Coven Inc.'s Official Scratchpad for Scrivening

The Presence was back, and planted squarely on his goddamn face.

A panicked flail, the first time, a hard shove the second and third, simply rolling over had all worked in the past, but he was no closer to determining the source of the phenomenon. Some mornings it felt like a weight on his chest, but just as often it was a weight across his face, a spreading, soft, but suffocating warmth that caught him off guard and stopped his intake of air. Ian had considered congestive problems, the possibility of some kind of massive sleep apnea, or goddamned night terrors, until one morning he woke up and shoved the thing off his face (why would that help a congestive problem? how the fuck would that work?) and the sensation of claws raked across his face.  He heard something thump on the ground for the first time as he hissed in pain, but when he sat up to look nothing was there, no sign of disturbance among the piles of clothes fallen by the wayside of his bed.

Clearly, he was going nuts.

Clearly, he was not going nuts, as he examined the small neat stripes of red across his cheekbone in the foggy bathroom mirror. The shower had cleared his head, but his new morning ritual of not-fucking-breathing felt no less real, and it’s hard to imagine how he could have Crazy™ed his way into putting claw marks on his face in his sleep.

The new apartment had felt a little creepy, but no more so than any new, untested space was. He’d felt watched, but it wasn’t until the breathing problem he’d given any credence to the primal voice in the back of his head shouting at him that he wasn’t alone.

“….hello?”

He felt like an idiot, staring out from the safe warm alcove of his bathroom, in only a towel, unshaved, as he surveyed his bedroom for potential supernatural threats.

“Is someone there?”

He was definitely an idiot.  Ian’s shoulders slumped as he scrubbed his hand through damp hair, turned to shuffle back into the wet warmth and deal with his scruff, and dove face first towards the side of the tub as something ankle high neatly tripped him on its way out the door. He scrabbled and barely caught himself, inches from breaking teeth and nose and neck on the faded enamel, panting and swearing as he slumped to the floor to let the warning lights of panic die down in his brain a little bit. Or ramp up. He was living with some kind of goddamned malevolent spirit. Fuck. It had just tried to kill him. It had been attempting to smother him for days. Fuck. What the fuck was he going to do?

This blog is dedicated one hundred percent to honing the craft of writing. Not through an advancement or elevation of the art itself, but through personal slogging in the trenches to find a system that works for us.

Much like a sketchbook, it is the firm belief of the participants that any writing is better than no writing at all, and it is better to have the freedom to experiment and get messy than to wait for perfection to arrive. Because as far as we can tell, that doesn’t fucking happen. So let’s get muddy and dirty and fertile with language. That wording sounded less gross in my head.

There will be One Prompt each week. A prompt may be an image, it may be a song, it may be a situational suggestion or anything else that could spark an emotional response. We may open up submissions at a later date for random denizens of the internet to give us suggestions for things to write about, that would be cool.

The form of response could be anything- koan, short prose essay, dirty limerick, but we will try to tend towards the format of short stories. There is no limit or minimum at present, but at least a page would be nice.