We’ve made it to the midpoint of my 12 in 12 Monthly Writing Prompt Challenge, with Story #6, Collective. I have a lot of thoughts on how the project is going so far and what comes next, but that can be an entire post on its own. I will point out though that a common theme has emerged; finding a reason to keep going when everything seems hopeless.

Collective continues this theme. It is probably the darkest story I have written so far, being about what I think people would do if we confirmed that hell was real, and for everyone. This is my childhood fear of going to hell meeting my current feelings of depression, and I think it turned into something quite good. It ended up being long too, coming in at almost 10,000 words which poured out of me.

Being so long I didn’t get to give it a second lot of editing which I think it needs (The ‘T’ key on my keyboard was broken this month, so a lot of words were missing their ts or had extra ones. This was a bad time to have a protagonist I referred to only as ‘he’.) To be honest though, I think most of these stories could use more editing. That’ll probably be something I tackle at the end of the year. Regardless, I’ve been happy with how these stories have turned out, and I’m really happy to share Collective with the world. You can start reading it now:

2026 Monthly Story Challenge #6

Collective (Wordcount 9923)

By Jayde Holmes

cw: body horror, depression and severe hopelessness, characters try to prevent their own existence

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He was six when his great-great-great-grandmother came to live with the family and he loved her. Her presence made him feel like he was in one of those happy families from the old movies. He’d liked Biggest Nana well enough as a human when he’d talked to her at the morgue, but he’d always wanted a puppy. He’d learnt early though that there weren’t enough resources for pets that didn’t used to be people these days, and he loved that Biggest Nana had found a way around that.

He was ten when Biggest Nana died, which was old enough to understand what was happening and be hopeful. For three days in a row, he went to the weed-filled park at the centre of their identical grey cube house neighbourhood, but he didn’t play with the other kids on the playground. Instead, he went to the small grassy area where he and Biggest Nana had played, and ran around, imagining her beside him as an animal spirit.

A month later Mum came home shaking and confirmed that Biggest Nana had been spotted in hell.

Click Here to Continue Reading

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I’ll be posting again soon to talk about all six stories from the first half of the year, as well as what I’m planning for the rest of the project. The first story of the second half will be called ‘Judgement’, which after writing a story about hell feels a bit familiar, but I don’t want to re-tread the same path as Collective. I am going to try and move away from the surviving hopelessness theme, and try to do a few stories that are lighter in tone.

We’ll see how that goes

~ Jayde