Join me at charloft for the 100 Drabbles of Summer challenge!

Read the rules, then sign up for the challenge! Can you write 100 100-word stories in three months? There's only one way to find out!

100 Drabbles of Summer begins on Memorial Day ( May 31st) and ends on Labor Day (September 6th)

Writers and roleplayers of all kinds are welcome to come and write with us!

About Us:
In addition to the 100 Drabbles of Summer challenge, charloft has been providing a daily character development prompt since October 2008. We also have live character / writer discussion and roleplaying chats, NanoWriMo support, and other fun activities! Our talented mod team is made up of veteran writers and roleplayers who provide you with quality prompts daily. There is no application process or hoops to jump through to be a member of Charloft - just join the community and you're in. Writers of fiction, fanfiction, original or characters from any canon are all welcome to come write and play. We'd love to have you write with us.

Pub, bar, inn, dive, publick house, watering hole, etc.

[I won't yet claim I'm going to single-handedly bring this community back to life, but I can try!]

My brother forbade me to enter the house if I'd been drinking. His eldest daughter told me the opposite: "If you must drink, stay home. The streets are too full of predators."

She's wrong. I'm in no danger. Inebriation doesn't prevent me from defending myself. Three nights ago when a group of young thugs approached me, I waited until they were close and then I reached up in a flash and raked one boy's belly clean in half, sending him shrieking and fleeing with his companions close behind. None can touch me, no matter how thick the haze.

Not sure if I remember the incident quite accurately, however. No evidence exists to back it up. If there was blood on my claws, it's gone now. Other events are harder to deny - like the time I woke up missing my shoes, credit key, and all ten earrings.

What the hell some guy off the street wants with ten steel earrings escapes me. Eh. It's of no consequence. Yet my niece obsesses over the idiotic idea that I was mugged.

I'm in no danger. I can take care of myself. It's what I was trained for.

Nami peels oranges beautifully, opening the fruit with delicate fingers: a flower blooming atop its own rind.

I watch her, pretending to be asleep; she is beautiful in her nakedness, sitting straight-backed, a slender, willowy reed with jagged black hair. Her 'net implants glitter in the sun, exotic jewels of the finest metals tucked behind that pink shell of an ear. The orange is a brilliant ball in her hand, caught in the same sunbeam; her dark eyes flicker as she watches the latest news updates.

Love has reduced me to cheap poetry, I think to myself.

"I know you're awake." I can hear the smile in her voice.

I toss aside the blanket, stretch lazily, and pad across the room to sit behind her, entwining my legs with hers. My breasts press up against her back, and she feeds me slices of orange one by one over her shoulder.

The perfect solution to my predicament occurred to me as I trudged out of that Kuthy alley onto the main street, empty flask still clutched in my hand. My eyes fixated on one of the moons, hovering at the horizon just in front of me, and people passed me alone and in pairs murmuring in Øenu to each other.

I realized then that I should buy a house. Somewhere far from Kuthy, far from my family, the ghetto, and the cursed space elevator. I'd saved up enough money. I'd purchase a property somewhere remote where there was no housing crisis. I would live there alone until I dried out. Until the grief faded. Until everyone forgot about me, and how I'd become Captain Hraith's idiotic pet project.

It wasn't a moon. It was the light at the maglev station entranceway. I was almost drunk enough to hop on a train and try to find my new house, but some tiny, sober part of me recalled that I hadn't bought one yet.

A bright idea. The inner 'aha!' lightbulb.

(for some interesting lightbulb-type inspiration, check this out.)

Name your price: everything has one. For sale.

(Show of hands: anyone mind if I mix the prompts up a bit? Music and pictures as well as words and phrases? Speak now or forever hold your peas.)

"It looks Mayan. Probably around 200CE."

Al's fingers are long and slender; she traces the worn curvature of the pendant as it lies in her palm. It looks like a fallen tooth that the years have abandoned to moss but the weight is wrong; there are no points or even their ghostly echoes where the animal in question had used it to tear apart its prey. There's a hole in the top, probably worried away with a sharp metal object - too small for stone flint. A string or lanyard would have passed through it there, securing it around wrist or throat.

"It could symbolize a jaguar tooth." she muses. "The jaguar is a common symbol for royalty in most Mesoamerican cultures. But I really don't know. It's certainly very old." She holds it up, turning it this way and that under the hot worklights, pinched between her delicate fingertips. She sets it down on the glass surface again, sticks her lower lip forward thoughtfully and nods in languid reverence before continuing on to the next piece.

Shiny. Brilliant. Smart. Bright.

Old. Rare. Precious. Antique.

:-)