Please forgive me for starting out with something a bit political, but I promise I’ll keep it short. If you don’t want to vote in person (or even by mail), you can now vote via email. Just click on the link at the end of my Story of the Week and you’ll be able to cast your vote on this week’s tale!
The prompt, by the way (also delivered via email) came from newish subscriber Annie Pupwilldoo. Thanks much, Annie, for the idea!
Here’s this week’s tale.
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At Least They Found a Good Place to Vente
After Starbucks and Amazon workers set the trend, union fever took off. Soon, pimps, robbers, drug dealers, and other unsavory characters formed the Organized Crime Union.
Their demands were very job-specific: Pimps demanded night shift bonus pay; bank robbers wanted safety standards to prevent exploding dye-packs injuries; meth cookers lobbied for health coverage that addressed exposure to deadly chemicals.
Once organized crime bosses realized union expenses were destroying profit margins, they summoned union members who were gently persuaded (at gunpoint) to disband the union. Naturally, the meeting occurred at Starbucks, where the criminals were served by well-paid workers with generous benefits.
Prompt: Hookers unionizing
| Here’s the place to vote on this story! |
Novel News & Notes…
That whole recent Covid thing didn’t affect my sense of taste (not that anyone ever accused me of having that), but it did sap my daily writing ritual. Now that I’m back in the storytelling game, I’ll probably have to seek out a 12-step program since I experienced major withdrawal pains during my forced sabbatical.
As I generate pages while using my bullet-point outline as a guide, I’m having fun as I find scenes to delete or combine with others. One combo scene made the story tighter while finding a way to add to the tension. At least I hope it did.
Another part of the writing magic that I’ve been experiencing lately are those moments when my character does something that I didn’t see coming—even though I was the one who designed the scenes and jotted down the bullet points that made up the outline I’ve been allegedly following. I’m particularly enjoying those occasions when Blake (my protagonist) does bad things for good reasons. I can tell even he knows deep down that he’s taking big risks, but it’s like he can’t control himself. Sometimes they work out for him. Other times…not so much.
Finally, since I mentioned generating pages, I’m up to 162 of them so far (approximately 39,000 words).
Time to get back to it.
Thanks for listening.
Scotty out