For week six of Jennie Coughlin’s Story Cubes Challenge, I thought I’d intro the story I wrote with a little information about the two characters I’ve been using in these challenge stories.

Mai Fisher and Alexei Bukharin are covert operatives for a fictional intelligence organization within the United Nations. I’ve written back story and, oh, four or five novels about them for the past fifteen to twenty years. (If you click on the “Works in Progress” tab above you can see descriptions of those novels in progress.)

I thought the Story Cubes Challenge would be a good vehicle for exploring things about the characters that don’t show up in the novels and back story. It’s been a lot of fun because I’ve written some things I never thought much about. I mean, back story simply said Alexei had defected from the Soviet Union, but I’d never written about how or when that happened, so I did in “Desert Nights and Weeping Flowers.”

The stories are vignettes, glimpses of the characters, and I’m learning a lot more about the two people and the world I created. Much fun.

So, here’s today’s story cubes:

Here’s what I saw in the cubes: (l to r) alien; padlock/locked; fight/fighting; earth/world; clothes on the line/hung out to dry; sadness; counting money; reading; and arrow.

This week’s story is called “Boredom and Terror.” (If you don’t see the link, hover your cursor over the Story Cubes Challenge tab above and select it from the drop-down menu.) And I live for your constructive comments. 😉

If you’d like to give it a try, use the photo of the cubes to the left and write a story of any length using what you see in the cubes, then go to Jennie Coughlin’s Welcome to Exeter blog and post a link to your story.