This is the second in a series of posts I’m sharing about quick little backstories I wrote for a recent retreat. We were doing a painting session and I’d wanted to help my friends bring their characters to life with some brief prompts. To get them to start telling the story, if you will.

It was satisfying to watch them read through these vignettes, sometimes laughing or reading portions aloud. I heard a lot of positive feedback on the names, which was gratifying because I’d hoped to present names that were unusual, but not too awkward. In this post, I’ll share a few stories for which the characters’ names garnered the most attention.

Delish Monté slowly blinked her eyes. Another twelve hours had passed. She didn’t move, preferring her trusted routine of letting her eyes adjust.

Delish frowned. She shouldn’t have been able to see this well. The closet was in an interior room with no windows. By the usual math, it was now midnight, so it should be pitch black.

Delish stood, stretching her limbs and noting that the louvered doors of the closet were intact, but no light filtered through. She looked up to see a ceiling crisscrossed with cracks through which the illumination came. Something had happened.

Her nostrils registered a strong odor of smoke and burning substances. Someone had tried to burn her safehouse down while she was incapacitated. Their intel was good, but not good enough to know she couldn’t be harmed for the twelve hour she waited in suspended animation. The closet doors fell away as she pushed on them, landing in ash and the muck created by water from firehoses. She knew she should worry that the Collective had finally caught up to her, but this was actually a reprieve. No one would be chasing a dead woman. Eleven hours and fifty-five minutes to find a new hiding place.

Delish Monté is my favorite name of the characters I created. There’s a fun rhythm to it and it’s somewhat provocative in a couple ways that could influence the story you start to tell yourself when you hear it. Similarly, the next character, Jonny Gunsel, is evocative for fans of gangster noir (gunsel: a criminal carrying a gun; I assumed it was short for “gunslinger”, but the word has a Yiddish origin instead). It’s also occuponomous, if you believe in that sort of thing.

In my last post, I described this amazing retreat that I attend every year. It’s probably 75% gaming, 25% whiskey, and 100% fun.

I promised to share the short backstories I’d written as part of the swag I was giving everyone. But before I get to that, let me describe the writing challenge I gave myself.

I had limited time to prepare, once I’d decided on my plan. I needed to print at least a dozen miniatures, then clip, clean, cure, and prime them all. I did the same with another dozen bases or so (I had some failed prints, I mean, some were battle damaged! Waaagh!) I also printed labels for each story card and for the bottom of each base so you’d remember the name of your character and the event where you got it.

And then I needed a dozen backstories of about 200 words each, which after printing, I’d affix a label and laminate. Buuuuut, because I’m a writer who needs to challenge himself, I ended up with sixteen. It wasn’t that much of a hardship because I had more than twenty ideas that I thought would be fun. So let me get to the challenge.