Many years ago I entered one of the quarterly “24 Hour Short Story” contests at Writers-Weekly.com. Essentially, the idea was to write a story based off of a single first line, no longer than the given word limit (1,000 words in the case of that particular contest), within 24 hours. Now I am by no means a fast writer. It may or may not have taken me forty-five minutes just to write the last three sentences. But it sounded like fun, and 1,000 words was surely doable.