"Towards the Edge of the Shadow" is a fictional crime story taking place in the 1960s. I was inspired to write the story after listening to a "Morbid" true crime podcast episode where boy scouts were used in search and rescue operations back in the day—a practice that many would never agree with today. I wrote the story from the perspective of a 16 year old eagle scout and his journey on a search and rescue mission for a missing woman. The story mostly goes in chronological order, with several hyperlinks leading to earlier instances.

I wrote this story using several tools. My first step in writing the story was to come up with a basic plot and outline. I then used Otter.ai to transcribe as I verbally wrote the story. I referenced my outline as I spoke in order to keep on track. Once I reached the point in the story where Morgan meets up with Jimmy, I got writers block. I decided to use the Oblique Strategies cards to help come up with the next events. The first card I drew said "cascades," which made me think of a waterfall. I decided to incorporate a body of water in the story because of this. The next card I drew was "From nothing to more than nothing." This card helped me come up with the idea that Morgan and Jimmy would discover something seemly ordinary that holds much more meaning. I just was not sure what evidence this would be yet. The last card I drew said "turn it upside down." The idea I got from this card was to make the culprit someone unexpected: Morgan's dad.

My next step was to come up with a piece of evidence for the boys to stumble upon. I turned to the Anagram Generator for ideas. I plugged in the phrase "I need evidence" to see what it came up with. Some interesting words that came from this were: deceived, envied, iced, vein, vice, and dice. I decided on using dice as my evidence.

Once I finished dictating, I took my transcript and edited it so that it made more sense and had the appropriate punctuation. Next, I chose 5 paragraphs of the story and placed them into n+7. Under n+13, the word "darkness" was turned into "daughter-in-law." This inspired me to make the missing woman the daughter-in-law of the lieutenant. I realized that I still needed a title, so I tried out Botnik. Using the Amy Winehouse generator, I was able to come up with "The Night Meets," but I did not find any other words to complete the title. I decided to put "The Night Meets" into a different Botnik dictionary—Kanye. I did not find anything there that I liked, so I resorted to Keats. This generated two interesting title ideas "The Night Meets the Still Stream" and "Still Wind and Streams." I initially chose the latter option as my title.

Next, I put my whole story in the Markov generator, combining it with Alice in Wonderland. A line that was generated from that method was "She'd become ice." I thought this was an interesting image, so I used it as inspiration and described Miss Mason's body as an "ice sculpture." Lastly, I put the whole story in charNG. This exercise produced the most unexpected results that were actual helpful. First, it produced the line "Miss Mason's body rests on the river." I originally had her body near the oak tree, but this line convinced me to move her body to the embankment of the river. The greatest gem of the charNG generator was the line "crunch, crunch, crunch, crunch, crunch towards the edge of the shadow the night until." I thought the phrase "Towards the edge of the shadow" was beautiful and so fitting for my story, so I changed the title generated from Botnik to this one.