After the sudden passing of my dear friend and fellow writer, P. T. Wyant, last month, I came to two very quick conclusions:

1. I was going to pick up the torch in the Rainbow Snippets Facebook group where she was the weekly thread poster for writers to share their snippet posts through. She was the glue to the group and I know she wouldn’t have wanted it to die off simply because she, well, you know… (I might have dark humor, but even that joke feels too soon.)
2. I was also going to pick up where she left off with her weekly Wednesday Word flash fiction blog posts, to continue to honor her memory.

To be completely truthful, hosting some kind of weekly prompt or engagement blog tidbit had always been a goal of mine to help drive traffic to my site. Also because it’s a great way to garner connection with fellow writers and readers. Connection has always been my main goal. Yeah, I care about the numbers side of social media, but I’d rather have a hundred loyal followers than thousands of trending followers any day.

I owe a lot of my writing success to weekly flash fiction blog challenges and the connections P. T. helped me make over the years through them and snippet hosting groups. I wanted to give homage to that success and pay it forward one way or another someday. Up until now, I was afraid of copying other’s ideas. I didn’t feel I had something original enough to use on my own site.

Now though…

Everything has changed. It’s still an idea of paying homage to my successes as a writer, but it’s also to honor my friend’s memory and help keep her alive in my heart.

That’s not to say I won’t be putting my own little twist or rebrand on the weekly prompts she’d been doing for years, but it will largely be a continuation of what she started. With tomorrow being Samhain, the Witch’s New Year, it seemed like the appropriate time to bring it back to life, too.

Without further ado then, here’s the rebirth of Wednesday Words:

Welcome to Wednesday Words Reborn!

To honor P. T. Wyant’s legacy as an author and her incredible influence on my success as a writer, I am taking up the torch of continuing her flash fiction challenge. Every Wednesday I will be posting some kind of flash fiction prompt, hopefully just after midnight Eastern time.

The prompt might be a single line, a photo, a group of things to include, a question, some weird news of the week, a theme, genre category, an idea, or quite literally anything my twisted ADHD-addled mind can come up with. Hell, if I get callbacks and engagement, I might even choose a line or something interesting from a participant’s response as a prompt sometime. (With their permission, of course.)

After the prompt is live, the rest is up to you. This isn’t any kind of contest. At least, not in the near future it isn’t, and whether or not you choose to participate is entirely your choice. The goal here is simply to have fun and exercise that writing muscle with, say, no more than 500 words.

You can choose to leave your flash fiction story as a comment below, or you can post it on your own social media of your choice. If you post elsewhere, I’d love if you dropped a comment below with a link for me to follow and read. You can also tag me across my various social media accounts (Twitter, BlueSky, and Facebook; all of which you can find under my Contact info) when you share your snippet. And if you post on your own blog, a ping back to the original post would be appreciated, though it’s not necessary. Share your #flashfiction tales with the hashtag #WWReborn across social media for others to browse and find.

Hey, if a prompt inspires more than 500 words, too, run with it!

This week’s line prompt:

“Well, that was unexpected.”

Now off with you, Darklings! Write with the frenzy of an overly caffeinated hamster on a wheel! Just don’t trip. Or maybe do trip. It might be more fun that way. As always, I’d love to see what you come up with!

**All stories written hereafter from this prompt are the property, both intellectually and physically, of the author.**