August is the yellowest month
It’s the Noongar season of Djilba where I live and all the yellow flowers are in bloom. Little golden orbs nod their heads happily, bobbing and swaying with the wind. You’d think that would bring me untold joy. I mean, what could be more pleasant than a sea of miniature suns in every direction? Under normal circumstances, nothing would make me happier. But it’s hard to feel the full magnificence of nature when your sinuses are cosplaying the transformation of Bruce Banner into The Incredible Hulk and your throat is lined with broken glass. And just to add a little extra flavour to all of that, this month is my older son’s birthday month and next month it’s my husband’s and younger son’s turn. Like most writers, I have other creative interests, like baking. So me and my aching bones and swollen sinuses and brain fog have been baking up a storm. I’m sure you can imagine just how much writing isn’t getting done as a result. <sigh> Maybe next week will be better.
~Asha
This Week’s Writing Prompt is:
This week, your job, should you choose to accept it, is to write a story, essay, or poem incorporating the following prompt:
Trope: Be Careful What You Wish For
We’re taking a cue from this year’s Scarlet Quill Society and getting some practice incorporating – or subverting – popular tropes. I know I wished for some downtime, but getting sick wasn’t what I had in mind. I guess I really should have heeded the old adage: Be careful what you wish for! Have you ever had one of those days when you got exactly what you wished for but you forgot to specify enough? In this trope, a character gets what they wish for only to discover that it doesn’t live up to the hype, or they weren’t specific enough to rule out disaster. Maybe a djinn shows up with three wishes, maybe the universe bestows a boon. Tell me about a time when the wish you’d been longing for didn’t live up to the fantasy you’d imagined.
What will your take be on this trope? Play with the prompt, and when you’ve got your story down, come tell us about it! Share snippets of or links to your best story in Discord or on Facebook! Stuck? Check out last year’s — no, year before last! — series on responding to prompts!
Share your response in the Coffeehouse, located both on Facebook or Discord, by linking your blog post, Google Doc, or other file. Check out your fellow YeahWriters’ responses, and don’t forget to leave them some love in the comments!
Looking for our weekly grids? After nearly ten years, they’ve been retired. Read more about the latest changes to YeahWrite in the #500 Weekly Writing Challenge Kickoff Post.
The Schedule
We will release a new prompt on our blog every Friday at 12pm Eastern. Then it’s up to you! Write your response to the prompt on your own blog or website and share the link in the Coffeehouse, located both on Facebook or Discord. If you prefer to keep your work under wraps (and away from the eyes of potential publishers), you can still ask for beta readers in the Coffeehouse and share your work privately!
Every Monday, we’ll check in to see how you’re doing and what your writing goals are for the week.
Wednesdays are “Work-in-Progress Wednesdays.” Share a few sentences or even a paragraph or two in the Coffeehouse (no more than 250 words, please). Even if you’re not done writing, this could be the boost you need to stay motivated. Did you publish a book? Do you have a story in a magazine?
The First Friday of every month is for self-promotion, where you can share commercial links to your work for purchase. (You can always share the news that you’ve been accepted for publication, though!) And of course, the entire community is here 24-7 to share your victories and setbacks, challenges and accomplishments. So come on in, pull up a chair, and say hello. We’re all writers here.
Upcoming and Ongoing
Sign up for our email blast so you don’t miss out on any upcoming classes, workshops, or competitions.
Scarlet Quill Society (Free Workshop w/ Optional Paid Benefits)
Welcome to the secret back room where the Scarlet Quill Society meets. In this year-long workshop, we’ll be focusing on tropes! Love ’em or hate ’em, you can’t avoid ’em. For the purpose of this year’s workshop, we’re defining a trope as a building block of storytelling. It’s a device or pattern of events that is used to solve plot or character problems or communicate meaning efficiently and effectively. Check out August’s post, in which we talk about the tropes you don’t know you’re adding to your stories, and how they affect your world and characters. Then hop on over to our YouTube channel to check out what our panel of experts had to say on this topic, on a pay-what-you-can basis! If you have a good time, leave a tip and we’ll love you forever.
Scarlet Quill Society workshop posts are always free. In addition, we are offering a couple add-ons that we think you’ll find exciting and worth a few bucks a month: face-to-face (okay, virtual) monthly gatherings to delve into the topics and answer your questions, and an editorial backroom on Discord! And for a bonus, if you’re a paid SQS member and you can’t make it to a meeting, you can still send us questions beforehand and we’ll make sure to cover them.
Sign up for a membership today to join the Scarlet Quill Society and automatically receive the Zoom link and password for every meeting. One-off monthly meeting tickets can also be purchased on Kofi. At YeahWrite we believe information wants to be shared. If you can’t afford to join us for society meetings, we post the recording about a week later, and you’re welcome to leave the tip you can afford (even if that’s just a nice thank you comment). Check out our YouTube channel for more.
2023 Anthology? WATCH THIS SPACE!
At YeahWrite, like it says on the box, we believe that your words – and your voice – matter. That has always been the core of our mission: to help authors develop and share their individual voices, whether they write romance, fantasy, mysteries, literary fiction, creative nonfiction, or anything else. It’s all storytelling, and we want your stories to shine.
That’s why we’re excited to help them shine in print for the first time! Our 2023 anthology, opening soon for submissions, will include 20 flash stories (fiction and creative nonfiction) that have a clear authorial voice and an innovative structure: braided stories, epistolaries, stories told as logbooks or news articles – these are just examples of the sorts of stories we are excited to publish. Can’t figure out your genre? Not a problem, we’re not genre-limiting this one! So dig back into your archive for that special story to dust off and tune up, or get ready to put pen to paper for that new idea that will help you procrastinate on the other writing you should be doing.
Because we love our newsletter subscribers, we’ll give them an early heads up with all the submissions guidelines. We’ll also send you details on the Kickstarter we’re planning that should help make our anthology even better!
Spontaneous Writing Challenges
About the author:
Asha lives near the beach in Perth, Western Australia, but hates sand between her toes. She began blogging at YeahWrite in October 2014 with this post, and YeahWrite was lucky to pull her on board as a Contributing Editor in December 2016. Asha writes flash fiction, short stories, and creative nonfiction. She is published in a variety of places and you can find links to her work at Asha Rajan Writer.
