Hey, all, it’s week five! That means we’re rolling into month two of imagination, stories, and becoming a writing community. We’ve rolled past the 21-days-to-develop-a-habit benchmark. Keep it up!
Don’t forget to share the fun. Tell your brother, tell a friend, tell your boss, and definitely tell your cat. Send in ideas for next week to oddprompts@gmail.com.
No minimum word count, no genre expectations, just words on a page, shared with virtual friends. The prompts are below. Missed sending one in this week? Grab a spare prompt and join the creative madness. I mean the fun.
| Prompter Name | Prompt | Promptee |
| Becky Jones | You’re an officer on a space ship. Your ship is a first landing on planet Earth. Upon landing with your “away team” you find yourselves in the midst of some weird and frightening (to you) Earth/human activity/ritual/celebration. Humans seem to find it perfectly normal. What did you land in the middle of? | Kat Ross |
| Kat Ross | My sister found her 30 sided die and rolled it for this weeks prompt. It fell on this image.  | Cedar Sanderson |
| nother Mike | You hear a strange tap, tap, tapping at your door. When you open the door to see what is out there, there is a doll standing there, arm raised… | Becky Jones |
| Fiona Grey | The STEM toy seemed like a great idea for your son/daughter/friend’s kid/young cousin/etc. Who wouldn’t want to build their own robot? But maybe you should have considered… | nother Mike |
| Leigh Kimmel | Man visits museum of antiquities—asks that it accept a bas-relief he has just made—old and learned curator laughs and says he cannot accept anything so modern. Man says that ‘dreams are older than brooding Egypt or the contemplative Sphinx or garden-girdled Babylonia’ and that he had fashioned the sculpture in his dreams. Curator bids him shew his product, and when he does so curator shews horror. Asks who the man may be. He tells modern name. “No—before that” says curator. Man does not remember except in dreams. Then curator offers high price, but man fears he means to destroy sculpture. Asks fabulous price—curator will consult directors. | B. Durbin |
| B. Durbin | It’s the hundredth day. | Fiona Grey |
| Misha Burnett | You receive a letter from yourself telling you that the last six months of your memory have been erased. Why did you do that? | Leigh Kimmel |
| Cedar Sanderson | The goblins wore pyjamas | Misha Burnett |
Spare prompt (Vakkotaur): The War Dept of the USA ceased to exist by that name in 1947. It is now 2020 (or further along…) and in today’s mail you received a *recently* dated letter from the War Department…
Spare prompt: When you got in the elevator, someone had already punched the bottom button, where no one ever goes. You’re not in a hurry, so you just wait. Then the door opens…
Spare prompt: The newest cell phones hit the market, you grabbed one, and then the recalls and the rumors started. Ghosts, aliens, monsters… something is wrong with the pictures? You laugh, point your new phone camera at the wall of your apartment, and snap a picture. That’s when you see…
Spare prompt: The scribe clutched his stylus, wishing for nothing more than to be a ____ instead. Why?
Spare prompt: Your superpower is a bit annoying, but at least you’ve managed to hide it so far.
Spare prompt: A living cyclops is unearthed in a strip mine in Nevada.
Spare prompt: A security guard in a graveyard is approached by a family of ghouls who offer a bribe for access to the graves. What happens next?
That’s it for prompts – can’t wait to see you in the comments.
Header image by Fiona Grey, Sylvan Lake, South Dakota
More Odds Than Ends 
[…] check out the story prompts! Even if you didn’t send one in this week, there are plenty of spares. No wordcount, no genre […]
LikeLike
The woods were filled with spider’s webs
And the magic always black
To the home of a child who fears the devil
I follow a dirt road back
The vultures sang of blood and pain
Fairy tales always Grimm
Untenanted Heaven and empty throne
Yet still I cry in fear of Him
In the sunlit world I learned of Law
Science, chrome and stone
The worlds would belong to Man
The sky to us alone
But reason fled at footfalls in moonlight
Madness flooded to take its place
The goblins wore pajamas
And every devil wore my mother’s face
LikeLiked by 2 people
Wow!
LikeLike
Whoa. Thanks for the nightmares!
LikeLike
This is amazing. Beautiful and creepy. Thank you.
LikeLike
Misha, I stand in awe.
LikeLike
Shiver. I’m not sure if like is the right response, somehow…
LikeLike
Blah! I have been poking at the weekly prompt, but I’m not really happy with my results so far. This last week has been kind of crazy in the real world, end of semester grades and administrative blunders combining to leave me blinking. I mean, I tried running down a list of genres, just to see if that sparked an idea.
Monster in the house? Okay, the toy robot is holding them prisoner? Golden fleece or quest? Hum, like Pinocchio, the robot wants to be a real boy? Out of the bottle (Wish fulfillment)? The robot does everything? Dude with a problem (ordinary guy, extraordinary situation)? No… Fool triumphant? Nah. Rite of passage (Life changes) Child with robot? Going to school? Superhero (Extraordinary guy, ordinary situation) Hoho! What if the robot is super? Buddies? Robot and child? Whydunit (mystery)? … Institutionalized (Individual versus Institution)? Nah…
So that didn’t get me anything that really excited me. Okay, just try brainstorming.
Robot? Avatar for child? Mentor for child? What unusual roles could the robot take on?
Runaway robot? Multiplying robots (the box said it could make replacement parts, but who expected it to set up a production line in the basement and start churning out a horde of robots?) Robot advice’? Ah, hacked and…
Well… maybe? How about some free writing? Aha, try this…
We only made two mistakes when we got George the newest robotic toy set out on the market for Christmas.
First, looking at the ugly, ugly container it came in, we decided to put it in a pretty box. So we carefully opened the container and poured all the parts into a nice white box, and gift wrapped it carefully. Then we tossed that ugly container.
What we didn’t realize was that the container was actually the control that kept the self-assembling nano-robotic elements in the kit from activating. So when we poured it into the box, they started randomly joining up and developing. According to the police report, about eight hours later, they escaped from the box in a tidal wave, and started reworking everything they encountered into… well, more robots. Which is why the world is currently fighting what amounts to an epidemic of robotic toys.
But, of course, that’s not the worst mistake. See, if we had read the directions, we would have known that the robots should have directions given to them, otherwise they tend to adopt the rule of multiply and expand. So, yes, we failed to give our robots any directions, which is the other big driver in the robot epidemic.
Bleah.
Child empowered by robot? Robot running everyone? Robot network?
Add-ons? Now we need …
So I put it away for a bit, and then came back to it. Try it again.
Robots. Batteries not included? Add-ons? Combining mech? With what? Lost toy (oh, previous owner?) my little panzer (dangerous toy?)
What the heck, let’s go spelunking on TVtropes https://tvtropes.org/ (Warning! May be a dangerous timesink!) Check out Robot? Aha, there’s a robot page… and a robot roll call page… let’s see what catches my attention there?
Oh, what about when someone wants to replace/upgrade? Growing up together?
Sliding scale of robot intelligence: non-sentient, animal level, sentient but no emotion, sentient and genius level (still no emotion?), godlike…
Cyborg? Morality? Becoming a real boy?
Oh, what if they give him the core set, but he adds odds and ends (four long pipes turn into two legs, and so forth?) to make a scarecrow robot?
Which eventually turned into Some Assembly Required, but…
I’m stll not sure I like it. Although it’s kind of funny… Go ahead, take a look at https://mbarker.dreamwidth.org/230988.html and let me know what you think?
‘nother Mike
LikeLike
Always feed the robots buckets of candy. I liked your articulated thought process.
LikeLike
My brother went as a robot one Halloween. He could hardly walk in that damn costume and I was told in no uncertain terms to look out for him. Little brothers! Sheesh. Does Abner have a big sister he’s trying to annoy? 😀
LikeLike
My brother went as a robot one Halloween. He could hardly walk in that damn costume and I was told in no uncertain terms to look out for him. Little brothers! Sheesh. Does Abner have a big sister he’s trying to annoy? 😀
LikeLike
Apologies for the duplicate comment. My wifi is random today.
LikeLike
[…] Odd Prompt this week came again from a photo prompt from Kat Ross again. I opted to go in a different direction than fiction. I prompted Misha Burnett with ‘the […]
LikeLike
My prompt this week didn’t want to be fiction, and is instead a sort of reflective piece on the nature of life and progress. https://www.cedarwrites.com/2020/02/03/metronome/
LikeLiked by 2 people
Well-reasoned, and quietly inspiring.
LikeLike
Thank you. Essays are sometimes easier than fiction for me.
LikeLike
I really like this. It captures what I’m feeling now, standing at a fork in my own road. I’m looking down the unknown fork, unsure of where I’m going, but I know that I have to head down there. Thank you for articulating some things for me.
LikeLike
I’m glad to help a little. Over the years I have loved the concept of ‘miles to go before I sleep’ because it does promise rest, eventually!
LikeLike
Very nice. 🙂
LikeLike
My prompt this week didn’t know what it wanted to be when it grew up. I started at least five different ideas (and caught two different colds) before this finally spilled out. I’m not entirely happy with it, as it’s trying to take an already outlined story in a weird direction. Bad story, no biscuit!
https://fionagreywrites.com/luck/
LikeLiked by 4 people
The cause of the accident at the end leaves a lot of room for a very interesting second act.
LikeLike
I liked it a lot!
You’ll laugh when I tell you the source of the prompt was the 100th day celebration my kids’ kindergarten class had. I thought it might turn out dystopic.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Incidentally, there’s nothing that says you can’t roast a chicken *and* have soup. You mostly use the skeleton, cartilage, and fascia for that anyway.
LikeLiked by 1 person
[…] Week 5 of More Odds than Ends writing prompts. If you would like to join in (please do! The more the merrier!) just go to More Odds Than Ends and read through the first post for the rules. […]
LikeLike
This is what I ended up with. I’m not really sure where it’s going right now.
https://profornery.wordpress.com/2020/02/04/curses/
LikeLike
My prompt was so long that I turned it into a sonnet. Not a great sonnet, mind you, but a sonnet nonetheless.
LikeLike
A long prompt is a challenge above and beyond. Very nicely done!
LikeLike
And I now have my response up at my LiveJournal: https://starshipcat.livejournal.com/691761.html. I know it’s rather ambiguous, but I could never settle on what way to take it — fantasy world with mind magic? cyberpunk world with advanced brain manipulation? cosmic horror with eldritch powers?
LikeLiked by 1 person
Oh, I love the idea of it being a scam. So many possibilities.
LikeLike
[…] Time and the muse cooperated and I was able to finish the Week 5 prompt. […]
LikeLike
Time and the muse cooperated and I was able to finish the Week 5 prompt.
https://undomesticatedfeline.wordpress.com/2020/02/05/odd-prompts-week-5/
LikeLike