200!!!!! · Word Crafters

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200!!!!!

We've hit 200 Skoolers!!! alright!!!!

I'll add the list of all the new folks in October here when I get home later this evening but I just wanted you to think about this one: 200 people spending 10 minutes of time is just over 33 hours of time

Since this is a site for authors and help with writing stories lets try writing one together...

I'm going to start a story idea and everyone who wants to join in add a paragraph or more to it. At the end of the week I'll compile it all and do something fun with it to share.

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Genre rolled: Weird Western.

Title: The Last Well in Marrow County

In the drought-cracked territory of Marrow County, every town survives on a single deep well, and every well is owned by the Cartwright Water Company. Orsolya Vance has spent eleven years as the company’s licensed dowser, a job that mostly means telling ranchers where not to dig. She doesn’t believe in the magic her grandmother swore by. She believes in soil samples, brass rods, and a steady paycheck. That changes the morning she rides out to Ferris Bend to survey a failing well and finds the bucket coming up full of warm, black water that hums against her teeth.

By nightfall, the whole town has gone quiet in a way that has nothing to do with the heat. People stand in doorways facing east, mouths slightly open, unblinking, until the hum fades near dawn. Orsolya’s only ally is Dutch Abernathy, a one-armed undertaker who has buried nine Ferris Bend residents in two weeks, all with their lungs full of dry dust and no water in their bodies at all. When Orsolya checks the company’s survey records, she finds her own signature on a deed she never signed, granting Cartwright the mineral rights to something called “the Sleeper below Marrow.”

The company’s regional manager, Silas Pruitt, arrives by private rail car with twelve armed men and a polite smile, offering Orsolya a generous promotion if she’ll sign off that the well is simply contaminated. But the hum is getting louder, the doorway-standers are drifting toward the old mine shaft, and Orsolya is starting to suspect that her grandmother’s magic was never a superstition. It was a leash.

The question driving the story: what happens to a county built on top of a sleeping thing when the one person who can still feel it decides to wake it up, or to keep it asleep?

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200!!!!!