November 17th
Total Words: 28,322
Ambience: The Drawing Room
“The clocks carved upon the furniture got to dancing as if bewitched, while those upon the mantel-pieces could scarcely contain themselves for fury, and kept such a continual striking of thirteen, and such a frisking and wriggling of their pendulums as it was really horrible to see.”
-The Devil in the Belfry, by Edgar Allen Poe
You slip off the bed onto the deerskin below. There's a chill in the air, making your spine tingle once more. You blindly grab for your dressing robe and pull it tightly around you before inching toward the heavy wood door.
The hallway is still dimly lit. Murmurs of concern float through the circulation vents in the floor. Vaguely, you hear a clock tolling out the hour. You fly down the hardwood stairs, turn the corner through a pocket door, and find yourself in the drawing room.
Prompt: Use a feature of your setting to allow someone to hear something they shouldn't.
The ticking of clocks is overwhelming in the sudden hush. All eyes on you. The room seems like some biblically accurate angel, where the guests are the wings and the clocks are the many eyes on the walls. All eyes on you. The ticking isn't synchronized at all. Another clock tolls the hour. The wrong hour.
“Do you know what could have happened?” Asks a timid girl in the corner, breaking the group's silence. You look around the room– all the clocks are set to different times, and papers are scattered about. Atop the papers, sealed in red wax, is a letter, addressed to the guests. “No,” you say, “But perhaps that letter can explain things!”
Challenge: Complete 10 repetitions of 5 minutes writing, 1 minute break (hydrate, fuel, exercise, no random internet stuff, so you can stay focused). This should take an hour. For extra motivation, grab a friend to do this with you, and see who gets the best word count.
Question: How does your conflict reveal divisions between your characters? How does it unify your characters?
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