Ancient Chinese Secret: Origin

January 21, 2008. That's the exact day I decided I wanted to be a writer. Since then, I haven't written tons, but what I think is a fairly decent amount-- about 119,000 words of finished fiction stories. If word count doesn't mean diddly squat to you, that's somewhere around 500 pages.

After that amount of writing, it still seems weird to me that this story, Ancient Chinese Secret, is the first story I have ever written that didn't contain at least one person I know! I know that I need to work on character development skills, so I decided that I better make up all the characters. And just in case you were wondering, it wasn't nearly as fun. And it's not so much my normal writing subject matter, either. (Translation: my main person didn't have any special abilities or save the world as we know it.) But, it was still dang fun to write! It was an assignment in my creative writing class-- we had to write a fiction story based on the writing prompt "When would a gift be considered a threat?"

This is a story about a girl that is addicted to Chinese food, which is all a happy and good (albeit not necessarily a very exciting) thing. That is, until her fortunes start coming true.

And yes. When you have a friend who is addicted to Chinese food (love you, Judy!), it was hard to not make her be the main character. Or to put her SOMEWHERE in the story. But, I stuck to my guns and did all made-up characters. But it didn't stop me from naming a character Judy! She wasn't based off Judy, but it still made me happy to name her that.

Anyway, I promised a few of you I would post this when I finished it. It is a short story, but still 24 pages long, so I am going to post it in parts-- one part a day.