Blackout: A Choose Your Own Adventure Story

Last time, I posted about starting to do our writing group's Holiday Project.  This year we came up with a Bingo Card filled with story elements. We each had to use a row, column, or diagonal's worth of story elements into our story.  Yesterday, after four weeks away, we all reconvened to present our writings.  It's always fun to see how eight people with different sensibilities tackle the same problem. Our group has a pretty strong sci-fi/fantasy bent, and the story prompt "A forgotten god who has gone into hiding" attracted four people to use it, two horizontally and two vertically.  The exercise was kind to people. Everyone submitted something at least solid, and mostly complete.

For my entry, I decided to go a little bit over the top. Here's a little hint how:

The Holiday Project - Writer's Bingo

Every year my writing group has a holiday project, a writing exercise that we come up with and do during the holiday season as we typically miss a meeting or two due to people being out of town.  The exercises typically have us each bring in some sort of prompt that we each need to use in our piece.  My favorite projects from past year's projects was when we each brought in a short piece of music to inspire our pieces, and the year we each were assigned a day of the week and came up with a prompt associated with that day of the week. We then had to use every day's prompt in order to write something that spanned the course of the week, beginning and ending with your day.

This year, our writing project uses a Bingo Card as a prompt.  Not just any Bingo Card, but one filled with writing prompts. Each writer will have to use all of the prompts in a row, column, or diagonal in their piece. Each member of the writing group (there are 8), contributed prompts for three of the available 24 spaces with the middle space being "Free".  Two of the prompts required a bit of explanation, so I put in footnotes at the bottom.

We will be unveiling our finished Holiday Projects in January.  If you'd like to play along at home, try seeing what you'd do with it: Holiday Project Bingo Card

My piece?  As always, I'm having a lot of fun with playing with the criteria. I'll post it after it's done. It's... different.

Lilith at the Wedding

Link: LilithAtTheWedding.pdf
Type: Short Screenplay
Status: Unproduced

My regular writing group has a yearly tradition around holiday times.  Each year we decide on a new writing challenge, and we give ourselves the period over the holidays to work on it.  Sometimes we give ourselves inspirations, such as music or photos.  Other times we have to hit certain plot points at certain times.  Sometimes we give ourselves requirements that we have to use.