Prompts below! Gitcher prompts here! Big prompts, small prompts, we gottem all. Even if you didn’t send one in… and why not? If you label it a spare prompt we won’t assign you a prompt in return, and you just might get the thrill of seeing your prompt transformed into a story!
| Prompter Name | Prompt | Promptee |
| nother Mike | At the novelty shop, you realize that the silver-painted skulls for Halloween decorations are not plastic, but real skulls… | MIsha Burnett |
| Kat Ross | Wild Eagle photo (see image below) | Becky Jones |
| Fiona Grey | Stimulating theta brain waves can improve insight and intuition. Who knew achieving it through ____ could enlighten oneself to ____? |
Cedar Sanderson
|
| MIsha Burnett | A character from a cartoon show you loved as a child shows up on your doorstep, asking for your help. | Leigh Kimmel |
| B. Durbin | The mirror at the antique store is beautiful. Oddly enough, it does not seem to be reflecting any color. | Kat Ross |
| Leigh Kimmel | Identity—reconstruction of personality—man makes duplicate of himself | Fiona Grey |
| Becky Jones | The line from “Heroes” by David Bowie: “Though nothing will keep us together, We could steal time, just for one day” Here’s the link to the whole song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXgkuM2NhYI | nother Mike |
| Cedar Sanderson | When the end comes, find the peace that surpasses understanding | B. Durbin |
And here are the spare prompts, if you are tempted to play along. Please do join us! It’s fun when there are loads of comments and feedback for the writers.
| Spare Prompt | The giants wearing Santa Claus outfits stomped into the park and sat down, then demanded treats… “Or we’ll trick y’a!” Go ahead and describe the scene, from the POV of a first responder, a kid watching, a bystander, a politician… just about anyone you like… |
| Spare Prompt | In 1960, Nomura made their first toy robot. The factory has long since closed, but in the back room, the robots have continued to build new models, each one improved over anything before it. Now they are ready to come out of the factory into the world… |
| Spare Prompt | A wizard leaves a book of spells in a public place. Who finds it, and what happens next? |
| Spare Prompt | A variant strain of encephalitis appears. 80% of the people who catch it die. Of the ones who survive, some develop mutant mental powers. |
Even if you neither submit a prompt, nor write from one, please consider helping the Odd Prompted by sharing the post with friends and family who may enjoy playing along? Last week this challenge went multi-generational when two women wrote for it, both published authors, one a grandmother and the other her granddaughter. See if you can guess who!
More Odds Than Ends 
Our cities are decorated with the bones of the unquiet dead
Gaudy, glistening, gilded, silvered, hung with lights
You’d never know they were there hanging just above your head
Shadowed in the daytime, glowing faintly in the nights
This street a concrete canyon thirty stories deep
Built at the cost of perhaps a dozen slain
That’s just the buy-in, not the upkeep
A few more every year, a few falls of crimson rain
You don’t ever see the faces of the lost
You might read about them if the news is slow
You live a quiet cozy life while they have paid the cost
It’s easier to relax at home because you’ll never know
You sit in comfort surrounded by the things you’ve got
Not knowing you are safe because they’re not
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You draw such clear pictures with your poems. I love them.
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Thank you.
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Spare prompt: A wizard leaves a book of spells in a public place. Who finds it, and what happens next?
***
Giggles were emanating from — where?
Whispers, then more giggles.
“I’m glad we found that book of spells. Well . . . SHE found it. But she doesn’t use it to make spells.”
“Yes.” More giggles, more whispers. “And I am glad she put it in her pocket. Makes it easier for us to find it, and read it. And make spells. Even if we do have to read it through layers of — whatever.
“Do you think she’ll find out about us? I mean, like those little elves that did so many good things for people? Then, when someone finally saw them, they stopped coming? I don’t want to be like that.”
“Well . . . I HOPE she never finds us! We’re so much smaller than she is, I think we can stay hidden forever.”
“Yes, I think if we remain very, very quiet, and don’t move around too much, we won’t be detected. Oh, I just LOVE doing spells and making people happy!”
A frown. “I like making people happy, too. But remember the first spell we tried? Something went very, very wrong. That one made her sick, and I felt so bad about it.”
Chortle: “But we learned! And now almost all our spells are happy ones! Remember when she went wading in the brook on that hot day? And we made the minnows nibble at her toes? And how it made her laugh?”
“Oh yes! Let’s just keep hiding in our hidey-hole, stay very quiet, and try our best to make only HAPPY spells!”
“I’m sure we can do that! I just hope she doesn’t eat any more pickles with ice cream. It makes me burp!”
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I love the premise! Babies? Twins? An adventure awaits!
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[…] we are at Week 9 for the prompt at More Odds than Ends. Wow. Over two months of writing prompts. I’m pretty […]
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My prompt was the photo from Kat. Here’s my response. It’s short, but it was the first thing to hit me when I looked at the photo.
https://profornery.wordpress.com/2020/02/26/eagles-soar/
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Becky this was lovely.
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Thank you! And, welcome to More Odds than Ends!
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Becky this is lovely.
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Over at https://mbarker.dreamwidth.org/231555.html you’ll find a short story, about 500 words, called Another Life. Let me know what you think, okay?
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That could be a curse, or a blessing, to be on the receiving end of it.
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[…] “When the end comes, find the peace that surpasses understanding.” You can find all the prompts and prompt responses here, and you should check them out, there is great writing going on. If you’d like to join in the […]
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I’m continuing the adventures of the hatrack this week. Serializing this story seems to be working for my muse! https://www.cedarwrites.com/2020/03/02/the-case-of-the-perambulating-hatrack-part-3/
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Oh, all I can say is GO READ IT! There will be cookies! Seriously, go read the on-going noir fantasy family-life (and other genres as they get rolled in) tale. You’ll be glad you did!
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I have promised cookies! I can’t say that I am paying any attention to how many genres get caught in the dragnet, though.
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Another short, distracted post, with bonus Thesis Cat. https://fionagreywrites.com/purple-ink/
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It’s still a fascinating take on the prompt, even if it’s a very different flavor of story than the source would have suggested.
And I’m old enough to remember the smell of fresh copies from the old-style spirit duplicators. All through grade school and most of high school, we’d get worksheets in that purple ink, and if the copies were fresh out of the machine, you could just about get high on them.
By the time I was an undergrad, xerographic copiers had become pretty much universal. I remember having classmates pay me to give them copies of my notes because they were so thorough — and these weren’t students who were skipping out on class. They just liked having that other set of notes that would pick up what slid past them.
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Thesis Cat is awesome.
And good that you are writing! Don’t worry about short or distracted. The act of making time for writing is the important bit.
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Yet again I’m running late, and it’s just the beginning of something that’s obviously going to be much longer (and will probably require immersive reading in Japanese folklore and traditional culture), but I have my response to my prompt up on my LiveJournal at https://starshipcat.livejournal.com/707391.html.
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There’s a reason I keep saying no word limits! Don’t stress, enjoy the process.
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It’s more that I’ve got so much else going on in my life that I usually can’t get to the actual writing process until it’s getting to the end of the week (this week we didn’t have as much construction activity, but I still had errands to run, and a very uncooperative cat to take to the vet for her annual shots), and where my writing tends to be very subconscious-driven, I’m often doing a lot of “driving into the fog.” I can feel that I’m just at the beginning of a much longer work that may take weeks or months to feel my way through, but I want to get enough of it down that I can continue when I get the time to circle back to it.
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[…] this doesn’t work the way that’s expected. My prompt was “When the end comes, find the peace that surpasses understanding.” But for some […]
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Well, this week’s entry went sideways.
And as for what happens next, the literal answer is “I woke up.” I WANT TO KNOW WHAT HAPPENS NEXT.
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Me, too!
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It’s cool! Now dream the rest 😀
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As soon as I find out an address for my muse, you can bug them personally.
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Me, too!
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[…] prompt from B. Durbin was “The mirror at the antique store is beautiful. Oddly enough, it does not seem […]
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A bit late, but March is a very busy month for the Ladies auxiliary branches of the Masonic family.
https://undomesticatedfeline.wordpress.com/2020/03/09/odd-prompts-week-9/
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