prompts
A long time ago I encountered a website which was a continually curated set of daily writing prompts. At the time I think I kept it open in a tab and failed to bookmark it and then lost it at . . . some point, whatever caused me to lose open tabs at the time. Computer crashed? New computer? Who knows! What I remember is that it rotated through curators--so one person would post words for a few weeks or a month or whatever--and it didn't do anything besides put a word on the screen for your prompt.
The fact that it was just some words that someone thought sounded like they'd make for a good post really appealed to me. I like prompt lists. The thing that really got me posting on Cohost was Noel B's Microblogvember prompts in November of 2023; I have on multiple occasions stolen some art prompt lists for inktober to write little flash fiction vignettes for each one; one of my longest complete projects was ultimately just prompts with extra steps; my short story Full Bloom had its structure of four sections with a two syllable seasonal word long before it had a plot. This is how I roll.
To say I dislike the forms of writing prompts which come with more than just the one word would be inaccurate; they just don't work for me. It feels more creative, to me, to write something based on the word "wild" than to write something in response to the prompt "Write about the time you were inspired by wilderness." Part of this is my natural hipster nature; part of it is that there's just more room to play around with it.
I considered creating a writing prompt page back when Cohost was still around; I think there I probably could have found a few people who were willing to rotate through hosting with me and get some traction. And I am considering it again now: if you're reading this and you're thinking to yourself "this sounds fun, I can probably come up with a list of interesting short prompts every now and then" you can find me on my contact page and get a hold of me in one of those ways. (Alternatively, if you remember the website I was talking about, send me a link?)
(I was going to add a comment box as a surprise new feature to this post but something about it broke, so looks like I need to do some more work to get those live. So, uh, look forward to that.)