Greetings, South County Writers. Our first meeting will take place tonight at a local coffee shop, 6:30-8:30pm.
We hope to see you there!
If you want to participate from a distance, the prompts chosen at the meeting were:
Standing under a streetlight in the middle of the night…
10 years from now…
Set a timer for twenty minutes for each prompt, and write! Try not to edit yourself too much or too harshly-the goal is to get words down on paper. You may use the prompt as the inspiration for free writing, or as a line in your story. You may choose not to use the prompt at all, but maybe the words make you think of something else you’ve been meaning to write. You never know what will spark a story or character later…happy writing.
southcountywriters 
Response of the Week:
10 Years From Now…
The problem was that she was always thinking about ten years from now. She’d been like that ever since she was a kid-sick with waiting for the next thing to happen-the next good thing, the next bad. At least when she was younger she hadn’t had to worry so much about the next bad thing coming. She hadn’t known any better. She’d thought the world was magic, one trick after another just waiting to unfold. She guessed that had changed when her brother died-that’s the way it happens sometimes. The world divides itself into before and after, and after, she’d always been able to spot the tell: the rabbit under the table, the scarf up the sleeve.
Of course, that’s what had attracted her to Jackson in the first place. She’d been at the party with someone else, a date her roommate, Sarah, had insisted she go on. She should have known better; honestly, she had known better. The Date, whose name she no longer remembers, wore chunky frame glasses with no actual need for a prescription, and his jeans had patches that were designed, rather than worn in. She’d been twenty minutes into the date before she realized that drinking heavily was her only way out of it. She’d been nodding along to a conversation about whether or not success corrupted all music when Jackson had walked up to the group, wrapped his fingers around her wrist and kept walking as though he knew her already and knew she would follow, as though he’d been watching and had decided to rescue her without her invitation. But the truth was that she felt like she knew him, too- knew his touch-the rough rasp of his callused fingertips on the sharp edge of her wristbone felt already familiar.
Her date had said something predictable-something like, “Excuse me?”, or, “Bro, that’s my date,” or something stupidly pretentious like, “She’s yours if you want her.”
Maybe that was true. Because he did want her, and she was his in that moment more perfectly than she ever was again.
Ten years later, she tries to pretend that it could have gone another way, as though she could have been more reasonable, less fevered. She tries to believe that she could have looked him in the eye, asked him to let go of her hand, or asked if she knew him, or said something to the effect of that’s my body you just grabbed as though it belongs to you and maybe you should at least tell me your name. But she hadn’t said any of those things, and she’s pretty sure that if she went back again, somehow, if she could do it all again-she’d make the same mistake.
It wasn’t just ten years ago she was mourning. It was ten years from now, the life she’d imagined in cheap apartments in Portland, and a small home in the suburbs. It was the wedding she’d pictured at his mother’s house, barefoot in a sundress with a crown of wildflowers in her hair, cheap liquor in jelly jars, bare bulbs hanging in the trees, their friends from college drunk and jumping in the lake.
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