follow me into the rain

Two more writing exercises with a Gintoki/Katsura theme.

First one was cheating a bit since it used emojis to signify who's talking, thus being able to be more succinct than it otherwise could have done.

Comfortably Mysterious

Second one, an experiment that maybe doesn't quite work (but that's exactly what these tweetfics are for, to try out stuff in a no-pressure way):

Contradictions: Thoughts vs Words

I've started a practice inspired by some Japanese Gintama fans I follow on Twitter. They use the character restraint on Old Twitter, 120 characters, to write some extremely short fanfic based on a pairing and prompt. Since Japanese characters can say more than Roman letters, I took the liberty of expanding the limit to 230 characters, or in other words exactly how much you can use to fill up a single tweet.

The whole point of this is for it to be a kind of ephemeral throwaway writing exercise, lowering your inhibitions because since it's so tough to write something actually good, I just... write something. 100-word drabbles actually feel intidimidating to me (though 300-word ficlets don't) because they're so much about being a Challenge to be Only This Short, But Good! But these Twitter tiny-fics don't feel like they have to be good. Especially since there's no edit button on Twitter...

Since these tweetfics are meant to be ephemeral, I really shouldn't save the links to them at all, but here I am posting them anyway! Eternally wishy-washy, that's me.

The pairing is Gintoki/Katsura, no spoilers. The first three are light-hearted, the last two more serious. I'm afraid I came up with the prompts myself, so they're not "pure" prompts.

Think about what you did
Ear-Cleaning
Souvenirs
Relief
Mask

It's interesting to be restricted to character count rather than word count. Have any of you done similar writing exercises?