2025 New Year's writing resolution: spend 10 minutes a day getting words on the page.

Today's 10-minute writing exercise is a love story! We're writing caring notes to a struggling loved one, and as usual your anonymish host is writing along. She got pretty into her idea -- she might actually build it out into a full story (or maybe save it & work it up for February's Flash Week).

This is a no-homework podcast! Every episode, we build in ten minutes of time for ourselves to do the assignment, and the assignment is always to write write write.

You can write to our daily writing prompt, but you could also:

• journal
• brainstorm
• write for your work in progress

All that matters is that you do write and you don't cheat and you don't stop writing until the music comes in.

In the US, we celebrate Valentine's Day in February. This day is usually seen as a celebration of romantic love, but love is a many-splendored thing. We love our parents, we love our pets, we love writing, we love New York. This month we'll be writing about love in all its forms.

For today's ten-minute writing exercise:

Write a series of loving notes sent daily to a loved one who is going through a hard time. It can be a lover, but it could also be a parent, a child, a sibling, a dear friend. Over the course of the story, hint at the cause of the hard time but do not state it explicitly.

Our themes this month are:

• Love in all its forms
• Dialogue
• Comedy Writing Step by Step by Gene Perret

We will also write a complete work of flash fiction together in a week from Feb 17 - Feb 23. No pre-work needed, and as always, zero homework outside of our ten minutes a day. This month we'll use Dan Harmon's story circles method to plan out our stories.