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Writing

A 317-post collection

Challenge #01490-D029: Prophecy From Another Dimension

You should write for Steemit...

Oh, that's right! You already do! Just "discovered" you there today... Having fun reading you, THANKS! -- @creatr

The message arrived via postcard under their door. They pondered over it for hours, because they had never written a word in their life. Everything was too busy. There was no time. There was no space to create anything in. Their space was a mere bed-sit[1] with cardboard walls and loud neighbours. It was the exact opposite of a writer's retreat.

But they had a laptop, which was the only source of entertainment they owned. Instead of hooking into online games or watching netflix, that evening, they looked up whatever Steemit was.

You could write anything you liked on there. Introduce yourself. Write about whatever you learned. Write about whatever took your fancy.

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Prompts remaining: 13 Submit a Prompt! Ask a question! Buy my stories!

Yoiks and Awaaaaaaayyy!

I got my first rejection, yesterday. The agent I sent a sample to, sent me a "thanks but no thanks" letter. I can't let that get to me, but at least I'm not set up to fail on my birthday.

And today, sometime between getting a heart-monitoring harness fitted, fetching a new battery (or more) for my sleep monitor, fetching the kids, arranging dinner, writing my book, etc.... I will fling another sample towards another agency and set my timer for potential

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Challenge #01314-C219: The Long Days

These things are sent to try us and they certainly do. -- Anon Guest

All of the longest days start in the wee small hours. Haven't you noticed? They begin with the nightmare. The terrors. The loud neighbour who accidentally or on purpose blasts five seconds of noise into the air. Or the telemarketer who calls without realising the time where you live. Or the obnoxious party relative who drunk-dials you for no real reason, or under the mistaken assumption that your

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Fun was had

We had a good handful of hours out. The entire family commenced their Pokejourney and, thanks to some lures set out by the businesspeople of Chermside, the little darlings and I leveled up a snootch.

The kids got more leveling done because my game crashed 90% of the time. My fickle fingers worked their anti-magic once more and I spent most of my time attempting to load pokemon go.

But I still made it to level 8, so suck it.

There's an

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My routine, such as it is.

I'm a chaotic sort, and random happenstance can mess this up at a moment's notice. But this is generally what I do every day before I sit down and write something.

My alleged waking time is 5:30AM, so of course I start the day by randomly waking up anywhere between half an hour or three hours before that because my dreams are generally the sort of thing that wake me up with random and completely illogical crap.

Depending on how much

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Okay, that just happened...

Thanks to sharing yesterday's instant to the Steampunk tag on Tumblr, I now have three more followers who do not do the porn thing. I could definitely do without the blogs who do the porn thing.

I'm more about the romance than the sex. Just saying. But -hey- if you love having looping gifs all over your dash of people doing their thing, then that's your thing. It's just not mine.

Anyway. I'm only just starting to get into Steampunk, so my

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Balance and writing

I do a lot of stories off the cuff. One thousand and thirty, before I get started on today's. Some, like We're Mostly Harmless, I Swear, wind up becoming the cornerstones for novels.

But I'm never lazy about it.

I could have easily copy/pasted my Instants about Amity into the novel-that-is and few would have been the wiser.

I'm not like that. I can't let myself do that. It's a form of cheating and - at least in my humble opinion

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So close, and yet...

::Cue Days of Our Lives music::

When we last left our heroes, MeMum was in a quantum state between being able to communicate online and not being able to communicate online... Telstra had taken twenty-four hours and counting to get back on a one-hour call-back... and Mayhem had forgotten all his Home Ec. crap at school.

Your humble Author is still poor. That $30 has to spend five business days in transit between PayPal and my bank accounts for no apparent reason.

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Challenge #00987-B256: A Question of Choice

http://outofcontextdnd.tumblr.com/post/129256209619/yet-another-reason-to-not-have-children-you-dont

“Yet another reason to not have children: You don’t want the batspider to visit you.” -- Anon Guest

"Bat... spider," repeated Hero. "I've never heard of the like. Is it a bat with spider legs, or a spider with bat wings?"

"It's like a Drider, but with the body, wings and head of a bat, 'stead of a drow," said the villager. "It takes all but one in ten of our children an' our

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Challenge #00976-B245: Subverting the Assumptions.

The politics of light and dark are everywhere in our vocabulary… lightness and white is good and pure, black and darkness is corrupt and evil, the known is a safe and friendly comfort, the unknown is a strange and hostile thing to be feared…

So… subvert this, reveal whiteness and lightness as sometimes false and violent, and darkness as protective and healing, fear that which is known and find the unknown as natural and gentle, and so on.

(Prompt from ChaosWolf1982 on

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Why Inkitt is so Firkin Great

Some of you who are still paying attention to my tumblr will be aware that I have a few stories up for offer at their contest, Reinvent Reality

Really sharp-eyed readers will know I'm currently at number 14 in the top 20.

Which is pretty firkin amazing for a story I put up only a few days ago.

Heck, it's damned amazing considering that I wrote this story, longhand, whilst I was waiting for the postie to turn up with my copy

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Challenge #00963-B232: Love and Hate and Love Again...

Dunno what this is from originally, but I saw it on Tumblr in a few places, and figured you’d make something awesome from it…

—-

“They say ‘You can’t love someone unless you love yourself first.' Bullshit. I have never loved myself. But you - oh god, I loved you so much… that I somehow forgot what hating myself felt like.”

(Prompt from ChaosWolf1982 on Tumblr)

There were days, aching days when the rain made his entire, misshapen body

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Challenge #00959-B228: Slight Technical Hitch

People’s relation to tech has not changed:

On two occasions I have been asked,—"Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?“ In one case a member of the Upper, and in the other a member of the Lower, House put this question. I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question. - Charles Babbage

(Prompt from recklessprudence on Tumblr)

"HA! That's

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My time stalking the postie is not wasted, dear readers. As long as I have a notebook and pen, I am never bored. Behold, a sneak peek at...

My time stalking the postie is not wasted, dear readers. As long as I have a notebook and pen, I am never bored. Behold, a sneak peek at some Amalgam Universe sci-fi in my spidery, messy longhand.

People able to decipher this may be drafted into transferring my scrawl into nice, neat typing, because I have the regrettable flaw of reading my stories instead of transposing them. Heheh.

Writing by hand hurts my wrist more than typing does. Yet another reason why

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Challenge #00953-B222: Millie the Conquerer

Well, I don’t think she ever seriously wanted the city. She conquered it as a stop-gap mechanism.

The line had to be drawn, somewhere, and Millie initially drew it with arsenic in Lord Pemberhall’s snuff. The man had been planning to raze her neighbourhood to put in a park, after all. He didn’t give a fig about where the people who lived there went, or if they lived or died.

Unfortunately, Pemberhall’s heirs immediately began bickering, and when

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