26 Comments
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Prince Kudu’Ra's avatar

I wanna read more from prompt 2! That was appropriately bracing, chilling, and thrilling!

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Magnetic S.'s avatar

Man I’m like what happened next!

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John Noire's avatar

Thanks for reading! While Prompt 3 doesn't fill in the gaps it does reveal how this story ultimately ends 👀

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Magnetic S.'s avatar

This was cold brother

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DWC's avatar

Loved these!!

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DWC's avatar

Loved these stories !!

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Ricky Denham's avatar

Bro you struck gold here. This was a chilling one. You paint the picture so well with your details here. I can see, and hear, and feel the heat and the cold weather and the negative effect from your subjects. Another brilliant piece 💎

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John Noire's avatar

Appreciate you reading bro 🙏🏾

If you haven't already, would definitely recommend checking out the Flash-Style, Flash Fiction movement on Substack as it definitely got the creative juices flowing for this piece

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Ricky Denham's avatar

Bet, say less

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Magnetic S.'s avatar

Love all three of these

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John Noire's avatar

Thanks man, know this genre is more of your wheelhouse so I appreciate the feedback 👊🏾

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alex b.'s avatar

I thoroughly enjoyed this. Reading stories about drugs, violence and betrayal are my favorite and you wrote these flash fics so well. Are these connected in some way? I read them as different moments for a main character with the ending being the arrest at the party.

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John Noire's avatar

Hi Alex, thanks for reading! Yes, they are all interconnected. The woman drug dealer taken into custody in the first story is the same woman who broke out of jail and is on-the-run in the second story and then pops up at the end of the third story after her finding her ex-lover in Alexandria.

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alex b.'s avatar

That's awesome how you made separate prompts work together. This is really good!👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽

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and now Miguel's avatar

Ice cold 🥶 I felt that blue steel on my neck 😵 💀 when her lover gets merked. Some good ass second person story telling be really having you embodied in the characters. Great pic of Nas, that set the tone really well.

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John Noire's avatar

Thanks! Happy to hear that you enjoyed it. Yeah once I put that pic in, I knew that I had to come correct 😂👍🏾

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and now Miguel's avatar

dead ass that exactly what I was thinking, but you came with, you came with it 🙏🏽 lol

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ARC's avatar

Yo!!!! I was wondering about the daughter! This was dope AF. I see you gotta continue it. I love the angle of the evolving story with the prompts for inspiration. So dope. Keep the story going!!!! This getting cinematic.

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KanikaXx's avatar

I really enjoyed the fill-in-the-blanks characterizations! Do you feel compelled to expand this story into a larger work or leave it as is?

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John Noire's avatar

Appreciate you reading 🙏🏾

Tbh I’m content with leaving it as is because I feel that adding anything else would just dilute it

The only other thing that I wish I could have done was to add a mini-story about the daughter but I couldn’t find a way to satisfyingly write about her using the prompts available for this exercise

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KanikaXx's avatar

Understood. I'm super curious about what this would have looked like through the daughters lens. Through age, experience. I see space here for something completely unexpected. Great reads!

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John Noire's avatar

Now updated with the daughter's story. Hope you like it!

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Amirah Jones's avatar

Whew, this is great storytelling! Prompt 1 was my favorite, but I enjoyed all 3! It may look different for each of us readers but your words really create a whole imaginative scene of what's going on throughout.

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John Noire's avatar

Thanks Amirah! Tbh that's been the goal with a lot of my storytelling (and why I try to avoid character descriptions as much as possible). It's so that people can fill in the gaps and picture a world that makes sense to them. The fun part, in this instance, is that all the short stories are interconnected so the scene you imagined in Prompt 1 can carry all the way through to Prompt 3

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Amirah Jones's avatar

Ahhh, that makes so much sense and I love that! Wow, yesss!! When I got to Prompt 2 and read the line about getting the handcuffs off and then “Is it for the daughter you left behind, determined to follow in her mother’s footsteps?” in Prompt 3, my mind instantly went to that initial imagery I visioned while reading Prompt 1!

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ARC's avatar

This was such a thoughtful, compelling, creative, and unique way to weave three totally separate disconnected prompts into three chapters of a cohesive narrative about the fates of our choices. To me, this is the power of post social media fiction: the conversation, the way the reader and the writer, the audience and the performer can change places, remix and slide together and define against each other in a way that the pre-social media fiction landscape could not. This was such a powerful way to show what we can all create together.

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