Lindsay Gurka

I finally did it. I’ve been stalking the Reedsy Prompts weekly contest for the last seven weeks or so, maybe longer, that’s how long I’ve had a profile up there at least. Anyways, I finally submitted something!

It’s a story I wrote a bit ago but finally finished editing today, with 10 hours of the contest to go, and only an hour before I had to leave to do the kid-pick-up gauntlet and then race to work. This is so cool though. I’m excited and nervous. I wanna dance and puke. I could chase this feeling forever. Now I’m over here thinking about the next story and the next contest and if there are any other contests that I can submit to this week. I have only one shift between me and the next set of prompts, so that’ll have to do for now.

This story had come about in the middle of some severe writer’s block. I have this massive encyclopedia on supernatural folk and did the thing where you flip and just plop your finger on a page. My finger landed on the entry of Irodeasa, a fairy queen, who is also known as a fairy of death.

I felt there had to be something in there about mushrooms, too, so I found a cool little mushroom named Little Gypsies, and that was it. Poor Ivan, the main man, had no chance. All he did was crash, find himself in the middle of nowhere, then all this. And it was a short story, so things moved rather quickly, but I’m sort of thinking about how it could be made into something a bit longer, maybe a novella? Anywho, fingers crossed his fictional death results in an exciting new chapter of life for me.

Sorry, Ivan.