seen from United States
seen from South Korea
seen from China
seen from United States
seen from France
seen from Canada
seen from China
seen from Germany
seen from United States
seen from Malaysia
seen from United States
seen from Belgium
seen from Canada
seen from Malaysia
seen from United States
seen from France
seen from Malaysia
seen from South Korea
seen from Malta
seen from China
Dialogue Prompt: “You’re not under the sea anymore, Princess.”
Welcome to the first Writing Sprint/ Caffeine Challenge! If you’d like to follow along with me, feel free to check out my video below. Time Stamps are in the description so you can pause and restart.
Otherwise, if you do do this writing sprint, please let me know by tagging me on Twitter (X) with a link, or by using the tag Caffeine Challenge on Tumblr!
Happy writing!
Heart Trade
DISCLAIMER: reposted here to the new blog
So a while back I used an old caffeine challenge as a prompt and this is what came of it. I believe it was like #23 or something. First line and image prompts used (coffee shop).
I’m also like 93% sure that this only took like 45 minutes tops to write, with a bit of editing cause I had time. It was a productive session and fits in the hour mark that caffeine challenges are, even though this is an old one. It’s exactly 2k words which makes me happy.
Also, there’s no dialogue (which I didn’t consciously do), but I think it works??? Gives it a sorta distant, cold feeling that gels well with the tone of the story. Dashed lines equals a jump between the two time periods. Warnings for mentions of cheating and mention of past death. Enjoy!!
*****
His heart is still beating when you decide you’ve spent enough time with his blood on your hands. His love for you seeps through the soft edges, leaking onto polished tile.
You, unfortunately, weren’t new to heart magic, to the sacred ritual of trusting another with everything. That time, you’d been burned.
Now, new heart in hand, you decide that you won’t be the one left broken this time.
——————
It all begins (ends) on a normal Tuesday. All the terrible, tragic things do. It had been a normal Wednesday night when your life first crashed around you, but that’s not a concern. Not now. Now, it’s a Tuesday evening and you’re waiting for him to come home. He’s late.
It’s 6:34 when you notice the blotch on his heart. Years ago, on another heart, in another life, you hadn’t known what that meant. You had ignored it, had continued to love your counterpart.
Now, you know better.
You won’t make that mistake twice.
He comes home six minutes after the clock ticks 9. He’s three hours late and a part of you is surprised – you hadn’t been expecting him at all. He smiles sheepishly at you, still sitting at the dinner table with the plates still out. Your eyes search instinctively for lies, scanning the lines next to his eyes and the dimple in his smile.
If you didn’t hold his heart, you wouldn’t know that anything was different.
But you do and you don’t want to inspire suspicion, so you stand from the hard-backed chair you’ve been worrying in and fret over him. You push his jacket over his shoulders, onto the floor and you kiss him, pretending not to notice the peach-colored smudge on the curve of his throat.
Part of you expects this kiss to be different, for you to be able to taste infidelity on his tongue or sense guilt in the purse of his lips, but there’s none. He’s kissing you and it feels like any other kiss he’s given you before.
That stings a little, heart clenching in his suit pocket on the floor. Perhaps that was another sign, that he keeps your heart in a place where it is easily forgotten and left. But that’s how it goes. You don’t notice the red flags and warnings until it’s too late. It’s idiotic how that works.
The two of you head to the bedroom, both of your hearts laying carelessly on the lower floor. You have to lie when he sees the single tear slip down your cheek and your heart, discarded, bristles as you realize that you’re even in the lies you’ve told.
For now.
The kind of lies he’s telling always outnumber any other.
Heart Trade
Summary: She shouldn’t have given her heart away. Not again.
Throwback to when I did a caffeine challenge for the fun of it. This is still something I like and am proud of. It’s still exactly 2k and that still makes me happy.
No edits. Also, there’s no dialogue (which I didn’t consciously do), but it works. Gives it a sorta distant, cold feeling that gels well with the tone of the story. Dashed lines equals a jump between the two time periods. Warnings for mentions of cheating and mention of past death. Enjoy!!
*****
His heart is still beating when you decide you’ve spent enough time with his blood on your hands. His love for you seeps through the soft edges, leaking onto polished tile.
You, unfortunately, weren’t new to heart magic, to the sacred ritual of trusting another with everything. That time, you’d been burned.
Now, new heart in hand, you decide that you won’t be the one left broken this time.
——————
It all begins (ends) on a normal Tuesday. All the terrible, tragic things do. It had been a normal Wednesday night when your life first crashed around you, but that’s not a concern. Not now. Now, it’s a Tuesday evening and you’re waiting for him to come home. He’s late.
It’s 6:34 when you notice the blotch on his heart. Years ago, on another heart, in another life, you hadn’t known what that meant. You had ignored it, had continued to love your counterpart.
Now, you know better.
You won’t make that mistake twice.
He comes home six minutes after the clock ticks 9. He’s three hours late and a part of you is surprised – you hadn’t been expecting him at all. He smiles sheepishly at you, still sitting at the dinner table with the plates still out. Your eyes search instinctively for lies, scanning the lines next to his eyes and the dimple in his smile.
If you didn’t hold his heart, you wouldn’t know that anything was different.
But you do and you don’t want to inspire suspicion, so you stand from the hard-backed chair you’ve been worrying in and fret over him. You push his jacket over his shoulders, onto the floor and you kiss him, pretending not to notice the peach-colored smudge on the curve of his throat.
Part of you expects this kiss to be different, for you to be able to taste infidelity on his tongue or sense guilt in the purse of his lips, but there’s none. He’s kissing you and it feels like any other kiss he’s given you before.
That stings a little, heart clenching in his suit pocket on the floor. Perhaps that was another sign, that he keeps your heart in a place where it is easily forgotten and left. But that’s how it goes. You don’t notice the red flags and warnings until it’s too late. It’s idiotic how that works.
The two of you head to the bedroom, both of your hearts laying carelessly on the lower floor. You have to lie when he sees the single tear slip down your cheek and your heart, discarded, bristles as you realize that you’re even in the lies you’ve told.
For now.
The kind of lies he’s telling always outnumber any other.
Caffeine Challenge 30
I have had a horrible day at work, which is true of most days this time of year, and I logged onto tumblr with only ten minutes before the challenge begun. Which means that this is one of the most ruly improvised stories I have written in a long time.
It’s about a curse.
***
Between the trees out here, where the sky goes golden on a sunset, he is standing. Waiting. He thinks he know the place, that he’s got it right. Surely this time he knows where she’ll be. It’s a cold night. The light bouncing off the trees until it’s properly golden. Until he can here the rustling of the leaves. The breaking of twigs. Snapping branches. Breathing.
Her breathing. He assumes. He doesn’t know her so well as to pick out what distinguishes her breathing from anyone else. Oh god does he? Is he that obsessive? No. He’s not. Definitely. Probably. Hopefully. No, no of course not.
It’s is her though. He can see her now, hunched over slightly, dragging a plastic sack along the forest floor. He picks up the shovel she must have left behind and decides to hide behind a tree. This is likely a bad idea so he changes his mind and stands out in the open.
‘Strop trying to be him,’ she says letting the sack drop to the ground, ‘You’ll never be him.’
‘I’m no… I’m not trying to be anyone. I want to help.’
‘No you don’t.’ As she faces him she wipes blood from her mouth with the back of a white lace glove. ‘You want me to stop. I can see it.’
‘No. Look.’ He starts digging. ‘I’ll even help.’
‘You just want to be out of here quicker. You can do that. Go now if you want.’
‘No. No. I’ll help.’
She smiles with pointed teeth. ‘Fine.’ She watches him dig. He is a fast digger. Good muscles. Wide shoulders, and, yes, a little red on his back, he’s used to labouring in the fields. He must be local. How quaint. ‘Have you dug a grave before?’ she says.
‘One.’
Caffeine Challenge #29
The engine purring outside the window shouldn’t exist. Jude knows that sound, she lived with that sound for eighteen years, before the ship it belongs to fell into a star.
But.
It’s insistent in it’s high pitched hum, and she can almost feel laughter bubbling up in her chest, because she’s going insane, finally, trapped alone on this morbid rock for - not years, she has no way to count years here - but a long time, so long her hair has started to turn a shining silver, and she has to cut it and cake it in mud to avoid alerting her prey. She has to hunt, here.
When before she had chased her crewmates, had introduced a cleaning bot to swordplay just to dodge it in a bloody game of tag, here she has to kill and skin and track the scrawny animals just to get some meat.
Jude then remembers the engine, and it’s high-pitched hum. It’s still there, she thinks. I’m still crazy.
But when she goes to the hole in the mud wall of her hut (she calls it a window, and it is, really, just not the vacuum-tight windows of her ship) and looks out and up, there is the silver hull, shining in the sky along with a million stars. If nothing else, this planet at least has a beautiful view of everything Jude has lost, all of the galaxies and suns and restaurants she’ll never see again.
And she knows that it’s a delusion, it must be, I saw that ship fall into a star, for Cliht’s sake, this can’t be real, yet she runs outside anyway, uncaring of the biting cold of the night air. But the ship, her long-lost resting place drifts down as if it senses her baffled amazement, and hovers only a few hands from the treetops, which sway gently in the breeze the ship creates, and it’s only when one of the needle-thin leaves pokes her cheek that she starts to believe, in a way she hasn’t in years, that she’s going to get off of this fucking rock and finally see another sentient being for the first time since she was young, younger than she is now by so many cycles.
And the ship drifts lower still, and lands on the rocky, uneven ground, lopsided but still standing, and she stumbles forward and only barely unlocks the airlock before the other side swings open and she’s tripping over herself to get in.
And there are people there, people whose faces she last saw in dreams, and before that through the vacuum-tight windows as they jumped to their own planets, and they surround her and
And when she’s inside, finally, with the entire universe ahead of her, she thinks about her ship, about the life she’s missed here, about the life she’s lived on that planet, so unknown it doesn’t even have a name, and
She thinks it feels an awful lot like coming home.
Caffeine Challenge #29
Posting a little early because I'm a morning writer and have been sitting on this all day. Thanks for the prompt, @caffeinewitchcraft !
*
Engine of Hope
The engine purring outside the window shouldn’t exist.
The drool-soaked pillow under my cheek let me know that I’d been dreaming - the deep, heavy sleep where I worked out the answers to impossible problems. I had ruined my favorite Star Wars pillow when I was eleven years old and dreamt exactly how a raven is like a writing desk. At sixteen, I was hospitalized for dehydration when I dreamt for two weeks straight to solve the mystery of Edwin Drood. At twenty-two, the doctors had thought I’d slipped into a coma before I awoke with the answer to Fermat’s last theorem.
Deep dreams were my blessing and my curse.
“Have you really done it, Dremmar?” A man’s deep baritone brought me out of the last stages of sleep. “Have you really saved the world?”
Dr. George Cavendish grinned at me from my bedside, his cheeks more wrinkles than skin around his mouth, but not his eyes.
“How long was I dreaming?” I struggled to sit up, but my body had never felt so heavy.
“Three months, two days, and one golden hour,” Cavendish replied, gesturing to a beefy nurse to help me navigate the IV needles, EKG lines, electric muscle stimulators, and catheter tubes. “That thing outside assembled itself out of thin air in the last fifty-seven minutes. EM readings have been in constant flux. Everything that runs on electricity for half a mile is dead, but that thing is purring like a kitten. How does it work? How can I make more?”
The naked greed of the mad venture capitalist flashed across Cavendish’s harmless-old-man face. It turned my blood to ice. What had I been thinking to partner with a man like this? How could I tell him that I’d dreamt the formula to forward-engineering the ultimate clean energy source: the power of human hope?
The Hope Engine that powered the levitating car outside the window hadn’t exactly materialized out of thin air, but it had built itself out of the intensity of my desire for it to exist. My deep dreams synchronized my neurons with the fundamental probability functions of the universe. These dreams allowed me to search through the countless possible outcomes that fanned out from each and every moment to find the extremely-low probability future that I wanted and pull that particular timeline to me. Or maybe I pushed my consciousness to that future. Did it really matter?
What mattered was that I’d dreamt a flying car with an engine that ran on pure hope - the ultimate perpetual motion machine. Entropy had no place under that sleek, red hood. The world could have endless power with no pollution. All we’d have to do is hope for it.
And pay George Cavendish for the privilege.
He gazed out the window with that look of bottomless greed. Men in hard hats were building a scaffold around my flying car while men in white coats made notes on clipboards, anxious to study it closer. The nurse gently disconnected me from the tubes that had kept me alive for thirteen weeks, while more men in white coats huddled under kerosene lamps to study the printouts of the brain activity of my deep dream.
Cavendish was no fool. He had three Ph.D.’s himself, with hundreds more on the payroll. With enough time, he would reverse-engineer the Hope Engine, patent it, and become the world’s exclusive purveyor of clean energy. He might even unlock the secret of my deep dreams and put them in a pill. What would a man like that do with that power? Would my blessing become the world’s curse?
I had created an engine that ran on hope. I knew exactly what I had to do with it.
Destroy it.
(Challenge #30)
Grandma’s house always makes me uncomfortable and my brother can tell.
“You keep being worried,” he scoffed. “The electrician said everything is fine.”
“Stop trying to be him. You’ll never be him,” I snapped. “Father knew what he was talking about, Jack. You don’t know anything about this.”
“Sis -.” His anger bloomed, pushing my buttons, but i could be angry too.
“Look at this place! The brambles have never been cleaned, the shingles needed to be replaced a decade ago and neither of us can afford the transfer of ownership taxes, to say nothing of six years of back taxes the old bat just forgot to pay!”
“It was her home,” he protested as he went back to the car for another energy drink like he was doing some kind of caffeine challenge.
The house smelled of old people and animal hair. All I wanted to do was burn it down, but I’d wanted to do that since I was six years old.
I followed Jack outside, and asked him to check the well. Maybe he would fetch the water again, just this once on his own, and this time remember all the horrible things she’d made us do. If I never had to crochet again, I’d consider myself blessed.
I lit a cigarette, which did nothing for my nerves. I studied the ash on the tip.
I dropped it and walked way.
Sometimes the past is a maze. And often the only solution to a maze is to burn it all down to reach the other side.
Caffeine Challenge 30
thanks to @caffeinewitchcraft because somehow your prompts always get me off my butt to at least attempt to write something
prompts: first line, dialogue, picture
warning: horror (my attempt at it), kinda bug-mentions, no editing whatsoever
~~~~
Nani’s house always makes me uncomfortable and my brother can tell. He grins mockingly at me behind Amma’s back, though of course he looks kind as can be by the time she turns around.
The little cottage is almost in the woods, far from the little town it’s listed under. Not within walking distance anyway. At night the sounds of the wild and the creaking of the house keep me awake, sure something will blink its eyes open in the dark in front of me at any second. I’ve never encountered any monsters though. Well, except for my brother.
