27 Nov 2020
Today’s prompt: “Write about a vivid but troubled figure from literature as if he or she were your grandparent or great-grandparent. Look for the ways their lives reveal the patterns of codependency, addiction, avoidance, or whatever else you’re dealing with in your own family.”
“There’s no great mystery as to what’s going on here, Watson,” Sherlock says. “This entire family is just very fucked up as to how to deal with illness. And while that’s something that’s going on in many families right now, not to mention the country writ large, as we all deal with coronavirus and our various levels of comfort or discomfort with risk, that’s also something that’s been going on in this particular family for ages. No less than two aunts have kept illnesses secret from their families until they could no longer do so – in one case, until she died in the hospital. And the pattern continues today with this particular yahoo,” Sherlock says, rapping your mattress with the back of his hand. “Once again, they avoided medical care, eschewed doctors, and when they were diagnosed, they kept their loved ones in the dark. How their loved ones failed to notice the telltale signs of an advanced sarcoma – the change in their style of dress to disguise lumps and swelling, for instance, and their movements over the past several months that indicated not the advance of age but an attempt to hide pain – is the greater mystery, not the cause of their impending death. But this supposedly sudden disease is no mystery at all. It wasn’t sudden. It was well-known, well in advance, by one person who absolutely refused to do anything about it for fear of worrying their family.”
You attempt to say something through your breathing tube.
“Shhhh,” Sherlock says. “I’m talking.”
25 Nov 2020
Today’s prompt: “Write a list of things to do before you die.”
My bucket list includes finishing turning all of the writing prompts in this book into death scenes, maybe doing a podcast of some of them and a Choose Your Own Adventure book of all death scenes, writing a couple comic books and graphic novels, traveling to Japan, and making my own sausage.
I don’t know what’s on your bucket list, but if I was to make a list of the things you were going to do before you die, it would have two items on it:
- Look behind you.
- Scream.
23 Nov 2020
Today’s prompt: “Your worst experience in gym class”
That time your instructor made you do pull-ups over an open water tank filled with piranha.
21 Nov 2020
Today’s prompt: “The last time you changed your mind about something important”
It’s just turned 12 o’clock. You close your spreadsheets, stand up from your desk, adjust the collar of the white button-down shirt you always wear, and head to the fridge, where you retrieve a Kraft Singles-and-mayonnaise sandwich on Wonder Bread, a Red Delicious apple, a baggie of baby carrots and exactly four Chips Ahoy cookies. Your normal lunch.
But today it tastes like ash in your mouth. Like boredom. Like wasted potential.
“Enough of this sameness, day in and day out!” you shout, hurling your lunch in the trash. There! Same old lunch, gone.
You can’t do much about your same old wardrobe right now, but you defiantly untuck your shirt. There. Better.
Just then, your boss rounds the corner. Before they can even say hello to you, you stride up to them and loudly inform them, “I quit! I’m going to go off adventuring!”
“O….kaaaaayyyy,” they respond. But you’re already on your way out the door.
Five weeks later, your makeshift armor constructed from aluminum pie tins is just not standing up to the beating you’re taking from the pack of ogres you recklessly charged.
19 Nov 2020
Today’s prompt: “Your worst experience in a bar”
You got alcohol poisoning, got in a bar fight, and were exposed to coronavirus all on the same night.
17 Nov 2020
Today’s prompt: “Interview someone you admire. Write a short profile of the person.”
You: So, what’s it like being a vampire?
Lucas d’Pointy: Ugh, it’s friggin’ terrible. You can’t possibly imagine how gross it is to have to survive by drinking blood all the time. Everybody thinks it’s all sexy that vampires drink from people’s necks, and I’m like, come on, you clearly just need to get laid. Can you imagine, murdering an innocent human being just so you can eat?
You: I guess I just figured you could just kill people who deserve it.
D’Pointy: Sounds like someone wants to appoint themselves judge, jury and executioner. First things first, I’d have to restrict my diet to only those criminals deserving of capital punishment who haven’t already been caught by the police. What, do you expect me to become some kind of magical detective that cracks cold cases and metes out justice? Becoming a vampire imbued me with immortality and the ability to turn into a bat, not the ability to solve crimes that the police can’t. If you’ve got issues with the justice system, that’s on humans to fix.
You: Okay, that makes sense. But couldn’t you just not drink all of a person’s blood, like leave enough for them to recover?
D’Pointy: So they can live with the memory of that assault for the rest of their lives?
You: Or you could turn them, so they can live.
D’Pointy: The math for that turns bad pretty quickly. So let’s say I drink enough of your blood to survive tonight, but then I turn you. Tomorrow, we’ve got two hungry vampires turning two more humans into vampires. And the night after that, it’s four vampires siring four more vampires. Do you know your powers of two? In a mere 33 nights we’ve turned the entire world’s population. And then what do you eat? I’ll tell you what you eat. You eat what ethical vampires like me eat. Rats. Mice. The occasional raccoon. It ain’t pretty. Have you ever tried to catch a raccoon?
You: Eating rats does sound kind of gross.
D’Pointy: It is! And if you can’t catch them, you go hungry for a while. You get pretty scrawny and even paler than normal.
You: So I take it not all vampires are ethical?
D’Pointy: Oh, definitely not. My sire, Lestab, really enjoyed killing people.
You: Yeah, that definitely sounds like the better way to go.
D’Pointy: Excuse me?
You: Nevermind. Still, being a vampire can’t be all bad. You get to live forever.
D’Pointy: Sure, but if you make human friends, you get to watch them all die. And if you make vampire friends, inevitably they trick you into drinking dead blood and dump you in a swamp, or trap you in a coffin, or shut you in a room filling with sunlight in the creepy vampire theater where you’ve been hanging out.
You: Uh huh, sounds cool.
D’Pointy: Are you even paying attention to me?
You: Look, I’ll cut to the chase. Will you make me a vampire?
D’Pointy: Fuck you. This interview is over.
(D’Pointy turns into a bat and flies out of the room. You start putting away your legal pad and pen and are about to turn off your tape recorder when a bat flies in through the window.)
You: Oh, good, you’re back. Now, Mr. D’Pointy – may I call you Luke?
(The bat transforms into humanoid form, revealing an entirely different vampire.)
Lestab: Oh, no, I think you’ve confused me with someone else. Say, y’ got anything to drink around here? (He flashes a fangy smile and laughs.) Ahahahaha, I crack me up. Now where was I? Oh yes. Nom nom nom nom nom.
15 Nov 2020
Today’s prompt: “Your worst experience during a family dinner”
Uncle Frank kept talking politics. And the chicken had salmonella.