Man. I was gonna do a short story every other month from January 2024. But I didn’t finish No.2 until last May. Here it is June 2025 and well, it’s been a couple of gnarly years to try and have things like plans and all.
So what happened to No.3?
I drew cards for No.3 in January but forgot to post about it. I was in a rush preparing to move my parents in Cleveland and intended to work on the story while I was there.
That was a terrible idea.
But anyway, let’s recap this project since it’s been over a year since we started.
I met a slew of writers at Sarah Lawrence College (located in Yonkers, New York) in the early 1990s. One day, long after I had lived there but when I was back visiting Los Angeles, the partner of one of those writers took me aside and asked me to motivate that writer to start writing again.
This was a tall order because I have always felt creativity projects, like anything else, should be self-motivated. If you’re meant to do something you will feel compelled to do it. If you are not compelled to do it, you maybe are not meant to do it (or do it anymore). In this case, this person hadn’t finished a writing project in about a decade. So I was pretty sure they weren’t interested….really.
But I kept thinking about the problem. It was a friend’s request so I had to try. When I discovered all the writing prompt cards I thought we could gamify the process together and I sent a set of cards to this writer. We made a plan to begin in January of 2024. Well, when that time came, the writer begged off very strenuously due to life dramas going on. Later, they admitted they didn’t think they wanted to write anymore after all.
This felt both sad and like a relief in a way. Comrade down but clarity and all.
But anyway, I found the card process of random story points to be exactly the thing I needed to get me going because it liberated me from the road blocks of preplanned agendas and ideas.
I haven’t had nearly the time to work on them that I imagined I would but I’ll keep working on them, ever so slowly.
I just now finished the rough draft of No.3 (Saturday) and drew some new cards for the No.4 story challenge yesterday.
They look like this:
Step 1: I pulled one Spark card (adventure story) and used the two Riff cards and one Connect card to string together my opening sentence: “The secretary felt like a painting.”
By the way, my opening sentence for story No.3. was “Her arm moved like a drinking song” and it was a detective story.
2. I haven’t figured out the answers to the purple card questions yet. But we picked “secretary” from the Riff card so…the main character will likely be a female secretary.
3. Write the title: “The Path Into Wildwood” which sounds kind of hoaky to me but this turns out to be a fantasy-type of adventure story based on the fact that…
4. Characters and Conflicts cards were pulled and…
…there’s a character with wings. Que the fairies. Our adventure will have wings (and a time machine).
4. Random images to incorporate: a knotted rope, a rainbow on wet pavement and shipping containers.
Challenge No3. was titled “All My Love Stories Have Happy Endings” and developed into a story about a character based on the Dead Files show’s former-NYPD-homicide-detective Steve DiSchiavi, except he’s a love coach in my story instead of a NYC detective. My in-laws used to love that show and would want to watch it whenever they visited us. Anyway, the love coach befriends a female detective who isn’t a good as a detective as he is as a love coach and they solve a double homicide together. (If I ever create a master page for this project, I’ll add the #3 set of cards there.)
Anyway…while the world falls apart, let us write.
