Yippee!
Again, I won't be able to share the story until it has been officially judged.
48 hours and 1000 words is pretty interesting. I got the prompt (genre, location, object) at midnight (friday night/saturday AM). noodled it for maybe 20 minutes--nothing felt good--and went to sleep, hoping my background brain would get to work. Saturday morning I fussed around with a few ideas in my head, but still mostly hemming and hawing. As I was on the clock, I forced myself to think through a basic plot and characters, expecting to hate it. But I knew that until I wrote the first story I would not be able to write the second, hopefully proper, one. And so I labored through a story for a few hours, trying not to re-write too much along the way. I then handed it off to my three beta readers, only one of whom knew it was coming. I set it down, grabbed some dinner, thought about making some edits but was really pretty drained. So, I loaded up brain with all the things I did not like about the first story, and the few things I did like. I then went to bed.
I got some feedback back from my first reader, and from my background brain, and did a major revision. I started with a clean sheet of paper and basically wrote the same story again, but cutting out the parts I did not like from before, and adding more detail to the bits I liked.
Sent it back out. And too my surprise I got mixed results! One person liked the first story much better, and someone else the second one. Oh dear.
But this was a blessing, actually. Each version had a good part, and a bad part. I was able then to make a third version of the story, now much more focused on the bits that were working for my early readers.
I then showed it to my daughter (she had been out all day), and she liked it. She also pointed out one last sentence that was a little odd. Fixed that up, and submitted it.
I highly recommend people doing these challenges; they are fun and make you stretch your brain.
Reading update:
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