The Stories
#001 // The Storm that Shook the Moon
#009 // Yew and Bone to Call Him Home
The Backstory
So, hey! It’s been a minute. How are you holding up in pandemic life? For me—could be better, could be worse. I’m exhausted. Burned out. I’m lucky to still be in good health, and to still be working my full-time job, 100% from home. But I’ve got a really good bead on the people who don’t have small children at home, because they’re the ones looking at me and saying “what do you mean you can’t edit 26 letters for me in the next three days????”
Yeah.
But of all the things wearing me down, I’d say the greatest toll this pandemic has taken on me is that it has completely killed my writing. Between full-time jobbing, full-time momming and having no way to offload the kid for any significant amount of time, even when I *do* have a little time to myself, I have no mental energy nor focus to work on my current novel edits.
I still want to write–I just can’t bear the thought of committing to the long slog of anything long-form right now, not with so much else stomping on my every second. So today I dug out my #rorysstorycubes and decided that for now, I’ll stick to short stuff, just to keep my hand in without too much of a commitment. The cubes will think of ideas for me, and all I have to do is link them together.
I’ll be posting them here under the tag “quarantine one-shot” with a picture of the images I rolled, plus the story I wrote from them.
These are meant to be short and totally unpolished–it’s the writer’s equivalent to a doodle, rather than any kind of thorough/evolved/meaningful/finished piece. And who knows–maybe it’ll spark some ideas for longer pieces to write after we get out of this viral hellscape.
Want to play along? Please do!! I’d love to know what story you might write with the same prompt!
Leila A. M. Martin 
What do you think?