Late summer is fair time in my neck of the woods, and besides midway rides of dubious safety, there aren’t many things more traditional than the pie contest at the county fair. I hope you guys saved your fork, because this week’s theme is going to be “Slice of Life.”

Now, the crust holding a Slice-of-Life story together is the idea that most of the time we’re not engaged in life-or-death plots. We’re not saving the world. The stakes aren’t really that high and if we fuck it up, then there’s probably still some hope for us.

The crust is great—can’t really have a good slice without a decent crust—but what I want people to focus on this week is the filling.

Characters are the filling in a S-o-L story. They are the soul and the flavor, and I really, really want to read about some flavorful characters this week. Maybe they’re sweet, maybe they’re salty, but they should all have depth and complexity. I need to believe that these are real people, even if they’re a little weird.

The setting for your story needn’t be mundane, as long as the characters are believable and facing the small challenges of everyday life instead of grappling with mega-crises.

I’m going to be offering ingredients—inspirations and hell rules. Inspirations are easy, you can ask me for a setting or a type of character to put in your story and I’ll give you ones that aren’t too difficult and they’ll cost you 100 words. Hell rules will be devilishly delightful. I won’t be pulling punches with them and expect to get a challenge—it might be a weird character you have to work into your story, or a very unconventional setting, or some sort of stylistic demand. But if you choose to get a hell rule, you’ll GET an extra 500 words.

Furthermore, critting is caring. If you write a crit of someone’s story in a past TD, I’ll credit the word-count of your crit toward your word count this week.

So, to sum up:
-Write a Slice of Life story
-Any setting you like, but make sure the characters have some serious character
-Start with 1500 words
-Buy character or setting inspirations for 100 words each.
-Challenge yourself to a hell rule and receive an additional 500 words.
-Be a real pal and crit someone else’s story, you’ll get the same number of words credited to yours.