DAILY PROMPT RESPONSE – FICTION
Writing was never the plan. I wanted something stable, normal—not this chaotic urge to bleed words onto a page. But here I am—caught off guard, and strangely okay with it.
You know that stability that gets beaten into your brain by your parents? The same folks who told you to follow your dreams? Yeah. I believed them—probably because they said it a few thousand times during my childhood with very sincere faces. But every time I actually tried to chase something I loved, it turned into: “Boy, you better get your head out of the clouds,” or “Son, you better get back into the real world.”
I worked a thousand jobs before I ever called myself a writer. The blame for all this goes squarely to Cheryl Whitmore. She gave me a journal when we graduated high school. Then, she sent me one every year for my birthday—for ten years—like she knew something I didn’t.
Since she kept sending the journals, I thought maybe Cheryl was into me. Like… romantically. But it turned out she’d had her heart broken and took a vow of celibacy. I wasn’t even sure she was serious. For a while, I figured it was just a clever way of shooting me down.
Years later, right after I published my first novel, I ran into her again, and she was still celibate. Like, the one person on earth not ruled by sex. She was kind of my hero after that, in a way I don’t really have the words for. Just… grounded. Steady. A rare person who didn’t want anything from me but gave me everything.
Now, I write in those journals every day. Or in ones that sort of look like them, depending on Amazon’s mood. You know how it goes—they’re out of stock when you actually need them and drowning in inventory when you don’t. I swear they do that on purpose.
Anyway, even if I hadn’t become a writer for real, I probably would’ve ended up working at the plant next to my dad, scribbling stories on the side for free.
Oh—and by the way, my parents? Yeah, they’ve read all my books. Twice. Now they hound me for the next one like it’s a Netflix series. But on weekends, Dad and I still tinker in the garage on his F-1 Ford pickup like nothing ever changed.
There’s nothing like being a writer. Honestly, why wouldn’t someone do it for free? We’re sorcerers—wielding words like spells, hoping each one leaves a mark. Our journals are ad-hoc grimoires, crammed with half-formed ideas, emotional incantations, and messy blue ink that somehow becomes meaning. We build memories out of language, wrap feelings in sentences, and send them into the world like bottled lightning. If even one of them sticks—if one person feels something they didn’t before—then the magic worked. And that’s the job.
Memoirs of Madness 