Acutal Contest Entry

So, in the post before last, I shared six possible entries that I wrote for the last Go Teen Writers contest. Now that the winners have been announced, I'm going to share my actual entry, which received an honorable mention.

I’ve never been the type of girl to say “leave your hope at the front gate.”

But for the first time in my life, I feel that sentiment worming its way into my head.

I look over the ruins of my city, a ghostly image of what it used to look like flickering just outside my vision.  Then, for a moment, the scavenging dragons in the sky become flying vehicles, and the fog crawling off the ocean becomes steam from Voyle’s Magic-processing factories. The sunlight sparkles off broken glass, and through the truth-obscuring fog I can imagine that the city is whole again.

Then a cloud comes over the sun. The illusion disappears.

I glance down at the notebook in my lap, and reread the words Pearl had written.

It passed.

Two words. Two small, innocent words with consequences far more chilling than I care to think about. 

This is what the MC of one of my latest shiny new ideas had to say about this prompt.  She gave me two paragraphs, actually, the other of which was one of the ones I posted before. 

This story is a bit nuts. It came to me after I listened to a cover of Imagine Dragons' Radioactive by Lindsey Stirling and Pentatonix and thought "Maybe one day I'll try writing a dystopia." Those of you who have known me for a while may have just gasped in horror, knowing my previous aversion to that genre. Said aversion is fading. 

Anyway, after that thought process got started, a bunch of other, older ideas said "Hey! You have to write me first!" And, after some bickering, they started joining forces one by one, saying "Hey, if we combine story ideas, maybe she'll write us faster." 

Bloody clever little plot bunnies. Now I have a story idea that covers possibly three genres (dystopia, science fantasy, and adventure), combines ideas for characters I've had floating around in my head for a while, and sounds fun to write. It may be my next NaNoWriMo story. We'll see.

And a wonderful day/evening/morning/whatever to you.