A woman wakes up delirious in her home and struggles to piece together the puzzle of her life.

The Verdant Raven Writing Battle is a 250-word, peer-judged writing contest that I was unfamiliar with, but got a crash course in very quickly.

In my second WritingBattle.com competition, I received prompts for the haunted house genre, a party organizer character, and a cane as an object. I told myself I wasn’t going to swap out any cards so I could expand my writing as much as possible.

I knew from the start I wasn’t going to do a traditional haunted house story—this was either going to help me or (pardon the pun) haunt me. The prompt aided me in the final direction of the story and, after some chiseling, I molded the story I have today.