Category Archives: writing

Writing prompt: I’ve never seen one, but how hard could it be?”

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Time: 7 minutes. Click here to go to my list of prompts.

“I’ve never seen one, but how hard could it be?” (This prompt inspired by the Erie Canal, built by four men who hadn’t even seen a canal when they set out to build one.)

 

“I’ve never seen one before, but how hard could it be?” Emmaye Cevluss said. “They built them practically in medieval times, it’s just a ditch full of water.”

*

Three months later and how she regretted those words. Without construction equipment, how did she remove the dirt? Without drafting software, how did she visualize the project? How would she calculate stress loads? On this new world, where would she find the materials for good concrete? For good steel?

How hard could it be? A canal connecting the bay to the western part of the peninsula with the quarries and mines. It might as well be a space elevator. Since they had arrived on this world, every day was a day spent learning to adjust to all the things it didn’t have.

Their ship, the Neva, was supposed to help with many of these things. Instead it sat broken, useless, to the west. All the energy it held was devoted to cold storage, to keep biological samples like seeds and useful fungi and bacteria until they could be properly used. And now the cold storage was having issues.

And it was starting to rain a lot. Especially a lot for a supposed desert region.

It was going to be a while before there was a canal.

Writing prompt: foraging

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Time: 7 minutes. Click here to go to my list of prompts.

“Foraging” (This prompt inspired by the well-known Danish foraging restaurant, top-rated Noma.)

 

“Announcing the release of the Forage 1000! For the low price of $1000, you can virtually eliminate grocery costs!”

Sylvia showed Tanisha the ad. Tanisha couldn’t share Sylvia’s enthusiasm. For one thing, she didn’t have nearly the shares in the product. But for another thing, Tanisha always felt a little sad when scientific breakthroughs went toward such short-sighted uses. And there was that third thing…

“So what about when everyone has one?” Tanisha asked. She had helped write the software that finally allowed machines to approximate an animal sense of taste. “Then these foragers won’t find much of the cheap grasses and fungi and bugs you’re promoting it for.”

Sylvia shrugged. “I think that’s a pretty good problem to have. Then we up the price. Or make a new one that finds things the old one didn’t.”

Tanisha sighed. She had to say it, she knew it. But it was hard giving bad news to funders. “You can’t.”

Sylvia crossed her arms. “Spit it out.”

“We still have this little problem,” Tanisha said. “It’s not perfect about identifying poisons.”

Sylvia sat.

“The body is complex. Something can taste good but have trace amounts of toxin or parasites or bacteria. Or just be bad for you like antifreeze. We didn’t know until a few weeks ago when we started to use a larger sampling range. Two dead mice.”

“We can fix that, right?” Sylvia said hopefully. “You’re going to fix this.”

Tanisha nodded, and Sylvia left, already on the phone. She turned to the ad. “How am I going to fix this?”

Another Fairy Tale at last

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When I released my collection of science fiction fairy tales, it was the start of a push to creatively engage with the world. I finally finished a project and put it out there, doubtless non-perfect like everything. Since then, I’ve submitted my short works nearly 90 times (with 3 acceptances). I’ve joined a writing group and participated in critiquing groups to work on my writing. I’ve studied Adobe’s Photoshop and illustrator, and recently painting, to improve my artistic skills. I’ve studied Indesign and book layout. I started posting regularly on this site, as I have for nearly two years now. The first set of fairy tales started all of this self-improvement.

I always intended to do another collection of fairy tales. I recently finished the first story, “The Lonely Man on the Ship”, about a man trapped alone for years on a spaceship during  terrible storms. I did the art with Prismacolor color pencils (which I intend to use for the rest of the eventual collection).

Now I’m coding the fairy tale for the kindle. Once I do, “The Lonely Man on the Ship” will be available free on the kindle and on the iPad. Much of the last two years’ studies has gone into this work. I used Indesign and illustrator for layout work. I used Photoshop to make sure my scanned art work was as attractive as possible. I think the writing is stronger than in the first fairy tales. As the first fairy tales inspired new studies, to release this work properly I’m learning CSS and HTML coding.

So until I finish this last step, enjoy a couple of illustrations!

abenn_ghost-small letterhead-small

Writing prompt: Driftless

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Time: 7 minutes. Click here to go to my list of prompts.

“Driftless” (If anyone’s curious, the driftless region is in Southwest Wisconsin. It is indeed full of valley and caves and unwashed hippies. And Holsteins.)

They call this region the Driftless region, a region around which the glaciers split so they didn’t drift the soil. It’s rough and wild, unlike everything else around. As a kid, I always assumed driftless refered to the quality of the region. It didn’t drift. Nothing changed. You came to the region and didn’t leave, and the less washed you were, the more likely you were to arrive.

But the geological reason made sense, too. Still, I wondered, how do glaciers just go about splitting? It seems like you’d need some force to split glaciers. We don’t have high mountains or great volcanos.

We also have a ton of caves around here. I started to wonder, between massive glaciers splitting and rendings in the Earth, well, was there something below? So I read what I could on Wikipedia and packed for a journey under the Driftless region.

I’m stuck down here now. I’m writing down why I came here, as if I don’t make it, hopefully these records do. Small bipedal creatures are running up to me and stealing food from my bag. At least, I think that’s what’s happening. I have no light, and they glow, and either this is a hallucination or I’m onto something really exciting. Either way, I’m not sure about the odds of my survival.

Writing prompt: The enchanted dollhouse

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Time: 7 minutes. Click here to go to my list of prompts.

“The enchanted dollhouse”

The attic, a place of gloom and terror that Lillian only went as a last resort to hide from chores, was the last place that Lillian expected to find a dollhouse. It was under a dusty old sheet, and when she pulled it off, she had the greatest sense of delight. The little dolls were tucked in their beds, and all the details were just so—victorian wallpaper, delicately carved stair railings, a tiny loaf of bread on the table. Lillian sat all the dolls at the kitchen table and arranged plates with forks and knives, and it was amazing.

Why hadn’t mom told her about the dollhouse? Well, sometimes mom was weird, so Lillian decided not to say anything about it after she came back down from the attic. All evening long, she wanted to go back up and play, but mom would ask questions.

The next afternoon, Lillian went straight to the attic after school, and straight to the dollhouse. Oddly, the dolls weren’t at the table, they were in bed again. Hmm, mom must have come up to play with it herself or something.

So Lillian asked her mother about the dollhouse when she returned from work.

“What dollhouse?” her mother said with intensity. She could be so weird.

“The one in the attic. The Victorian one. I found it yesterday.”

“You didn’t play with it, did you?” her mother’s face grew pale.

“Of course I did,” Lillian said. “Don’t worry, I was careful and I didn’t break anything.”

Her mother rushed out of the room. “Mom,” her mother said, “Lillian found the dollhouse. What do I do?”

Writing prompt: add a cat to an existing universe

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Time: 7 minutes. Click here to go to my list of prompts.

“Add a cat to an existing universe”

When the Founders left Earth, they brought a variety of animals, kept in suspended animation, for the founding of their eventual colony. Sheep, cows, horses, pigs, all the big animals that civilization used to get started, along with some smaller ones like chickens and dogs. The only animal out of suspension was Andine Kenda’s black cat Nyx. It prowled the hallways of the Neva, and it was clear that it owned that ship more than anyone.

The cat lived with Andine after Founding—in the city at first, and in Mt. Vit during the rains. After Andine was killed, she was taken back to the Neva, which then went to Naenia. Nyx refused to get off the ship on Naenia, and lived out her remaining 5 years as the terrifying spook of the ship. Stories recount engineers repairing parts of the ship encountering the black beast, and with the scratches to prove it.

Eventually all creatures slow, though. Her body was found, curled up as though sleeping, outside the room that was once Andine’s. In Vironeaveh, black cats are creatures of wonder and energy. On Naenia, they’re little demons that bring you bad luck.

(Just got back from vacation and with a cold, so this one was a struggle. But if I write now, I can always write, and that’s important!)

Writing prompt: invasive species

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Time: 7 minutes. Click here to go to my list of prompts.

“Invasive species”

Years ago, I watched time-lapse photography of plants growing. Plants move and respond to stimuli and avoid pain like animals, the narrator said. They just do it on a different time scale. That documentary made me wonder what the world seems like to a plant.

Reading the news the other day, that documentary came to mind. The tenta plant has been making its way up from Mexico. Here in the Shenandoah we knew we’d be safe; we have winters here after all. Plants adapt over time, but winter is a mighty thing.

Somehow, the tenta adapts faster. Scientists are fascinated by it the way they always are by hazardous things, like a kitten with a grenade. Some have compared it to reverse transcription viruses like HIV, somehow it has some ability to incorporate genetic attributes of other plants. Surrounded by winter-hardy plants, ten thousand of these plants could try ten thousand combinations.

There are indications of new traits to the plant, as it grows further into more densely settled regions. It was never an irritant like poison ivy, but now it is. Some have nettles.

I remember watching those vines frantically reach toward the light, in some way we can’t understand knowing and feeling what they wanted. Or the ficus tree, slowly growing the life out of its host. I couldn’t help but wonder if the tenta plant had such an awareness to accompany its novel new ability, and what that might hold for the future.

Writing prompt: world build for an in-progress work

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Time: 7 minutes. Click here to go to my list of prompts. This prompt is related to the prompt “a door that goes anywhere“.

“World-build for an in-progress work, specifically for a magic system”

The main character’s parents have a door that goes anywhere. Through his childhood, the character didn’t know about this door, and he only found out about it by accident when he did. His parents are unhappy about him finding out. They didn’t want him to know because they didn’t want him to follow their footsteps and do what they did.

The door can go anywhere. The parents use this to gather scarce and special materials from all corners of the planet for special paintings that have magical properties. A portrait of a person with the right ingredients can improve their health or maybe their fertility. A different portrait can sabotage their health, or make the stressed or unlucky. Without the door, obtaining the right materials in the right purities would be nearly impossible, but it’s still quite hard as you must have been to the location before. The parents apprenticed to learn these locations and materials.

Naturally enough, there are people who use the paintings to control and harm people, and people who use the paintings to help and enrich people, and these two groups don’t like each other. The character’s parents are the nice group, but each group works hard to maintain the secrecy of their identity, since then the opposition could paint a portrait of them.

The paintings need not be only portraits. A painting of a volcano with the right ingredients might increase the likelihood of an eruption or a painting of a plane with the right ingredients might increase the likelihood of a smooth flight. A painting of locusts could either increase or decrease the likelihood of destruction by them.

The parents don’t want the character participating because the good side has been losing, and their own health has been sabotaged. The bad side has a sense of honor, and doesn’t generally attack unaffiliated people, but if the character were to become involved, his health and safety would be vulnerable.

Writing prompt: Expand upon a character in an in-progress work

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Time: 10 minutes. Click here to go to my list of prompts.

“Expand upon a character in an in-progress work”

Jada has loved nature since she was a little girl. She grew up with a brother and two half sisters in a pretty small house, so nature was a literal retreat. She would walk through the woods by the train tracks and draw pictures of different plants and birds’ nest, and take pictures. She wasn’t always a good student, especially if there was a window in the class for her to stare out of and daydream.

In high school, Jada’s good friend Ella helped her get serious about her homework, and eventually apply to a state forestry program. Ella and Jada eventually had a falling out over a boy. Jada retained her determination in academics. Ella’s family was more studious, and before meeting Ella, Jada just hadn’t really considered what studying could lead to.

After the falling out with Ella, Jada was a bit disillusioned about relationships and boys, and is highly wary of the drama that they can lead to. After starting on the Blue Ridge project, she started dating coworker Axel, maybe against her better judgment. That ended messily, though they still had to work with each other. She doubts herself in the matter, and wonders if the relationship ended due to the flaws she saw or failure that she was always anticipating. (Axel is bit of a jerk; he can be unempathetic.) When Jada gets upset, she has difficulty articulating why.

Jada’s favorite color is turquoise, but her favorite color to wear is red. She likes very spicy food, and she really wants to travel, having never been outside the US and Canada. Her most treasured travel was to Redwood forest. She would like to visit the Amazon, but especially the jungles of Papua New Guinea, partially because her mother is partially of that descent.

Writing prompt: Lie detector

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Time: 7 minutes. Click here to go to my list of prompts.

“Lie detector”

Blood flows in the face indicate certain emotions. Rage is one pattern, confusion another, fear (perhaps of getting caught in a lie) yet another. Some cameras could detect subtle changes in face color from the blood flow, but better yet were cameras that reached into the infrared, to see the heat of that blood flow.

Trish first loved the science of this technology, but after she was denied tenure for lacking funding, she found a new purpose to it. Business.

With google glasses so common as they were, it wasn’t much of a trick to fit hers out with the additional infrared range camera and write the code to show the blood flows overlaid upon their face. She became a human lie detector, able to fox out the lies and bluffs of all but the sociopathic (who incidentally had their own telltale patterns). Perhaps the preponderance of the sociopathic shouldn’t have come as a surprise, but it did.

Still, the funding came in now, and she started up a company. Not with her own special technology, of course. It was her ticket to a bright future. Some other good but less phenomenal idea.

That was, until the meeting with Ms. Teller, who seemed oddly apt at dissecting Trish’s own lies and sidesteps. Reading up on her, Trish discovered Teller’s background in pattern processing and optics. Suddenly, the marketplace had grown just a little more crowded.

To Trish, the solution was obvious—she had to destroy Teller or join with her.