The way Writer In Motion works is our "game master" aka Professional Editor Jeni Chappelle, picked our prompt. She decided to choose the photo featured above by Casey Horner. We had a week to figure out our first draft.

My first impressions were:
Wall-E
post-apocalyptic
Lake dried up from climate change
Different planet

I started pantsing a sci-fi story about a space ship's crew and what they would be looking for on this old boat.

...and I wrote 1,300 words...

... and I wasn't sold on it.

It felt clunky and like I was having to really push myself to be excited about it. It wasn't a bad first draft, but it was serious, and I wanted something which made me laugh.

What it did do was get me thinking about mummified bodies in the hold of this boat.

And then I began thinking about what kind of bugs would be there, and in my mind I had a little story going which reminded me of A Bugs Life, but with cockroaches.

I also decided to read some short stories by one of my favorite writers, Neil Gaiman, to see how he crafted them to get a completely closed story rather than something that felt like it was only an opening to some larger story.

So at 10pm, after I'd already written one first draft, i scrapped it and started drafting another.

A completely different story which I could barely type fast enough. It made me laugh - which was the most important thing. It was exactly what was searching for.

Read on to see what my first (unedited) draft of what became Surviving Gravity looked like.