Love

The prompt for the first January Business Card Fiction Challenge is a picture with a sentence. I got the inspiration for this story last week, when Madeline was crying late at night because she was crook. It fitted the tone of it well, so I shoe-horned it into my entry. The original seed was a bit longer and more detailed, but I think the brevity suits it better.

The prompt

For design purposes, you can squish a lot more in the card space if you paste in sentences individually so that you can rejig the spacing between them - especially if you have some paragraphs. I wanted my card to look sexy not just with font, but with a nice background too, so I grabbed a chunk of this picture. Font is good old Impact. I've got all these lovely fonts I'm gagging to use, but a lot of them don't look so flash in small sizes.

(I'm thinking I should start limiting my introduction to a business card size as well, that might have to be for next weeks challenge).

Offering

China is part of the file name for the prompt for the second Business Card Fiction, but I've recast it off the waters of Vietnam, seeing as how I'm living here  - that also lets me slip in some accented letters and a different font to spice it up from just normal text. I also selected colours from the picture to try and liven it up a bit. They're sort of Christmassy too, so that's a nice touch.. The final font is popular on shop fronts and printouts here, because it imitates calligraphy, although it doesn't seem to support diacritics which I find a bit strange. But I guess those accents only help people like me who have to look up the meaning of words. Even at high font sizes it can be a bit tricky to read.

The prompt:

The story:

For those of you who struggle with the font as I sometimes do, the last line reads The Dragon would bring revenge

I saw Business Card Fiction being talked about a while back, and added it to my RSS feed as I loved the idea of it... and I'd forget about it otherwise. Instead of a word count, you're limited by space. To some degree you can tweak it, based on what font you use (and I am a sucker for sexy fonts - though most of them are pretty illegible if you go too small). My story wouldn't fit landscape, but there was buckets of space left over when it was portrait. For the inaugural prompt, we had this lovely scene:

And after talking about how I love fonts, what did I end up running with? Times New Roman