Episode 97 (14 August 2024): Excuse me, humanity, please pay attention. I have an urgent message. “What? Not in the middle of my reality TV show!” I’m sorry. I’ll be brief. But first, a little background. My message concerns the fate of a pale blue dot in the inky expanse of the universe. Beyond its fragile borders is vast nothingness.

I wrote You Have Been Warned for the Not Quite Write Prize, run by the Not Quite Write Podcast, in April 2024. Their brief for the competition was the story must:

1. Contain the word DATE. The word must be used in full, with no spaces or interrupting punctuation. However, it may be included within a longer word.
2. Feature the action of “picking a winner.” You don’t need to use this exact wording, and you can feature the action prominently or simply as an aside. The action may occur before the beginning or after it ends as long as it’s referenced somewhere within your story.
3. Break the writing rule “always use said”. You can interpret this anti-prompt in whatever creative way you see fit.

60-hour Deadline

Writers have 60 hours to craft a 500-word story from midday Friday of the Not Quite Write Prize weekend to midnight Sunday. Having brainstormed an idea on Friday, I set out on Saturday morning to write a story titled “What If?”. I wrote a solid opening paragraph and developed the story, ticking off the brief and writing 250-300 words by early Saturday afternoon.

But then I realised the story wouldn’t work. It was too much “raw” autofiction based on a tragic event I experienced in early April. So, I parked that story and started on You Have Been Warned, drawing from an idea I used in another short story about climate change I wrote for the Furious Fiction writing challenge in 2022, Once Upon A Time (on Tall And True), and narrated for Episode 59 of Tall And True Short Reads.

The two stories are different, but reading them side-by-side, you can tell they have the same “father”. See if you can hear the required word and action from the brief and notice how I broke the “always use said” rule!

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Proud Mention

I didn’t win or get short or long-listed for the April 2024 Not Quite Write Prize. But You Have Been Warned earned a special mention on the Not Quite Write Podcast for being an engaging title, which made me proud!

I hope you enjoy listening to this story and its message on the Acast player (above), the podcast website, and all popular podcasting apps, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube. You can read You Have Been Warned and my selected short stories, blog posts, and other writings on Tall And True.

You can also buy my short story and microfiction collections from the Amazon Kindle, Apple Books, and Kobo online bookstores.

The next episode of Tall And True Short Reads will be released shortly. In the meantime, please check your feed or the podcast website, TallAndTrueShortReads.com, for earlier episodes from all four seasons. And follow or subscribe to the podcast and rate and review it via your favourite podcasting app — doing so helps me share my storytelling.

Finally, please share this blog post and podcast episode with family and friends and help spread the word about Tall And True Short Reads and the Tall And True writers’ website.

© 2024 Robert Fairhead

N.B. You might also like to read my post introducing Tall And True Short Reads – Season Four.

Note: This blog post originally appeared on Tall And True.