If you’re not familiar, there’s a writing prompt on Twitter for the writing community with the hashtag vss365. The “vss” stands for “very short story,” and the number is self-explanatory. Each month, a new Twitter user is tasked with posting a new word each day to prompt people. With the 280 characters available in a Tweet, a user has to come up with a story of some sort incorporating the posted word-of-the-day, although because you need to include the hashtag, the story itself is typically 273 characters (if you try to be exact, at least).
It also doesn’t necessarily have to be a story. Some play around with the form and structure by doing poetry or a haiku or whatever else.
For Aug. 3, the word is “calculus.”
Here is my entry:
Tim’s #calculus: Sleep it away. Parents thought him a typical middle schooler, only up at hedgehog hours (dad’s analogy: “Our prickly pal!”).
He hadn’t counted on his crush dropping by with a neighbor asking for him. On the porch, hair wild, his nightmare was realized. #vss365
(Fun fact, this one is based on a true experience of mine. Maybe I’ll share it at a later time.)