One of my Christmas presents this year, given by our own Sarah Hoyt, was a book of fantasy writing prompts. Normally, I’m not much for using other people’s ideas, which is what a book of prompts is, but after taking a moment to get over myself- and get over the fact that the author is making money off a book of a thousand disconnected fantasy-related sentences- I found that it was fairly useful.

It came at a good time, too. I’m a solar-powered human with the misfortune to live in a part of the world that has both short days and overcast weather this time of year. I can usually handle one or the other, but both is tough; I’ve been very sluggish lately. The usual solution for sluggish writing is to change projects and work on a different WIP for a day or two, but none of the characters were willing to tell me their stories.

Well, fine. I’ll make some new characters. Harrumph.

I’m not going through the entire book and writing a story for each prompt, in order of appearance. I’m not crazy. Not that kind of crazy, anyway. But opening the book to a random page once or twice a week and picking one of the ten prompts on that page seemed like a more achievable goal. Then I’ll also have time to work on my other WIPs, which don’t deserve to be abandoned just because I wasn’t getting along with them for a moment.

Yesterday’s prompt was: Write a Cinderella story from the ugly stepsister’s point of view.

Okay, that’s been done before, but who cares? There’s still a lot of room to work within a simple POV switch. And I’m apparently incapable of writing villains- someday, I’ll learn that skill, but today is not that day- so there’s a bit of mental exercise in making the stepsister/villain into a sympathetic character.

No, I haven’t finished the story yet. But those 1275 words were the most fiction I’ve written in one day, in a while. Another day should finish it, then it’ll go in a drawer, to be pulled out when I have enough of these for a collection.

In the meantime, how’s this for a beginning?

***

The eldest daughter in the family should be the prettiest. Catalina had always known that.

It only made sense. The prettiest daughter was sure to make as good a match as she could- one must always allow for the difficulties of poverty, a witch’s curse, or the remoteness of one’s father’s lands- and thus, she set the tone for all of her sisters’ subsequent marriages. For the prettiest daughter to be the youngest, and thus, the last to marry, was nonsensical.

Whatever was a plain girl- if the observer was being charitable- to do, when one’s widowed mother married again, to a man whose only child was a girl still in leading strings, and was the sort of girl who only becomes prettier as she grows?