Crunch: The Undeliverable Message
Writing Exercise #8
I was thinking about a creature feature about the “mailer daemon” that returns undeliverable emails:
I’ve never written a creature-feature before. I consider them challenging and I struggle to make them believable. So this was an experiment! Let me know how I did.
If you have ideas for Prompts, Crunches, Sprints, Relays, Stretches, Fables, or other writing exercises in the future, please leave them in the comments! If you would like to write your own take for this exercise, please comment with a link so that I can see what you wrote and support your work, maybe even share your version with my subscribers. Please let me know if you have any thoughts, comments, or constructive criticisms as well!
Enjoy!
Crunch: Write about a mailer daemon
The submission deadline closed in 30 minutes. Curse it all! Where did the time go!
He clacked away on his computer, trying to get his finest one thousand words for the contest. He didn’t have time to edit, so he just had to write carefully. One thousand words. How hard could it be? He’d written one thousand words before, in no time at all. Why was it so hard? 25 minutes! Ah!
Suddenly, the story clicked. The words flowed, the ideas made it on to the digital page. He re-read it with ten minutes left. Good as it’s gonna be. When he opened his email, the power flickered in his apartment. Was there a storm coming? Oh man I gotta be quick.
What was the email it had to go to? He wrote it down—but what if it was wrong? Better double check.
Five minutes to the deadline. He got the email address. He put it in the email. Clacked out a quick “To Whom it may concern.”
With two minutes left, he hit “send”.
The power flickered off—the apartment was dark as the abyss.
Two glowing white eyes opened in front of him—he couldn’t tell if they were real, or hallucinated. He couldn’t make out any features, but it was behind his monitors—it seemed to climb over the monitor.
The power came back on—the creature vanished. When his screens flickered back, it was 12:01am. In his inbox was a message: Mailer Daemon: Returned Undeliverable.
(250 words )
Talk to me!
Your feedback helps to improve my writing. I would really appreciate a comment on your thoughts on this writing exercise. Consider telling me your thoughts about:
Have you ever snuck in an assignment or submission too close to the deadline?
What’s your favorite creature-feature movie?
What’s your go-to midnight snack?
Thank you for reading! I hope you enjoy! Come back next week for another writing exercise!
Have you taken a look at the section called “The Volume” recently? All my longer-form stories are kept there! Be sure to take a look and catch up on any stories you’ve missed!
Thank you and God bless!
I love the idea of a creature stealing your data. A professor of mine used to call these “cyber gremlins,” any time an email failed to send. 😂
Go to midnight snack is usually (weirdly specific) Belvita breakfast sandwiches 😂