And we call it 5MinuteFiction because you write a nice little piece of fiction in five minutes. Crazy people that we are. Are you new? Get in there and start scrapping!

The Rules

* You get five minutes to write a piece of prose in any style or genre

* You must directly reference today’s prompt: familiarity

(Note: The prompt is the word. The picture is for decoration/inspiration or may be completely random.)

* Post your entry as a comment to this post.

I’ll close the contest at 1:45. That gives you 5 minutes to write and ten to accommodate the vagaries of relative time, technology, and the fickle internets. If you are confused or just want to whine, feel free to email me.

At the close of the contest, this week’s guest judge, Jeff Bennington, @TweetTheBook will nominate five finalists. I’ll put the nominees in the poll on the side of the page, and at 9:00 EST tomorrow I’ll close the poll and declare the winner.

For updates, you can subscribe to my RSS Feed, or follow me on twitter.

What’s the prize? Well, nothing, obviously. But we’ll all agree to tweet and/or blog about the winner of today’s contest so their fame and fortune will be assured.

A Few Notes:

* In the interest of time and formatting, it’s best to type straight into the comment box. It’s also smart to do a quick highlight and copy before you hit “post” just in case the internets decide to eat your entry. If your entry doesn’t appear right away, email me sometimes comments go into the suspected spam folder and I have to dig them out.

* I reserve the right to remove hate speech or similar but I’m not too picky about the other stuff.

* This is all for fun and self-promotion. So be sure to put your twitter handle at the end of your post and a link to your blog if you have one.