The world is turning upside down like a snowglobe, but I’m not sure those are snowflakes swirling around! Fortunately, when all else in in flux, there are always prompts to keep you writing. If you aren’t part of the prompted crew, feel free to grab a Spare Prompt and play along. No wordcount limits, it doesn’t even have to be fiction. Although, given most of the prompts, it would be even more of a challenge to make them non-fiction!
| Prompter Name | Prompt | Promptee Name |
| nother Mike | What do you do when the trooper beside you asks, “Did the Sarge say to get your arse in gear or get your arson gear?” | Fiona Grey |
| Cedar Sanderson | A race of dragon librarians whose highest honor after death was to be made into a book (a play on the books bound in human skin in horror tropes) | B. Durbin |
| Fiona Grey’s Dad | Fast food for dragons | Leigh Kimmel |
| Becky Jones | The very polite and friendly-looking, if a bit odd, gentleman on your doorstep is selling insurance for _________ . | Kat Ross |
| Kat Ross | (see the hut picture!) | Cedar Sanderson |
| B. Durbin | The vacuum chokes on something, and when you clean it out, you look in surprise at the thing that really shouldn’t be there. | nother Mike |
| Leigh Kimmel | Warning that certain ground is sacred or accursed; that a house or city must not be built upon it—or must be abandoned or destroyed if built, under penalty of catastrophe. | Becky Jones |
Visual prompt!
Spare prompts, like the Spare ‘Oom, are a ‘nother world unto themselves
| Spare | The editor was hard to please, but that might have been because he had been dead for years. |
| Spare | The fire chief sighed. That was the fifth call they had gone to in the last hour, all because someone set their hair on fire! Why did people think that was the right way to respond to this crisis, anyway? |
| Spare | Flurp waved a happy tentacle with an extra curl and went back to ____. |
| Spare | You find a puzzle piece in your luggage, and a jar of plastic ants in your briefcase… |
| Spare | Do werewolves blow out their undercoats? Can you spin it? What would you make with werewolf yarn? |
See you in the comments. We love to get feedback on the prompts, or submissions of your prompted creative works.
Header image by Fiona Grey, Infantry Museum, Fort Gordon, Georgia.
More Odds Than Ends 
psst, Fiona, there’s no “e” in my name, unless your using my full given name. Besides, Kate is a better writer than I am. 😉
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Sorry, fixed now!
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Sorry about that… I think I messed that up. Whoops!
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I was tweaking Fiona’s tail ’cause the misspell only showed up when she did the posting.
Not mad, or nuthin’, just a bit of tail pulling. 😉
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The work’s split up between several people. I did a bunch of draft posts a while back because everyone’s lives got way out of whack all at once. I think I became convinced you were “Kate who goes by Kat” at some point, though.
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Concerning the last spare prompt–would a garment made of werewolf yarn only exist during the full moon?
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Sounds almost like a reverse skinwalker thingie… instead of wearing the animal skin and turning into it, wear the werewolf’s yarn and turn into skin without the full moon?
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Or maybe, a werewolf yarn scarf could give a werewolf the ability to stay human during the full moon? Or… wait, suppose that if you knitted a doggy sweater from werewolf yarn it could let your dog turn into a human being?
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Based on the photo in the header.
“Pass your letters down the line, boys, pass your letters back”
The Quartermaster hefted the great and greasy sack
“We’ll send them back to Base HQ and they’ll send them home from there”
The Quartermaster’s words were soft and scarce disturbed the air.
“If you don’t know what to write,” the Sargent’s voice was also low
“Start out with ‘I love you’, that’s always apropos
“You can say that we’re advancing, but you can’t say where to.”
“Not that we know anyway,” muttered someone in the crew.
“Is mail call finished?” asked the Captain, as he stood before the ranks.
“Seal your letters, send them off, we’ve an appointment with some tanks.
We want them safely on the train before the foe begins to shell
We’re skipping lunch today, boys, tonight we’ll feast in Hell.”
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Oh, that is lovely.
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Very Kipling rhythm to it.
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[…] week, my dad got in on the Odd Prompts writing challenge fun and suggested the phrase “fast food for dragons.” I can’t […]
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I kept thinking about what an arson mission could be, but I’m not sure I want to know! I tried to head elsewhere. https://fionagreywrites.com/night-mission/
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Arson is starting fires, but y’a know, I’m not sure what an arson mission would be either! Still, you did a great job! Now I kind of want to see them finish the training mission…
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[…] week’s prompt was from Becky Jones. She asked: The very polite and friendly-looking, if a bit odd, gentleman on […]
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I decided to make this week’s a companion piece, of sorts, to a bit I did last year. https://undomesticatedfeline.wordpress.com/2020/03/29/odd-prompts-week-13/
Like Water Wars I wove in a few hat-tips, some more obvious than others. I did not know that anagrams could be so fun.
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As we trip the light fantastic, from one reality to another… nice!
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Mrs Kuttner was so accepting of the unnatural. 🙂
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Considering that “Mrs. Kuttner” wove some of the best fantasy stories in her day, she probably thinks they are quite natural. 😉
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This week, my prompt was “The vacuum chokes on something, and when you clean it out, you look in surprise at the thing that really shouldn’t be there.”
Sorry, this weekend has been difficult. I twisted my back or something early Saturday, and have mostly been not doing things this weekend as a result. However, along the way, I did come up with this fragment… incomplete, and I’m not quite sure where I would go with it.
Watch Where You Stick That Vacuum Cleaner Hose! (500 words)
By Mike Barker
He knew he shouldn’t just stick the vacuum hose under the refrigerator and suck whatever was under there up in it, but… sweeping it out and sorting things out was so icky! So, since no one was watching, he stuck it under, and listened to the thumps and whooshes as he moved the hose tip around. Then the vacuum coughed, and he could feel the whole thing shudder. What the heck had he sucked up?
He turned the vacuum off, and dragged the hose and the vacuum out under the bright fluorescent lights. Drat. Okay, start with the easy part.
[You’ll find the rest at https://mbarker.dreamwidth.org/232678.html ]
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Mike, the link is 404’d.
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Oh, how weird. I had a right bracket after the URL, which somehow got mangled into the URL, and then the site didn’t recognize it. Fixed now (put a space between the URL and the bracket)! Thanks for pointing it out!
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This one works: https://mbarker.dreamwidth.org/232678.html
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I liked what you did there! I also hope you start to feel better. Take it easy, we want more of your words.
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Heh.
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[…] we are at Week 13 of the More Odds than Ends writing prompts. My prompt this week came from Leigh Kimmel. And the prompt I submitted went to Kat […]
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Jack the freelance curse breaker is forging on…
https://profornery.wordpress.com/2020/03/29/cursed-dolls-and-cursed-land/
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I liked this – the house added unexpected depth.
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More clues, more clues! What a tangled web of mystery is slowly building up here! Oh, this will be good!
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[…] My prompt challenge for this last week was an image of a reed hut of ancient origins from Kat Ross, check it out here. I challenged B. Durbin with “A race of dragon librarians whose highest honor after death was […]
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This one turned out to be a long one! I was really struggling with how to weave in Kat’s prompt, since the story wasn’t ‘there’ yet, but I had a brainstorm and I think it works nicely! https://www.cedarwrites.com/2020/03/31/the-case-of-the-perambulating-hatrack-part-8/
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[…] My prompt this week was: “A race of dragon librarians whose highest honor after death was to be made into a book.” […]
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Only a scene this time, not a full story. Why dragon librarians protect their hoard.
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Mine is now up on my LiveJournal at https://starshipcat.livejournal.com/722203.html.
I’ve also been continuing to develop my story from a few weeks ago, “My Old School,” and I did a bit from what I think will be much later in it for the Sunday vignette challenge over at Sarah Hoyt’s blog. I’m hoping to end up with something in the 20K to 50K range, a decent size for a stand-alone.
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