Uncomfortable Conversation – Risa and Zane

For today’s story update (whatever the calendar says, I’m still going to consider it Saturday until I go to sleep), I thought I’d do a little exercise to build my excitement for these characters again. They’re the main couple from my webserial and also two of the main characters in the novel that I’m going to be editing during July’s Camp NaNoWriMo. I actually really like them, but I think I’ve spent too much time with them the past few years so I’m less interested in writing them than I want to be.

This scene takes place before the start of the webserial, but some weeks after the start of the novel. I don’t think it’s necessary to have read the webserial or any outside information about these two and their story before reading this. Certain things will make more sense if you have, sure, but I think it can stand on its own well enough.

Length: 1,072 words
Characters: Risa, Zane
Prompt: Write a scene in which a character has to have an uncomfortable conversation. (Source: http://writingprompts.tumblr.com/post/53280081730/753-uncomfortable-conversations)

Character Room Description – Cyn

Weekly updates on a set day have been working fine for my webserial, so I’ve set a goal for myself to keep a regular update schedule here. The plan is to post a story or writing exercise every Saturday and a more general/thoughtful piece on writing or things I notice about my own work every other Thursday. I made myself a nice printed calendar and everything.

Anyway, for today’s writing update, I adapted a writing exercise one of my Short Narratives professors back in college had us do. That exercise was to describe a character’s bedroom. Instead of a bedroom, I’ll be using this exercise to describe a character’s office space. More specifically, I’ll be using the character from the last two stories I posted, Cyn. She makes me smile every time I think about her and I imagine that she has a cubicle at the mystery place she works which is full of fun things.

Music Prompt – Phoenixes

The month before a NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) event always makes me feel like there’s a level 5 hurricane on a path straight to me. I’ll spend the whole month anxiously monitoring its progress and hoping for it to turn away. Then (normally at the last minute) I’ll get an idea about what to write and suddenly it’s nothing but blue skies. Except not really because I still have to write 50k in a month. So more like a tropical storm hanging out above my head full-time, maybe?

Anyway, there will be plenty more posts on NaNoWriMo later. Point is I’ll have an underlying anxiety about deciding on a novel subject for the rest of the month. One of the possibilities I’m considering is writing a novel focusing on the conflicts between my phoenixes and dragons mentioned in my webserial and a couple of the unedited novels from past NaNo events. I probably won’t choose that idea for my NaNo novel, but I decided to do a writing exercise with my phoenix characters anyway.

The Rules:

1. Pick a character, pairing, or fandom you like.
2. Turn on your music player and put it on random/shuffle.
3. Write a drabble/ficlet related to each song that plays. You only have the time frame of the song to finish the drabble; you start when the song starts, and stop when it’s over. No lingering afterwards!
4. Do ten of these.