Cedar Sanderson

Week 39 of Odd Prompts

Congratulations! You’ve made it to yet another week of hijinks and foofaraws in the prompt section!

Remember, as you take on a prompt, that there are low expectations. If you are writing, there is no minimum wordcount. In fact, it doesn’t even have to be fiction. If you are creating in a visual media, you don’t have to finish the drawing, edit the photo, or process the fractal. All we want, all we expect, is for your imagination to chug into gear.

That’s why prompts. Sometimes you have to prime a little before ignition happens.

Prompter Prompt Prompted
Cedar Sanderson The fog was an unnatural cotton-candy pink as the sun rose. As the light hit it, it glowed, but there was a moving shadow in the heart of it. What emerged… Fiona Grey
Fiona Grey “Don’t wake up the computer. It’ll bite.”
Cedar Sanderson
Anne Guglik My hands felt sweaty on the steering wheel as I went hard into the turn. There was a sheer drop to one side, an unforgiving cliff on the other. My mind raced to think of some way to get out of this mess, but it came up blank as I saw my pursuer yet again in the rearview mirror, maintaining the pace seemingly without effort. Becky Jones
Becky Jones Half the story wrote itself…literally. Anne Guglik
nother Mike The plastic Halloween pumpkin looked cheap, but then it started to talk… Leigh Kimmel
Leigh Kimmel You’re working on a project you’re running late on, and you hear a loud *thump* outside. You look out the window and see… nother Mike
If you don’t want to commit to issuing a prompt challenge, which would be randomly assigned to another prompter, then there are always spare prompts! Take one, take two, see if you can fit three in there and blend them up into a new and interesting formation.
Spare Visual Prompt
(photo credit: Jolie Lachance)

 

Spare Who knew the sun was a wormhole?
Spare The return of noodle cat!
Spare When the monk promised the fae his firstborn, he never expected them to try to help him have a child…
Spare The new quantum drive was fine, until it started showing files from the future… sometimes…
Spare The woman walked out of the forest with a tree on her shoulder
Spare When you turn the key to start your car, instead of the whirr of the starter, you hear eldritch moans

And that’s all for this week! If you wanted something else, check out the preceding weeks of spare prompts. If you want to submit a prompt, simply email it to oddprompts@gmail.com and if you don’t want to enter into the challenge ring, put ‘spare’ in the subject line.

As for the responses, they go in comments, or as a link in the comments to a blog or site or some hosting for graphics (flickr, deviantArt, others) because WordPress doesn’t allow photo comments sadly.

(header image: Early Cell Division by Cedar Sanderson)

18 comments

  2. 39.
    This is now “Jack Benny” weeks old!
    (The odd thing? The FIRST time Jack was on radio he was actually *38*. And they already made fun of his car. It wasn’t the Maxwell then. “Why does he have to start it so early?” “It takes some time to get the steam up.”)

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  5. The day job wins again, as did the bricked cell phone and replacement saga. I want to explore building anticipation with a sentient pink fog, I think…but I’m helping to train a search and rescue puppy this week, so it’ll be a bit before I can catch up.

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  10. Leigh Kimmel prompted…

    You’re working on a project you’re running late on, and you hear a loud *thump* outside. You look out the window and see…

    Stop the Clock!
    By Mike Barker

    Harold glanced up at the clock, shook his head, and looked at the lines of code scrolling across the screen. He was working as fast as he could, scanning the existing code in one window, typing madly on the keyboard in sudden bursts of new code and modified code in another window, but he didn’t think he could get done in time.

    He hated being late.

    “Ye gods, I wish there was some way to stop the clock.”

    There was a sudden thump outside. He stood up and looked out the window. It wasn’t much of a window, programmers didn’t get the best offices, but…

    What happened to his view of the parking lot? As he looked out, there was a… Some kind of strange mechanism, with… Was that a harpoon? Some kind of spear, anyway, jammed into the gears. And there was a guy in a leopard skin holding it, looking up at him. Then the guy waved at him, and…

    Suddenly, the guy in the leopardskin was in his office. With a great big smile.

    You can read the rest (there’s not much more!) over at https://mbarker.dreamwidth.org/236977.html

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