Welcome to the place that is dedicated to getting you writing (again?). Maybe you have absolutely no idea where to start but have always wanted to try being a writer. Maybe you want to write the great American novel or you thought you'd write a poem about hidden life of a grain of sand. Maybe you just need a little inspiration to get you started or you find yourself just a little stuck. Maybe you find yourself trying to break out of your comfort zone or mix things up at work. Whatever your reason for landing here, practicing a little creativity can impact your life in ways you didn't expect.
But let's be honest. Creativity is a muscle and it needs exercise to work properly. That's where this series comes in. With any luck, this series will get your creative juices flowing and get you thinking in ways you hadn't before. Throughout the summer, we posted a couple of prompts every week. We cut back a little during the school year but will attempt to post at least one prompt a month. If you are interested in more, not only are there prompt sites online, we also have a prompt booklet you can get from us and enough creative people on staff to maybe come up with an idea you can run with if you come in and ask.
Here's the thing: Romance is hard at the best of times. Finding that right person at the right time, getting to know one another, finding fun things to do and new ways of doing them, figuring out whether it is worth staying with someone after you have a serious fight... okay, that last one is a little dark, but still a valid point. But in the middle of a pandemic, any one of those steps can be hampered by all of those new rules, limitations and guidelines set in place to keep us safe, if a little stir crazy, too.
You'd have to have been practically suicidal pre-vaccination to go into a crowded college bar, offer someone a beer and get lost in the throng of pulsing, jostling, dancing bodies. It happened, but it invariably led to super-spreader scenarios. Similar could be said for going to restaurants, movie theatres, sporting events, etc. But if you weren't into putting yourself into pandemically dangerous positions, figuring out where to go on the date was one of the least of our problems, especially when you put into account the times that we had to quarantine, We couldn't go out anywhere, couldn't hang out. Touch and seeing a person's full face was pretty much out of the question. While many of us could keep in contact via phone, not only is that putting all non-live-in relationships into the "long distance" mode without the distance, that still meant meeting people was nigh impossible. Many of us were stuck in a strange sort of limbo in which one must wonder: "What do you do on a date during a pandemic?"
It's getting a little easier now that the pandemic is starting to wind down, so let's look back on that time in our lives we all so want to move on from.
So here's your prompt: Write a story about summer love — the quarantine edition.