Here is your mission, should you choose to accept it. This is an experiment to see if this is worth doing once, much less as an ongoing thing. If it works, we'll do this every couple of weeks. If it doesn't, it'll go the way of the Fester's Choice Awards.

This is a bit of Fiction Frenzy. The game is played like this: we will throw open a certain period of time for you to write a short story with a given set of parameters. Anyone is open to participate, including members of the staff. Hopefully when this is all over, we'll have a bunch of cool original material scattered amongst a few sites, all of which will play with the parameters in myriad ways. I'll create a post that links to all the stories and we'll have an instant anthology, just add water. So the rules of engagement are:

1. You are given your parameters and a timeline.
2. You write your short story.
3. You post it to your site or blog or Live Journal or whatever. If you have no whatever, post it to the Gabfest in the Library. E-mail me a link when you're done.
4. At the end of the time period, the post goes live and we all get to marvel at what productive, creative bastards we all are. And really, we are all productive, creative bastards...this just gives you a box to do it in and a bunch of interested readers.

The rules for your short story are:

• 250+ words. No haikus.
• Must be prose or at least something resembling prose. It's a short story after all.
• Must be original. Either your creation or working with things you have permission to. If you want to write using Creative Commons properties, go for it. If you want to write an X-Men story, blech. No thanks. And it must be written during the time period given for the writing frenzy.
• No shite. We will know shite when we see it. This is the equivalent of the Gabfest rule, "Don't be a dick." So no shite, okay?

Okay, got that? Here are your parameters. We're going nice and simple for this test run. Later on we'll start to get crazy.

Deadline: Noon EST, Sunday 2/5. That's a hard stop. At 12:01pm, I will laugh at your late-ass e-mails.
Parameter(s): The story must end with the words "and then she turned away." Beyond that, it's up to you.

Ready? Go.