The last few weeks I’ve been taking part in Story-a-Day May. My theme? Monsters, Romance, and the End of the World.

(You don’t have to pick a theme. Heck, you don’t have to follow any rules. Don’t like prompts? Don’t use them. Kind of like the prompts? Change them. Can’t actually write everyday? Make your own schedule. Nobody cares! Do what you want.)

I like a theme for when I sit down and wonder where to begin. Unbounded possibilities freeze my brain. If I can go anywhere, where should I go? This year I did use most of the prompts (though I did change a few to suit my style or my whims). For example, one prompt said to be inspired by a hibiscus. So, I wrote a story of a girl hiding under a hibiscus bush as the world came to an end. For me, a theme + a prompt = a story.

Inspiration math doesn’t work the same for everyone though, so if a theme plus a prompt sounds terrible you to, godspeed, dear writer! Every writer and artist must find their own configuration.

All this to say, twenty-six days in and I have twenty-five stories! Well, twenty-four stories and a poem. Surprisingly, the majority of those stories even have endings! It’s easy to start a story and a lot harder (for me anyway) to finish it. Not that the stories are actually finished. Written in one day, they’re rough drafts. Of course! Even if one story was written over a week or a month, it would still be a rough draft in need of revising, but I’m happy with what I have.

One truly startling thing this time around is the use of my own art. A friend and Story-a-Day writer used my art (with permission) for a prompt. I worried that the image was too strange for people to make a story with, and maybe it was for some folks. But some embraced the impossibility of the image and came up with stories! I hope to read them. I’d love to see where people went with it.

Maybe I’ll put the stories together for another anthology. I’ll certainly share a few (next month) in my newsletter (sign up, ya’ll!) and on Patreon. Also, I have another anthology I’ve been working pretty much finished. I just have to figure out how I want to put it out in the world. We shall see. In the meantime, keep writing (if that’s your thing) and keep reading.

Thanks for reading this!