My piece, Flashlight, earned a quick and positive response from several markets, which was a sure sign that it was a winner. This week, I got the acceptance I was looking for.

Flashlight is a flash fiction about a girl in a bad but somewhat ambiguous situation, told in less than three hundred words. I'll update my blog when it's published.

Meanwhile, I'm working on some other stories--a story about retirees whose idyllic life goes by too quickly, a story about a woman with a terminal illness and the demon that tempts her, and a story about a man's bond with art. Once I'm finished thinking about and revising those, it's on to novel time before AWP in late March.
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Our guild is continuing to build itself up from nothing in Guild Wars 2. We claimed our guild hall on Monday night in one shot. One very derpy shot in which we ran around aimlessly trying to find the spawns and then zerged into the final boss via the waypoint. Once we had finished, we admired Lost Precipice for an entire hour. It's gorgeous even in its ruined state, and I can't wait to see what upgrades will turn it into. We're almost done with the tavern upgrade 1, but now we can say we have a hall when we recruit people, which is an enormous step up.

Lost Precipice is a Petra-like forgotten ruin with a desert theme. It's gigantic and beautiful, with a lot of platforms, gliding points, and high ground. A river runs through it. Although I also like how Gilded Hollow looks, I think Lost Precipice showcases the best of GW2's art and landscape design. 

We then proceeded to try out Spirit Vale with a majority guild group. Since it was a bunch of new people, we didn't get the kill, but we met some new friends, learned the fight mechanics, and are starting to feel more comfortable with everything. I'm certainly starting to feel more like a guildmaster than just a random noob with nothing to be guildmaster of and no one to coordinate.

I have three alts clustered around the same level, but I'm going to set aside my mesmer and work on raid-important alts that fill guild needs. We're a bit light on condi damage and healers. I rolled a ranger purely to heal and because we had zero rangers, but I fell in love with him (and I think you will too). I'm going to do a post later in the week showcasing the epic awesomeness that is Tango Catstaple.

Don't worry! No one knows what a catstaple is.

In a prior post, I ​wrote that I never wrote anything good from prompts and that my mission was to rehabilitate a prompt piece.

This is logical as it will prove that I did not waste all of my time in writing these sorts of pieces for classes, workshops, and writer's activities. Or, if you think your work sucks, the answer is to make the work you want to see in your portfolio or in various folders on Google docs until you're satisfied.

The story I chose was a flash fiction about an American girl in 1920s Italy who just doesn't get what the fuss is about Europe, 'culture,' or Italian men.

I hate everything about it, except for a single image, in which her Italian shoes--yes, the shoes that people rave about and that she bought because of that--are uncomfortable and are blistering her heel.

So unless I want to write a fifty-word story about that (not a terrible idea as ideas go...), I'm SOL here. I'm finding it hard to encapsulate the culture and time period while making my protagonist...do...stuff. 

I might just look for some other writing I've done in response to specific prompts and see if that offers any inspiration.