Collaborative ClicheIn 2009, Ruth Arnell created the Collaborative Cliché project, where we reached for every cliché we have seen or read, and used them to create an awful group story. We skewered epic fantasy in that column, but we can find clichés anywhere. Let’s try it again, this time with a sub-genre dear to my heart, urban fantasy.

I’ll start us off. Then you continue the story by adding your cliché-ridden passage in the Comments Section. You can come back and add as many passages as you like.

My soul-beacon tattoo woke me at two in the morning. I got up and slipped into my skintight, gleaming black leather pants, the matching boots with the four-inch stiletto heels, my bustier and a black hoodie. All set for a night of fighting, climbing and running.

Someone in the city was in trouble. I hoped it wasn’t a family member again. I was loyal to my family. Even though I hadn’t spoken to my father, the organized crime lord and city Alpha of the werewolves, in three years, and even though my mother, the mad half-Nephilim, had tried to drag the earth into the sun before getting yanked away and imprisoned in an alternate dimension, and even though the gorgeous man who had grown up with me, who Dad insisted was my half-brother even though that just didn’t feel right, had disappeared a year ago, I was all about family. Loyalty. That’s me…

Now it’s your turn! Add to the story in the Comments. You can come back and add as many passages as you like. One commenter with a USA mailing address will get to choose a book from our Stacks.

Author

  • Marion Deeds

    Marion Deeds, with us since March, 2011, is the author of the fantasy novella ALUMINUM LEAVES. Her short fiction has appeared in the anthologies BEYOND THE STARS, THE WAND THAT ROCKS THE CRADLE, STRANGE CALIFORNIA, and in Podcastle, The Noyo River Review, Daily Science Fiction and Flash Fiction Online. She’s retired from 35 years in county government, and spends some of her free time volunteering at a second-hand bookstore in her home town.

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