Every year, the Codex Writer’s Group has a flash fiction competition called Weekend Warrior. For five weekends in a row, we receive prompts every Friday night at 9pm Eastern and have to turn around a 750-word story by Sunday night at 2am. The competition has been going on for long enough that we’ve developed a series of traditional prompts, the most beloved of which is something called the “Title Rummage Sale.”
In the title rummage, run by the amazing Vylar Kaftan, participants click a link to be taken to a random set of five titles that were either created by Vylar or donated by other writers. You can click to refresh the page, but if you do that, there’s no guarantee you will ever see one of those first five titles again. Whenever you find a title that speaks to you, you claim it and the title is yours.
I don’t recall who donated “The Clearest Window in Hinterlight Abbey” but the instant I saw it, I knew that title was meant to be mine. I’ve always been fascinated by the regular clergy (monks and nuns who follow a “rule”, one of the most famous of which is the Rule of St. Benedict) and the word “hinterlight” just begged for a science fictional definition.
The rest is space nuns.
