of the constellations. She remembered the first night she’d explained how Corey could always locate north on a clear night by following the Big Dipper’s handle to the North Star.
“But that’s not the brightest star,” Corey had said, pointing instead towards Canis Major.
“That’s Sirius, the Dog Star. We get the phrase ‘dog days of summer’ because it rose before the hottest days of the year.”
“What do dogs have to do with hot days?” Corey asked. Delia opened her mouth to answer only to realize she had no idea.
That time was gone. In recent years Corey had lost her interest in the stars, even in the outdoors. Delia finally gave in to her pleas and installed high speed Internet. Six months later, for fear of losing her daughter, she cancelled it. Two weeks after that, Corey ran away.
Read UTAH 1 here
ROUND 2: Write the opening paragraph of your novella. It should be no more than 300 words, not including your opening sentence, and should be about interactions that take place over the web.
At three a.m., August 4th, the first of many cornfield nightmares jarred Delia out of her sleep. She jerked up from her bed, coated in a thin film of sweat. In the nightmare, she was standing alone on the edge of her cornfield, which now lay in a scorched waste, as if a horde of Vikings had marauded through and torched everything in sight. There was nothing more to the dream, but it left her with an overwhelming feeling of impotence and devastating loss. Unable to drift back to sleep, she decided her only chance at salvaging another hour or two of sleep was to first stretch her legs and reboot her disturbed psyche with a brief trip to the kitchen. In the hallway, a slit of light was emanating out from under the door to the computer room. She assumed she’d forgotten to shut it down so she pushed the door open. Her 13-year-old daughter, Corey, was sitting there, expressionless, almost robotic in the white preternatural glow of the screen. It was as if she were trapped within the abduction beam of an alien vessel. She was wearing headphones and typing in short fast bursts between pauses. Delia slowly walked towards Corey until she was standing directly behind her. On the screen was a man in a hooded sweatshirt, probably in his late thirties or early forties. Despite the pixilation, Delia could see the shock on his face as he registered her presence through the video chat. Then, the MSN box vanished from the screen.
