Okay everyone. I'm giving blogging another shot. Now that I am stay at home (for the most part) I need something to keep me busy. I also am trying to be braver and post my creative writing bits where people can actually read them.

I have this thing where I am deathly afraid of failure. I am also trying to get over this "it's not ready" complex that I have. I  constantly putting off sending my stuff, novels and short stories and such, so this is an attempt of getting out of my comfort zone and putting myself out there.

Please comment, leave feedback and let me know what you think and what should improve. (Be kind, please. It's called constructive criticism for a reason  ;)

So for this first post, I found some pretty cool 'creative writing' prompts on Pinterest (the holy grail of internet perfection) and I am giving a few a shot.

Here's the catch: Not all of them are going to be complete...when I complete the thought, then I complete it. If I stop mid way because that's where I stop, then that's what you get. This is the first of hopefully many posts.

 PS, sorry it's so dark. The prompt wasn't dark per se, but the back story I imagined for the character needed to be in a dark place to be in the mind set to go along with the prompt. Maybe later, there will be more development for this story later. I'm keeping them all in my Wring Workout folder. To Be Continued........

So enjoy, comment and read away!

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I hadn’t moved in what felt like ages. My life had become a routine of monotonous agony, leaving me to bond with the couch on a molecular level that would soon become permanent. My roommates, my boyfriend – correction, my ex-boyfriend – had been trying to get me off the couch and out of the loft for ages. I was spiraling. Had been for a while. You should get up, they said. Get a job, get some sun. I’d heard it all and yet nothing lifted the elephant that had established residency on my chest. 

Breathing was something that I did because I had to, simply out of habit and not because I wanted to.

Depression was an interesting thing. It was like drowning and suffocating and starving all at once. It was like being so tired that functioning is unreachable and yet your brain will never stop whirring. 

Just after my mom died when I was 15, I lost it just a bit. Not too bad, though. Just typical teenage rebellion. Nothing my die hard strict dad couldn’t fix by shipping me off to boarding school. Sure, I found sex, drugs, alcohol. Sure I nearly flunked out, several times. But at least I was out of my dad’s hair.

Surprisingly enough, my relationship with my father greatly improved once I got out of boarding school and into college. It got to the point where I actually went home on the weekends, dinner one day a week. My life was getting better; I was studying, I was working, I was making friends that hadn’t spent time in juvie. It was a good time. For 3 years, we were happy. Then he had to go and die on my too.

Driving home for dinner one night, I knew something was wrong right from the start. When I pulled up all the lights were off. Even when my dad slept, he left the bottom floor lights on. He said it gave the illusion that someone was still awake and made him less likely to be targeted for a home invasion. Too bad that’s exactly what got him and the idiots that killed him robbed the place, cleaned up and even shut the lights off.

I found him. That’s what did it. I never even saw my mom at her funeral. Not even when she was in the hospital, after she stopped breathing, I wasn’t allowed in the room and my own strange psychology prevented me from seeing her body in the viewing. That wasn’t my mom anymore. There was no reason to look at an empty shell. But seeing my father, I guess it was too much for my brain to handle. From that point on, I had been unable to be to dig myself of the pit from which I had flung myself.

So there I was, laying on the sofa in my room. I had just binged watched 6 seasons on Netflix and was about to start a new series when my roommate Lana walked into my room, without knocking – as usual.

“That. Is. It!” she said.

I lazily looked up. “What is it?”

“You, Gretch, are getting up, off this couch and you’re going to a job interview. Now, c’mon. You need to take a shower…really bad. I’ll pick out your outfit and I’ll even do your make up.”

I made a motion like I would get up and then pulled the blanket further over my head, burrowing 

back into the couch.

Lana grabbed the edge of my blanket and yanked it off in one swift pull. “Gretchen Andrews! Get off your butt and in the shower or I will bring a bucket of ice water in here and give you a nice cold 

shower right here. Your choice.” She strode out of my room without another word.

I sat there for a time. I debated whether or not she was serious then decided that she probably was. For the most part, my friends had left me to wallow in self-pity I guess the pity party was coming to an end. I knew this day would come. I just wish it would come later.  

I sluggishly got up.