A Baker's Dozen of Christmas What-Ifs

A Baker's Dozen: Intro

What if the Universe turned left instead of right?

This book is my thirteen entries into the Twelve Prompts of Christmas contest, created by WriterOnTheIsland for the 2019 Christmas holiday.

Each of these thirteen stories is based on real-life events. Some of them are plain-old non-fiction. Can you guess which ones? The rest of them tell of real-life events, or a combination of real-life events, but from a different branch of the alternate-Universe tree.

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Examples of ways in which reality has branched: 

*  What if my Dad went pro as an Opera singer rather than choosing the higher paying engineering opportunities?

*  What if I only had a couple of siblings, rather than six of them? 

*  What if I didn't move to New York, but instead stayed with Boston Ballet Company? 

*  What if my family moved back to Lexington when we all grew up and emptied out the house?

*  What if my first boyfriend had been older than me instead of younger than me?

*  What if my high-school crush and I had crossed paths again after high-school?

*  What if Tropical Cyclone Sarai had formed four days earlier and had swung closer to Fiji?

*  What if my brother came out at Christmas Dinner instead of after my Dad's passing?

... and so on.

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Each story had mandatory prompts.  Each story will include a brief intro, describing the instructions I was meant to follow in writing the story.  Each story will also state what day it was in the 12 days of Christmas.  You may notice there are two for day six.  One of those was something I'd written for Q-Link in 1988 (earning 2nd prize in a contest there.)

Some of the stories occur in the same Universe.  I've clustered those together, regardless of what day they were in the contest. 

Finally, I confess that I tend to be wordy and often surpassed the 500-word expectation. And since I was pushing these out one-a-day, and since entry into the contest was partly because of the hope to learn more about editing, I did not wield a heartless editor's knife.  Not yet.  May still happen once I'm confident of that.

I hope you enjoy!  Let me know what you think! In other words, V.C.S.  (Vote, Comment, Share.)  <3

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All photographs are copyright as attributed.

All text is © 2019 Diane Bryan, all rights reserved.