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Yes, I am in the ranks of Team Conan. Mind you, I prefer Letterman, but come on, Conan O’Brien is being royally screwed by NBC because they screwed up. And I even LIKE NBC.

What got me was in Conan’s letter to the people he states:

The Tonight Show at 12:05 simply isn’t the Tonight Show.

And he’s right! At 12:05 you have the Morning Show, not the Tonight Show. So, my challenge to my fellow writers is to write a debate between two characters on how something happening at a set time should be referred to.

Rules:

• there should be something that will happen just after midnight
• the writer is neutral in their opinion on the matter
• one character should take each of the following stances:

1. after midnight is still “tonight”
2. after midnight would be the next day

For example, there is to be a raid at 12:01 a.m., one character tells the other including “tonight” in the description of the time, which sets the second character off on something like “but that would be tomorrow morning.”

As I was waiting in the car at the hardware store tonight I noticed this distinguished looking gentleman come out of the nearby contractor’s entrance and walk in front of the car. He looked like he was still young, but had white/gray hair and a well kept but not truely athletic physique that was covered by a black overcoat, black shirt and black slacks. I noted a dark bluetooth headset  tacked into his ear as he walked, and he was gently tugging on a pair of black driving gloves.

There was something about the whole aura and attire the guy had that made me think at once that he had to be some kind of spy that had to stop in at the hardware store for some needed items for whatever mission he was on. It only added to the effect when he got into a nearby black sporty car, a casual look back toward the store before he slid behind the wheel and drove off.

I can so see him as a secret agent spy type. Or perhaps a modern vampire I suppose. Maybe he was getting a replacement bolt for the loose hinge on his coffin?

Go people watching and see what the people you see might look like to you, then share a few observations.

Tonight is the winter solstice, dark will now slowly give way to light. That is going to be our prompt. Darkness to light.

Maybe create a character that starts out dark and slowly redeems themselves until they are the hero of the story?

Show what would happen to a character that has spent a long time in darkness and stumbles out into the light.

How would it change a character to dye their dark hair a light color?

What does the kid see under the bed when they shine their new flashlight into the darkness?

PROMPT: The countdown clock for Christmas is ticking. Santa’s elves begin working their magic on the assembly lines, but the line comes to a screeching halt when rumors leak that one elf is going to get let go that day.
GOAL: 750 words or fewer.
SOURCE: Writers Digest Writing Prompts

Rough Draft – no revision

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Over the sound of low voices and hammering, the even sound of the giant clock’s hands was a constant reminder that time continued to move, with slow determination, toward the biggest day of the year. Christmas Eve was only one more day away and the North Pole workshop was at its busiest. Magic aided manual labor as the elves worked to finish the toys that would go to all of the good little boys and girls of the world.

Dolls were sewn, dressed and given curly locks on one long series of tables. Sticks received hobby horse heads and wheels on another table. Elves on one end of the room built airplanes that were flown on test flights to the other end of the room where they were painted and placed into boxes.

It was a chaotic mass of assembly lines creating sleds and wagons, tops and jump ropes. Toy soldiers lined up beside dancing dolls. Teddy Bears leaned against Jack In the Box toys. Scissors snipped bows to perfect dove tail points, pens scritched out names taken from Santa’s ‘Good little Girls and Boys’ lists.

And then the whisper was heard.

“One elf is going to get let go today.”

The room fell to silence, the attention of all on the two elves that stood at the top of the stair. Time were tough, even far to the north, but none had ever thought such troubles would ever reach Santa’s workshop. Letters from little boys and girls asked Santa for a job for their mommy or daddy, it was well known that so many were unemployed in the real world. But there, at Santa’s workshop? How could any elf be let go when there was so much work to be done for all of the good little boys and girls of the world?

The floor of the workshop was silent. And then a whisper could be heard, and more whispers and more. How could it be? So near Christmas Eve? How could one of their own be let go? The elves worked hard, toy making was all that they knew. How could any one of them be without a job? Why?

Santa needed to be asked about this. The elves would strike before they let one of their family go. They had made toys, one generation after another, for hundreds of years. It simply was not fair for Santa to let one of them go. They were not even paid!

The whispers and angry murmurs were soon overheard in Santa’s office and the not-too jolly old elf came out to see what the commotion was about. Why had the work stopped? It was Christmas eve!

Rather than work the elves all turned, scowls and fists and angry scorn. They moved as a mass, a mob filled with elves, shouting and yelling each one wanted heard. Santa was pushed back, his hand out in front, surprised at the anger from such happy elves.

“Oh no,” he laughed, unable to stand up, collapsed in a chair he fought for breath. “I’m not firing an elf this night, there are so many children, I need some help. One of you will get to go with me on the sleigh tonight!”

Okay, this is kewl. See my sidebar there, the little dealie showing random books from my library… yeah, that. It’s a little deal from LibraryThing that lets me show you what books I have in my library here. You can even click on the covers to buy one of them you might like from Amazon – pretty spiffy!

Anyway, LibraryThing is a really kewl website that I discovered this morning and have been playing with. It lets you create a virtual bookshelf of all your books (200 for free and more with yearly or lifetime subscriptions). You can see how many members have the same books as you and get recommendations for books you might enjoy based on the ones you have uploaded.

Get pictures of the covers of your books, or upload your own images if there are none on the site. I did that for one of my books today.

Okay, so…

The Writing Prompt?

A thing in a library. This opens up a lot of fascinating ideas for me as a fantasy writer. Oh what kinds of things might lurk in the libraries of fantasy worlds? But there could be a lot of fun in other genera’s as well. Horror comes to mind as a fun one hehehe. Sci-Fi could have interesting things in the libraries. Of course, the thing does not have to be a living thing. It could be some weird piece of artwork that the hero can only describe as “the thing in the library”.