November Challenge Day 22 | #nanowrimo
4. Rewrite these characters into a fairytale.
Royal Navy Beauty & the Beast Retelling
When the Peace of Amiens goes into effect (1802), the admiral sends his young-adult daughters from Portugal back to family living in England aboard their Captain-brother’s ship. While at sea, a freak accident starts a fire in which the First Lieutenant, the son of an aristocratic family, is badly burned. Having spent a couple of years working as a nurse, the younger of the sisters cares for him while he’s out of his mind with pain and fever, developing strong feelings for him as they sail back toward England. Once the ship docks, they are parted—he to his family who can afford the best doctors, she to her family in the country.
A few years later, she still thinks about him occasionally—no more than once or twice a day. Upon her sister’s marriage, she moves to Portsmouth to live with her brother’s family and volunteer as a nurse at a convalescent home for sailors too gravely injured to return to sea. The hospice is a large estate outside Portsmouth owned by an aristocratic recluse. Upon her arrival, she is warned not to enter a certain part of the meandering, slightly renovated, medieval-era castle. Curiosity gets the best of her and she “wanders” through the forbidden door—where she finds her very own darling Beast, now scarred and scraggly, sullen, irascible . . . and scared to show his half-burned face to the world.
November Challenge Day 18 | #nanowrimo
Writing Prompts
1. His or her high school cafeteria—but one thing is very different
2. Every year at the stroke of midnight on November 30, something important happens.
3. A character can not tell the truth, even when they want to.
4. Rewrite these characters into a fairytale.
5. There’s a legend of a buried treasure in Gossettville, and a scavenger hunt to find it every fall. H/Hn get teamed up to work together to “find it” (i.e., win the game).
6. Mac wakes up to find an animal in her apartment. What is it, what is here immediate reaction, and what does she do about/with it?
7. Mac daydreams about her dream job. What is the job and how does she feel about it?
8. Kars discovers he has supernatural powers and could heal his mother—but all magic comes with a(n equal and opposite) price. What is the price? What does he choose to do?
9. What is each character’s worst fear? Make them face it (or some version of it).
10. Each character has the worst day ever. Then they have dinner together. What happens at dinner?
11. Ripped from the headlines—use a headline as a prompt.
12. Drop a bomb—an unexpected kiss, arrival,departure, fight, etc.
13. A character from one of my character’s favorite TV show or movie suddenly shows up. What happens?
14. Character has his/her first-ever panic or anxiety attack. Why? How does he/she handle it?
15. Characters have to participate in an icebreaker game in a social setting. What game is it? What do they share about themselves? What do they learn about each other—not just through what is shared verbally.
16. Characters have to empty their school bags/pockets in front of each other. What’s there? How do they react to each other’s stuff and to the other seeing their stuff?
17. Mac secretly observes Kars dining at a restaurant. What does she learn about him?
18. Mac and Kars share their personal romantic histories with each other.
19. What regular habit/quirk does each do that annoys the other? How does each handle it?
20. Create three strong supporting characters for each lead.
21. Determine/create an antagonist for each main character.
22. Character has an epiphany (doesn’t need to be life changing). What is it and what does it change?
23. Create a Top 10 favorites list for each character.
24. A planned event is highly anticipated, but everything that can go wrong does.
25. Twenty questions—each must ask the other, each must answer honestly.
November Challenge Day 17 | #nanowrimo
I want to write so that it makes me FEEL the way I do from the “Avengers, assemble” scene through to the end of Endgame. I used to be able to write with emotion. But now it just feels dry and hollow. So I have to figure out how to tap into my emotions and feelings again and get it back into fictional characters so I can write the kinds of stories I love.
November Challenge Day 12 |#nanowrimo
Mac set the bowl on the table in front of Mrs. R. As soon as her employer picked up her spoon, Mac returned to the stove where she could watch without being quite so obvious. Mac had never made chicken and dumplings before—and rarely had she ever cooked something with the recipe’s proprietor sitting across the room talking her through it from memory and peppering in anecdotes illustrating the importance of the dish to her family. Mac had never felt like both her job and home depended on getting one dish just right.
November Challenge Day 7 | #nanowrimo
“Next time you come into work service”—the restaurant floor manager’s gaze ran the length of her disapprovingly—“lose the cosplay look.”
Mac swallowed back her feeling of embarrassed disappointment over the harsh tone. While her black pants and white shirt were nearly identical to every other server’s, she’d known her retro hair and makeup would stood out. But her unique style usually made people smile, not criticize.
November Challenge Day 6 | #nanowrimo
It’s just a first draft, and the important thing is that I’m writing and shouldn’t be worrying about or even thinking about how pretty much everything I’ve written here so far will end up on the virtual editing room floor. Right now, I just need to let myself word vomit onto the page and wait to worry about the technical aspects of my writing until after I’ve written the ending!!!
November Challenge Day 5 | #nanowrimo
Something was happening. Mac struggled against the confusion and darkness and reached for the thing that seemed to be the root cause of the perturbance. A loud clatter brought her closer to a sense of reasonality. Forcing her concrete-laden lids open a crack, she rolled over, leaned over the side of the bed, and picked up the cellphone now creating even more ruckus by vibrating against the wood floor as the alarm continued to beep at her that it was time to get out of bed and become a productive human being again — or some semblance thereof.
November Challenge Day 4 |#nanowrimo
Karsten stood just beyond the doorway, numb. After years of nearly silent melancholy from his mother, he couldn’t believe what he was hearing coming from the kitchen. Chatting and laughing like her old self. Mom had rarely even cracked a smile for her husband and sons since the accident landed her in the wheelchair. Yet after just a few days of knowing Mac, Mom was acting as if the accident had never happened. What was so special about this somewhat bizarre redhead — who dressed every day as if it were a 1940s costume party — that made Mom so happy, when nothing Kars had tried in the last five years had elicited much more than a wan smile?
November Challenge Day 3 | #nanowrimo
If there was one thing that had been true all her life, it was that she couldn’t depend on anything to just work itself out for her good; and when everything hit the fan, she was good and truly on her own.
November Challenge Day 2 | #nanowrimo
When Mom and Dad said they were going to hire someone to help out with cooking and light housekeeping, Kars had imagined someone like his grandmother, not this curvaceous creature who’d looked like a 1940s starlet the first time he’d met her.
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