1. The clouds seal off the sky, a grim undulating wall of gray that thwarts her attempts to chart their course. By the fifth day she can only answer ‘at sea’ when the prince asks where they are.

2. Superstition holds that cats walk closest to the spirit world, but even here, where the barriers are thinnest, superstition is all that they can claim. Mice, on the other hand…

3. It’s easier not to try– and the days turn to weeks turn to months and it isn’t until some well-meaning coworker murmurs condolences that he realizes a year has passed.

4. They’d tried creating magical companion animals once, as a way of expanding their mana pools. Melding human and animal into a coherent whole… Their students’ students still whisper tales of the disastrous results centuries later.

5. The downside to waking from cryogenic slumber into a futuristic world is that no one knows how anything works. Kate glared unhappily at her current handler who was honestly confused as to why her charge kept asking such strange questions. If a hovercar worked, why did it matter how?

1. Nothing says ‘I love you’ quite like destroying a national monument, but on the whole she was beginning to regret dating someone who’s superpowers focused on expansion instead of compression… diamonds might be cheesy, but at least they were portable.

2. Old age wasn’t anything to look forward to– at least before scientists perfected Artificial Reincarnation(tm).

3. Being alone isn’t the same thing as being lonely, but over the centuries he’s gotten tired of explaining the difference. So now when mortals look at him with condescending pity when he tells them who and what he is, he just pretends to suffer and everyone’s happy.

4. They’ll build the new world on the ashes of the old– more literally than was pleasant, but they had to make concrete from something…

5. If anyone asks, they’ll just say they found it when they were looking for the ruins. The locals aren’t as familiar with the old technology and chances are good none of them can tell alien tech from human tech anymore…

These story prompts are released into the wild per Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License, so sayth their author Martha McMahon Bechtel.

Technotari Tags: Writing Prompts

1. “We’ll go on grand adventures!” the shimmering Plot Bunny promised. “We’ll save the world and bring a thousand years of peace! We’ll kill the evil dragons and rescue princesses! We’ll solve ancient riddles and find buried treasure! It will be such fun!”

The Writer was not impressed.

2. The worst part about being told that you’re the only one who can complete a task that will most likely kill you, is realizing that the person telling you this is a) still an insufferable jackass and b) right.

3. Cooking stew has a certain calm to it, which might be why it was served eight times out of ten when the army was on the march. The scent of the cookfires permeated the camps all day, and it never tasted the same twice since they cooks relied on the hunting and gathering parties for supplies.

4. She could never tell if anyone really believed he was coming back, or if they had simply fallen into the habit of of belief– expecting without questioning that one day they’d open the door as they did every day at noon and this time he’d be on the other side, waiting to come home.

5. This would normally be where the story ends, if this were a story; the world has been saved, the prince has found his bride, and there’s nothing left to do. Only this isn’t a story and the loose ends that are left belong to people that aren’t the prince, or the dragon, or the little goose girl.

These story prompts are released into the wild per Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License, so sayth their author Martha McMahon Bechtel.

Technotari Tags: Writing Prompts

1. The news had said pieces of the wreck were scattered on impact, but she hadn’t really grasped the fact that she’d be finding parts of the plane in her fields for years afterwords.

2. One of the more disturbing things about being told the aliens you’d found were roughly as intelligent as pigs, was discovering just how intelligent pigs were…

3. Wishes were supposed to be used for important things– like money or love or happiness or even revenge. You weren’t supposed to use them on stupid things like male pattern baldness or heartburn or the fact that you kept forgetting if you’d left the oven on or not.

4. It was odd what you missed, in a galaxy far far away. He stood in a forest of things that weren’t quite trees in a season that wasn’t quite fall, and tried to remember the smell of the pines.

5. The time to start worrying is when the little voice in your head switches from ‘somebody do something!’ to ‘if I hit him hard enough, he might drop the gun’…

_______________________________

These story prompts are released into the wild per Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License, so sayth their author Martha McMahon Bechtel.

Technotari Tags: Writing Prompts

1. The river was wide, but not deep, which meant the caravan could cross easily– at least for values of ‘easily’ that included spending half the day reconfiguring the wagons to barges and back again.

2. The vines had woven themselves throughout the fence and hissed in annoyance as she unwound them from their conquered territory.

3. Patience wasn’t something she had much of, it had been a long year and too many things had gone wrong to suffer fools quietly– Even if she knew the only reason for the mistakes was the same bone-dead weariness they all suffered.

4. Thunderstorms clustered around the mountain where they hid, gnawing at the rocks with acid rains and electrical fury.

5. Loose lips did more than just sink ships, so when a leak was made more than just the speaker paid the price. Secrets are only secret if you keep them with the dead…

These story prompts are released into the wild per Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License, so sayth their author Martha McMahon Bechtel.

Technotari Tags: Writing Prompts