Reddit mentions of Purity of Mind

There was a prompt along the lines of "A long time ago, everyone had perfect control over one of the elements apiece, now everyone through mixed breeding has very small control over all of them." One of the posts went on to be published on Amazon, I loved the post and bought it, "Purity of Mind" by Roger Ostrander. If you like spy thrillers and magic, I'd check it out. Link

This one's easy! In fact, it ties nicely into:

> self-promotions

TL;DR

Every so often, something I write takes off. Now this, alone, is a great experience. Coming back to a story and seeing hundreds (or thousands!) of upvotes is awesome, and even better is having my inbox explode with people who really enjoyed the story (having an audience enjoy my work is why I write, after all). And, of course, the inevitable calls for a continuation.

That's hard. The way I write is to start at the ending and work backward, so a lot - if not all - of what I write is self-contained and I don't have any greater intentions, so I don't usually do it.

Then this prompt happened. My story's the top one and like my other stories, I had that ending to the first part already planned out. It was super exciting that the prompt took off and I didn't have any plans to keep going, but it was by far the most popular thing that I'd ever done.

I'd (self-)published a book on Amazon before, something that was basically an in-joke for my friends, so I knew how it was done. And I wouldn't mind doing it again. But I didn't know if I could actually write a story this way, wholesale, just coming up with a longer-term ending for something that hadn't been bubbling up in the back of my mind for years.

But I thought up an outline, set myself a schedule for writing updates in my sub (1/week), and kept going. And people, much to my surprise, stayed with me. I expected a huge bounce rate but almost everyone stuck around. Another redditor even got me beta readers, which was enormously helpful.

So, finally, after I'd written and read and re-read and edited and re-edited over and over, and after I'd finally put it up on Amazon, there was only one more thing to do:

The Announcement

That was my best experience on Writing Prompts. Seeing the fruition of everything I'd done and having everyone enjoy it. People ranging from "I followed that and it's awesome to see it come out" to "I saw that prompt and wondered whatever happened" to just general awesomeness. It. Was. Great.

I don't write here expecting that kind of thing to happen. I've had prompts both before and after that one take off in similar ways, and never went anywhere with them. But for that one, everything came together. It was an amazing experience and I'm incredibly glad I did it, and it's all thanks to this sub. :)