Clare-Dragonfly

Most importantly: "Harvest Day" won the poll for the anonymous donation, so I've revised it very slightly and added a little more than 300 words. Read it here!

For the theme poll, "fences & gates" is tied with "paths," so unless one of those get more votes before the next Garden of Prose (currently unscheduled), I'll pick one of them.

I also remembered a couple of things I wanted to talk about regarding this Garden of Prose but forgot in the last post ::facepalm:: One is that I'm probably going to leave the prompting open for 48 hours or more next time. Part of that is to give people more time to think and signal boost, and part of that is in hopes of making it more friendly to new people--all the prompters this time around were people I knew already!

What do you think, readers? Also, is there a particular time of week that you would prefer for prompting?

The other thing is a little more personal about my writing. I noticed that I wrote differently depending on what the wordcount I had to work with was. For example, in Magic Dough I left out a lot of emotional details that I would have normally included in order to keep it close to 350 words, and in Some Guys Just Can't Hold Their Nightshade I skipped over a lot of context and backstory. I know this is affected by how long I thought it would take me to get to the part of the story relevant to the prompt, since Gathering Herbs is also quite short but I didn't deliberately leave out any details.

For this Garden of Prose, the way I worked was to basically write the guaranteed wordcount for each prompt (sometimes I wrote a little beyond if I was inspired), post it, and go on to the next one. I wonder if I would write more fully-realized characters and stories if I just wrote the whole story, as it came to me, and then posted the first few paragraphs regardless of whether that reached the relevant part. In that case I could give a bit more of a summary in the notes, as well, which might help guide people on whether they wanted to see more. Posting would be a bit slower, but probably not much slower in most cases than it was last time, since I'll time it for when I have more reliable internet!

Any opinions on that? Did you notice the difference in depth of description? Would you be disappointed if the posted section of your prompt response didn't include what you mentioned in the prompt?

Any other feedback on the Garden of Prose is still welcome as well!