Prompt #105
The End Arrives
Happy Final Prompt of the Year!
Well, folks, this is it. The last prompt of 2025.
It’s been so much fun hanging out with you these last two years. Thank you for all the camaraderie, the great stories, the fun comments, the good vibes. You people are the best of the best! I’m crazy about all of my “regulars”—you know who you are. I miss you all already.
If you’re brand new here (and I’ve noticed an uptick in subscribers lately—not sure why), you’re just in time to see this project come to its end. Sorry about that! But the truth is, I may not be disappearing altogether. I may come roaring back. I don’t have any plans on deleting my Substack any time soon. It will stay right here until I decide what I’d like to do with it. But…I haven’t figured out what that is yet. So until I do—
Sending you all my biggest love!
TODAY’S PROMPT
Write a prompt and post it in the Comments section!
Your prompt can be a “real” one—like the type I post each week. (If this substack continues, you’ll have given me a gift! Write as many as you’d like!)
Or, you can write a “fake” one—whatever that means to you. For instance, you can write a story in the shape of a prompt: “Write a story about a disastrous dinner that was the ex-husband’s fault. The ex-husband in the story should be loud and obnoxious when he drinks. The wife is drop-dead gorgeous, but somehow doesn’t know it. Let the story end with the wife finding new love and the ex-husband in a gutter somewhere. Five hundred words.”
That’s it, my people, my glorious people!
One billion words max in the comments section.
See you when I see you! Happy New Year!
[Photo credit: Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash]
Mary, Mary, Mary!! You have become one of my personal heroes. First your awesome contributions and insights over at Story Club. I nicknamed you the TA (I guess they are now GSI’s.) Then your loving inspirations here in What Now (aka Prompt Land). Thank you for the Herculean efforts. I know they are extensive. I hope whatever direction you turn next will be filled with creativity and joy. And, selfishly, I hope you’ll be back. But just as selfishly, I hope you won’t. I hope you’ll just send a postcard from somewhere so far up the road you might never come back. But you’ll come back just to say Hi. It’s all good. Actually it’s all great! Thanks for writing your way into our lives and prompting us all to write our way into yours (and each other’s). You have given us many gifts. !!❤️😎 (oh, my prompt? “Thankfully, there was also the dog.”
Write a story about gratitude and joy. About how it feels to wake up on a sunny day at the tail-end of the year. About how it feels to see the angle of light changing as the minutes of darkness decrease day by day. About how it feels to be over the hump of holiday obligations. About how it feels to decide to make a pineapple upside down cake later this morning because you’ve unexpectedly come into possession of a reasonably good pineapple, here in a desert so very far away from the tropics. About how it feels to see the little boy who lives across the street jumping up and down with joy in his front yard when he sees the neighborhood turkeys out for their morning patrol. About how it feels to be surprised that you aren’t sad this morning. About how you expected to be sad because “What Now?” is going on hiatus, but instead of being sad, you are thinking about how much fun you’ve had in the past two years, looking forward to Monday mornings set aside for some quick writing. About how much fun you’ve had reading what this group of fine folks has written each week. About how much you’ve learned as you’ve seen how many different ways there are to respond to the same prompt. About how it feels to be so very grateful to Mary and to everyone who has participated in this delightful project. About how it feels to be on this little island of joy this morning. About how, maybe, it will be possible to remember this joy later when the bigger world with all its problems comes marching back into your awareness. About how you might use that joy to energize your response to some of those problems and how that might in some tiny way shift something in the right direction. About how, in the meantime, you wish Mary and everyone who has been a part of “What Now” the same delightful joy that has settled on you this morning.
Or write a story about something else. Just remember to keep on writing. Think about setting aside your Monday mornings every week as a sacred time to shut your office door and write whatever it is that is waiting to pop out and surprise you. And when you shut that door, remember your gratitude to Mary for opening the door to this practice.