Post-Nut Clarity

A community writing prompt.

Pranjall Kumar

This is all Night Cracks’ fault.

A few days ago he dropped the phrase “Post-Nut Clarity” into a comment thread and then wandered off, completely unaware that he’d just infected my brain.

It would. Not. Leave.

The more I rolled it around, the less interested I became in the obvious interpretation and the more interested I became in everything that comes afterwards. Then I threw the idea into a Note, mostly because I wanted to know whether it was just my weird little brain doing weird little brain things.

Apparently... no.

Instead I got story ideas, confessions, gender theory, jokes, late-capitalism discourse, people volunteering to write, and one glorious suggestion that Nutbush City Limits absolutely had to feature somewhere.

So, seeing as my thumb is buggered, burnout is still being an absolute goblin, and I can’t seem to write much myself at the moment... I’ve decided to start some shit instead.

Welcome to Post-Nut Clarity.

Now, before anyone panics...

Yes, the title is rude. No, this is not an instruction to write erotica. (Although if your brain immediately went there, I fully support your life choices.)

Think of the title as more of a… vibe.

I’m not bothered what shape it takes. Smut, horror, romance, fantasy, literary fiction, poetry, artwork... or a story about someone who finally buys the stupid car they've wanted since 1989 and realises the wanting was the best bit.

I genuinely don’t care where you take it — I just want to see what lives on the other side of wanting.

The extremely low-key logistics

• Any genre.

• Poetry, flash fiction, essays masquerading as fiction... if it belongs, it belongs.

• Original artwork.

• Any length.

• Please produce something new.

• Include a link to this post on your published piece.

• Once you've published, give it a restack and tag me there. Substack notifications are held together with duct tape and wishful thinking, and I really don't want to miss anyone's offering!

• Deadline. I don’t know… sometime before the heat death of the universe? So, let's say the end of July.

There are no winners, it’s not a competition. I’m just curious to see what happens when a bunch of writers all start in the same place and wander off in completely different directions.

And... if enough of us end up with stories and poems, I’d love to jump on a couple of Substack Lives and read some of them together. Nothing formal. Just writers sharing the gloriously weird places this prompt took them.

One does not simply walk into Post-Nut Clarity.

But apparently quite a few of us are going to try.