The goat died of cirrhosis

I've been writing brief prompts since 2002. Some of my writer friends also do prompts and if you spend any amount of time with me, you know that I'm always looking for great prompts to write from. Today at Writing Friday lunch, my friend Eileen announced that she was going to be reading her poems at a goat roast. After the inevitable jokes about saying deprecating remarks about goats, Sue told a story about an alcoholic goat from her past, a goat who loved beer and who died of cirrhosis of the liver. A prompt if I ever heard one.

I'm closing in on completing the 100-prompt challenge I set for myself. Such challenges are usually a do-one-a-day idea to keep us writing. Write a poem a day. Write a chapter a day. Write a prompt a day. But as I have said before, in spite of my rather overdeveloped sense of personal responsibility and discipline, I rebel at the tyranny of once-a-day practices (except brushing my teeth and journaling) so I tend to follow through on these writing ideas in my own fashion. This morning I wrote 6 prompts. Three of them revolved around an interesting new character named Muriel, who was last seen at the bowling alley Friday night (prompt was "last seen"). Then I wrote a personal story about the one night I spent in Montreal and two other fictional bits with new characters. I'm pretty restless today and if it hadn't been Writing Friday and if Pam hadn't wanted to use my computer for a while, I might have been in my office working and pretending to write. As it was, I sat out on terrace in the cool summer quiet and kept asking myself to sit still and I wrote those prompts. I stayed at it long enough to get past the obligation and into the stream of things. So glad I did.