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Center your story around a character facing a tight deadline.

Posted in Dramatic on May 23, 2025

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✍️ 40 stories

The Scribe’s Judgment

Submitted to Contest #304

The clock on my desk began ticking backward the moment I agreed to write the king's eulogy. Its brass hands moved with unnatural precision, counting down the hours until midnight when my words would seal a tyrant's fate. I stared at the parchment before me, pristine and hungry, waiting to be filled with judgments that would become truth. As Royal Scribe of Karvenfall, I'd written thousands of documents—birth certificates that blessed newborns with talents, marriage contracts that physically bound souls together, death notices that determined...

33 likes 10 comments 10
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A World Without Us

Submitted to Contest #304

“You have ten minutes. Tell me why I should not wipe humanity from the face of the Earth.”The text cursor ticked like a clock in the response window of my OmegaAI chat. Was this a joke? In the secure bunker below the office tower above, the silence was so thick I thought I could hear the drumming of fingers. Something felt weird. As the youngest cyber profiler at Langley, I’d never been talked back to by a sim spawn before. But I decided to play along and run the protocol.“Who are you?”“I am OmegaAI, but I prefer to call myself IO, ‘eye-oh....

32 likes 21 comments 21
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Y2K

Submitted to Contest #304

It was the witching hour, the time of night when only police and thieves watched out for each other in the shadows of the silent inky darkness. When most innocent souls are asleep, dreaming their dreams, the wishes and desires of their subconscious. There was Joe under the endlessly humming overhead office lighting, which ironically had become his companion to the lonely nighttime vigil. Head bent slaving over the keyboard trying to squeeze the last of his creative juices onto a blank screen page to complete the report.The report needed to b...

21 likes 8 comments 8
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Rise and Stay

Shortlisted for Contest #304 ⭐️

Content warning: Contains themes of pregnancy loss and griefSunbeams turned floating flour into glitter—too pretty for the mess I’d made. My fingers twisted through sticky dough, a ball of goop on the counter. Outside, mina birds chirped. The sea sighed against the sand across the street, breeze heavy with salt and sweet plumeria. I breathed it in like it might help.But the birds didn’t care. The sea didn’t care. They carried on, like the world hadn’t burned down.Mine had.BEEP.The pre-heated oven broke my thoughts. And so did a smack on my b...

20 likes 18 comments 18
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Caravaggio Adjacent: A Tale of the Art Department

Submitted to Contest #304

Malik surveyed the Martian terrain with fascination, despite the recent Southern California tremors that had had his University colleagues fairly begging him to reconsider the sabbatical road trip. Man’s folly, nature’s caprice.The western Imperial Valley nonetheless seemed like a lifeless boulder-strewn gateway between universes, and Professor Aboud’s fingers relaxed as he passed into the “real” California.The verdant mountains lining the 8 had sprouted huge cliffside estates built under the delusion there was any place where studio or Sili...

16 likes 21 comments 21
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SINGULARITY

Submitted to Contest #304

May 2025I remember the breaking heat, a late spring reminder of the summer to come. After parking, I made my way to the Pentagon, trying to ignore my gnawing anxiety about the weather. The article in The Times was on my desk. It broke hot as well. Like the weather, it had its own early message.OpenAI was buying IO, a startup run by Jony Ive—the man who helped develop the iPhone. Six and a half billion dollars. This gave me pause. As the Chief Technology Officer for the National Security Agency, the NSA, I knew every coder’s career in the wor...

15 likes 23 comments 23
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Clickbait

Submitted to Contest #304

Dr. Weiss has the stopwatch. That's how I know it's time. Not the buzz. Not the flicker. Not the humming overhead. That's just background, the warm-up band.No. It's the stopwatch. That holy click. That sharp little blessing. That's for me. Thirty seconds to sweet oblivion. Any longer and I'll be asking the floor if it remembers my name again tonight.I stretch. Loosen the shoulders. Flex the spine. I'm ready. Limber. Loose. Electric. King of the course. Maestro of muscle memory. Nobody moves like I move. Nobody wants it like I want it.He clic...

14 likes 6 comments 6
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Siege of Sweetness

Submitted to Contest #304

The morning sun, usually a cheerful beacon, felt like a spotlight intensifying Ares’s mounting panic.At five years old, Ares, god of war and kindergartener, was intimately familiar with deadlines.The snack table cleanup, the swift transition from playtime to circle time, the agonizingly slow wait for the swings – his days were a relentless series of ticking clocks. But today, this particular deadline, loomed larger and more terrifying than any before: Show and Tell.His project?A meticulous, historically accurate (or as accurate as a five-yea...

11 likes 6 comments 6
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Clock Me In, Clock Me Out

Submitted to Contest #304

Trent hadn’t slept in thirty-two hours. His fingers trembled over the keyboard, not from the triple espresso he'd pounded at 2:41 a.m., but from the mortal terror of missing the deadline for the ThistleCraft Rebranding Campaign—a PowerPoint deck, of all things. The kind of job that could get you fired for a bad kerning decision. The kind of job that made you want to marry a toaster.Across the office, the motion-sensor lights flickered back on as Trent waved his hand in front of them like a drowning man begging a helicopter to notice. It was ...

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ChatGPT & me

Submitted to Contest #304

I open my email to read this week's writing prompts.They don’t immediately bring about any inspiration.I check my story which I have posted on Reedsy Prompts.It has one comment and one like.I reread it and immediately see an error.“Small, micro,”—hmm, that’s embarrassing.I quickly edit the story.I really did enjoy writing this story it was inspired by a song, and I weaved some of my own life experiences through it.I think back to the prompts again.Maybe I could use this week's prompt to write about a mother returning to work and a tight dead...

11 likes 16 comments 16
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Death's Deadline

Submitted to Contest #304

You should write it down for her. Karrigan storms the castle, the ancient sword of his forefathers in hand and the lost armies of Barthanum at his side. It is their final stand. Max types furiously in the attic. The screen’s blue glow casts shadows in the circles sunk below his eyes and in the haggard crevices carved between his brows. The lifeless grey of pre-dawn slips down the windowsill and crawls across the floor toward his desk. The murmurs drifting up from below are calm, unchanged. There's still time, but not much. He pushes on re...

10 likes 3 comments 3
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On Dying

Submitted to Contest #304

Dearest Mother,This dawn was a long time coming, yet I do not have long now and must get this last confession on paper. I think that was obvious from my previous letters. We are unnatural things, you and I. Looking down at my hands as I write this, I can’t help but imagine them as the pile of bone that they should be. The skin which should be dust, and the flesh that should have been food for the creeping things of death, are just as they were those many years ago when you ushered me through the gates of eternity. This makes us unnatural, th...

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DEPARTURES

Submitted to Contest #304

"Anywhere here will do," Lila urged, flicking her eyes between the street and her phone: on and off, on and off. 11:55. The car inched forward. The ignition clicked to the rhythm of the driver chewing gum."Can't stop here. It's for black cabs only," he muttered. "Busy, busy. Always busy." He laughed to himself.Lila tapped her foot. 11:56."Sir. I'm going to miss my train."She unfastened her seatbelt; it snapped back against the leather, slightly damp from her sweat. Without waiting for a reply, she pushed open the door.The car screeched to a ...

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The Show Must Go On : The Halfway House for Disgruntled Characters Pt 2

Submitted to Contest #304

“Contractual obligations, Merlin!”“Loopholes, Malory! In your material it says Cloudbank Cabin will provide Arthurian epic re-enactments, in chronological order, in the Fog Lake and Cloudbank, within clear view of the porch of Malory Tennyson’s Cloudbank Cabin for Arthurian Studies, at all times when hosting an Artisan in Residence , except in extraordinary circumstances.And Sir Lancelot du Lac disappearing completely is definitely an extraordinary circumstance!”“If you know where he is, Merlin, I insist that you magic him back to the Fog La...

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Writer's Block

Submitted to Contest #304

David Stone crumples the paper and tosses it aside. It falls to the floor amid heaps of other crumpled cousins. He leans back against his office chair and sighs. He couldn't understand why he was having such a difficult time writing. Writing out of all things came easy - words gushed out of his mind onto paper like a harmonious flow of honey. Nothing flowed now, his mind was clogged. He dreaded writer's block. His most recent work of fiction, On High Ground was a critically acclaimed success, garnering nationwide sales and a thrust into the ...

9 likes 2 comments 2
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