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. I wish we lived closer, but tigers are a solitary breed, weretigers only slightly less so. Even with the easy connection of the ‘net, my sister rarely talks to me and I learned long ago it isn’t worth the effort to force her into conversation. It isn’t my fault I stayed human, just a quirk of the genetic pool thanks to great-grandma Mercer, or that I long for things my family cannot give.

2. The vines climb slowly up the walls, an inch a year when the weather’s good or several feet those times the courtyard is awash in blood.

3. If anyone deserved to be followed around by a neon purple springbok, it was Charles.

4. Dragons, being dragons, were wont to live very close to forever (knights and unnaturally talented squires aside), and that meant a great many of them were bored.

5. Sasha wasn’t meant for this kind of heat, and was sprawled on the water cooled river rocks with something akin to bliss.

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. “Did you meant it?”
“Mean what?”
“When you said ‘only if you were the last man on earth’?”
“That was before I knew you had a time machine.”

2. Dreams are meant to be broken, nightmares doubly so.

3. If anyone had looked, they would have noticed the small yellow-green mouse that sat on the corner of the booth muttering to itself. But in all fairness the sudden appearance of the pink and orange triceratops was slightly distracting.

4. “Some questions are best left unasked.” The dragon’s glare was as far from subtle as a three story carnivore could get, and Jen decided she didn’t really need to know why it was chained to the wall.

5. “If you could have anything, what would you want?” She leaned back against the side of the front-loader, looking out across the development.

“Nothing.”

“Wait, what?”

“I don’t ‘want’ Tabby, it’s not possible, thus regardless of the situation my answer would remain ‘nothing.’”

“You don’t really have a grasp on the ‘theoretical questions’ portion of conversation, do you.” She patted the side of the loader affectionately.

“I would point out that you’re the one having theoretical conversations with a piece of construction equipment.”

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

“You don’t find magic in an IHOP.” Wendy pointed a pancake laden fork at James with an annoyance just short of anger. “This isn’t some fairy tale adventure where second sight gives you an instant ability to find the mystic in the mundane.”

“So I’m just supposed to ignore the dragon that’s stealing sausage links?”

Wendy blinked, “What?”

“There’s a dragon right–” James leaned a bit to the left and then nodded at the table three booths behind Wendy, “–there and it’s stealing that guy’s breakfast.”

Wendy twisted in her seat, saw the chipmunk-sized dragon munching happily on Jimmy Dean sausages and sighed.

“So I’m not crazy,” James settled back into his seat, “good to know.”

“The point is still valid.” Wendy was glaring at the dragon who had frozen as soon as it had realized it was seen, sausage link still mid-chew. “You don’t see things like this in IHOP.”

The dragon grinned sheepishly, then bolted for the door, wings flapping valiantly as it tried to carry away its prize.

“Right.” But James counted his sausage twice, just to make sure.

These snippits are copyright Martha McMahon Bechtel and may not be reproduced or distributed without express permission. All rights reserved.

Technotari Tags: Fiction, Fantasy

And again, we have seeds from the Days of Long Ago! (Well, okay, these are only a year or two old, but still… *grin*)

1. This is where the story ends, back where it began, standing in the ash and the mud and watching as the world burns.

2. For a long time he wished they had just let him wander, being lost was nothing compared to the suffering of being found.

3. Everyone knew where dragons came from; from eggs, from fire, from the islands of Illofan, but everyone was wrong.

4. And after everything was said and done, nothing had changed. She still had classes to pay for and finals to take, still faced twenty-six hours a week saying ‘have a nice day’ to people who rarely took the advice.

5. It was like watching the sky collapse, one sun after the other plunging behind billowing clouds of ash.

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