Asides

Welcome to Week 17 of the Friday Fiction Writing Challenge! Here’s a complete list of all the posts so far. Feel free to join in.

This week’s random word is: Family

I cheated a little this week. Mainly in the form of using characters I’ve been working on for a while now. Matt is the leader of Alpha Team in my Denaible Unit series. And Jake is from a related series that I’ve been playing with in my downtime.

The cheat is a little more than stealing fully-formed (in my head, anyway) characters. I know their history, their relationship, and how the past has shaped them (and their sister, Eve).

I know far more about Matt and how coming face-to-face with his past would go. So, I decided to see how Jake would deal with it—for some reason, I seem to like torturing Jake with people from his past.

This was a whole lot of fun, and it helped me connect with Jake and his backstory.

Here’s my response to the prompt (basic editing):

Jake hit the lights and music on his cruiser and motioned for the driver of the F150 to pull over. The driver hadn’t done anything, but his gut screamed that something was off with this guy.

The in-vehicle computer didn’t throw up anything on the truck or the owner. Maybe he needed some downtime after all.

He touched his weapon as he approached the F150. His gut may be off, but that didn’t mean he was going to be complacent on a traffic stop.

“Was I speeding, Officer?” the man asked from beneath his baseball cap.

Jake froze. That voice. He was suddenly fifteen again. Hope and pain fought in his chest. No, he’d stopped “seeing” Matt everywhere he looked a decade ago. He blew out a breath. “Licence and registration.”

The man stiffened.

Jake readied his thumb at the snap on his holster and repeated his request.

The man nodded and leaned over for his wallet. There was a scar at the back of his neck. One he’d caused.

A lightness filled Jake’s chest; he couldn’t breathe. “Matt?”

“Jay…”

The lightness burned away as fury took hold. Jake yanked open the door and hauled his brother out. “Losing you tore our family apart.” Jake swung at Matt, but Matt was too fast, blocking him.

With effortless grace, Matt maneuvered Jake to the ground, pinning him facedown on the asphalt. “I had a job to do. Being dead was…necessary. Besides, you were better off with me gone.”

Thanks for reading and have a stupendous weekend!

HOW IT WORKS

1. Don’t think too hard on the word; just write about it for a maximum of twenty-five minutes or 250 words.
2. Once you complete your sprint, give it some basic editing.
3. Be courageous and post your results to your blog.

RULES

1. Complete the challenge on your blog before 1700 UTC of the following Friday.
2. Link to the original prompt post and make sure to use the tag Genre Scribes so that we can see all the posts together in WP Reader.
3. Your text must be fiction (preferably one you publish in (or plan to).
4. No real-life stories.
5. The text can be dialogue, an interior monologue, a scene, flash fiction, anything… so long as it’s fiction.

Full information is on the Genre Scribes: Friday Fiction Writing Challenge page.