A few notes about stories & prompts

As I mentioned a few days ago, I am going to try to increase my output of short fiction on the site to stretch out those muscles in that part of my brain which have atrophied somewhat in the past few years.

I feel that I should provide some disclosures before publishing many more stories and to make clear what my personal rules are, and to set expectations about what you see in the coming days. Rather than post a few disclaimers for every story, I thought I’d point to this post. It is intended to be a living document and I will modify it as needed to clarify or correct its contents.

First off, these are all first-draft quality stories. There are bound to be errors, typos, and problematic spelling or grammar in any of these pieces you read. They are not intended to be finished works, but something that is meant to be polished up for later publication — should I choose to polish and publish them at all.

They are, instead, the product of challenging myself to write outside of my comfort zone in as short a period of time as possible.

Secondly, with few (unlikely) exceptions, these prompted stories are all intended to be longish flash fiction or shorter (flash fiction is usually 1000-1500 words, I am allowing myself as many as 2000 words). While I may elect to take something longer that sinks its hooks into me, my goal is breadth over depth.

Thirdly — and I know there is currently a multitude of opinions on the matter — I am using AI to generate a daily 3-5 prompts and to set the genre. That said, however, the stories are 100% human-written. I do not use starter sentences, dialog help, refinements or general organizational elements with the help of AI. I may use AI for research or to come up with likely character or place names (one of the things I hate doing, by the way, is coming up with names), but even that has me at the helm by way of how I phrase my name suggestion request and I choose from a list of options. But, to emphasize, AI does not do any actual writing of any part of the story outside of providing the prompts and setting genre. That’s not writing, that’s parlor games.

While I have my prompts set to daily delivery, there is always a chance that I can’t or won’t use it. Something just doesn’t click for me sometimes. I am not committing to daily flash fiction posts, just to increase the quantity of flash fiction posts.

Thanks, and I really hope you enjoy some of what I improvise in the coming weeks and months (or longer ?).