November 23rd
Total Words: 38,318
Ambience: Walking through the Graveyard
“So when in tears
The love of years
Is wasted like the snow…”
The Forest Reverie, by Edgar Allen Poe
A strange silence fills the drawing room as you fold the cream parchment back into its envelope. Whatever happens next ends up just a blur to you. Inkhouse is quieter after that letter was read– save for the soft sounds of writing. It seems each writer has taken to his or her own room. Some locked their doors. Others left them standing open, and a cold breeze from open windows blows their curtains through the room. You're not sure how there aren't more papers flying through the house.
As for you, dull dread presses on your chest. Each time you try to write, it seems like tangled pitch, only fit to bring the flames in your hearth to a dull roar to counteract the open windows. You feel stuck back where you were before Inkhouse, only this time, you aren't free to go anywhere else.
Prompt: Make your character feel trapped. Bonus points if it involves fire.
Anywhere, that is, except the graveyard outside the house. With a sigh, you pull a coat tightly around you and head downstairs and out of the house. Ravens are still calling. The foggy haze that had shrouded the headstones before has now been replaced with a wet slathering of thin snow. And sure enough, there through the dark tree trunks stands a smooth and continuous wall that traps you in.
“Enough of this!” Your cry echoes through the skeletal woods. If you're going to be stuck here until a story is done, then you may as well just get it done! You resolve to just write, no matter how bad, without burning any papers until editing. You can't rewrite a blank parchment, after all! You charge back through the snow into the house and begin to write feverishly.
Challenge: Write for 20 minutes without backspacing or editing anything.
Question: Do your characters ever doubt the importance of the conflict?
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