Write about your (or a character’s) rituals—anything from squeezing out a pea-sized dollop of toothpaste in the mornings to honoring dear and departed loved ones.

Prompt #108: Write a sentence (or two, or three) inspired by another sentence you wish you had written.

The junkyard boys, in their attempts to look menacing, took too-big steps to keep their too-big pants from collapsing around their ankles.

Loosely inspired by: “The boys and girls around him wore coral colors and Ray-Bans and seemed to outstretch themselves to the sun.” (from Foster Dade Explores the Cosmos by Nash Jenkins)

Prompt #109: What is something you can’t escape the pull of? What keeps dragging you back into its orbit no matter how hard you try to resist?

My bed

I walk on tiptoes so the floor doesn’t creak
as I move from room to room in my head

Rooms I’ve avoided, I now want to explore
But need glowing stars and night lights
Relics, reminders, of tender and soft spaces
Piles of pillows, blankets, forehead kisses

At night, the feelings wake me up
so I can brew them tea and lend sympathetic ears
Sometimes during the day, they try to leave me lengthy voicemails

Lately, I’ve been leaving them waiting
while I run my fingers across my skin under cool clouds
Cumulus, cirrus, nimbostratus, stratus
Watching for glimpses of sky
the sun peaking through to warm my skin

Prompt #109: What is something you can’t escape the pull of? What keeps dragging you back into its orbit no matter how hard you try to resist?

He’s warm and he’s there. Not hot but not ugly. His number at the top of my recent calls, text threads, and Instagram DMs. Always accessible. Verbally describing memes to each other form the basis of our conversations. He looks at me with dull, eight-ball eyes that never shine with hunger or intrigue. The other day, after biting into a donut, a dusting of powdered sugar ringed his lips and I felt neither disgusted nor charmed. I wonder what he sees in me. I wonder what I see in him. Perhaps what we recognize in each other is our own loneliness.

Prompt #110: Are you a pantser, planner, or somewhere-in-betweener? In both writing and life or not? What’s that like?

It’s funny, in life I’m a big planner but in writing I’m definitely a pantser. My writing starts with a sentence, an idea, a smell, sometimes just a word. I never know where it’s going or what it will become. In life, I love to-do lists and routine a place for everything, everything in its place. Laundry is both my greatest pleasure and the bane of my existence because it can’t ever all be clean at once. I love this duality though, the planner/pantser simultaneity. A dirty house makes me crazy, seeing the sun shine through a single leaf and writing about it makes me sane. Party.

Books are mirrors: you only see in them what you already have inside you.