Some of you might not know that The Confabulator Cafe has a meeting once a month. In that meeting, we decide what prompt we are going to use for the stories the next month. Around the same time, Clarkesworld editor Neil Clarke shared a wordle of the story titles submitted to his magazine.
It’s pretty common for me to start out with nothing more than a title, and that is what we decided to do. We’re using titles created by that wordle as prompts. The only rule was that the words had to be touching. I created several titles from the wordle that will probably get used for one thing or another in the future. For this story, I used “red” and “house.”
“The Red House” is sort of a haunted house story, but not quite a traditional one. It’s pretty brutal, but I am proud of it. You can read it here.