Category: fiction from prompts

  • Flash fiction prompt — 10feb26

    Photo by Patrick Fore on Unsplash

    I am sharing flash fiction prompts generated by AI for my own use unless I don’t think they are worth pursuing. Readers are welcome to try their hand at writing based on the prompts generated for this exercise.

    Notes about modifications made to the AI instructions or this post template are at the end of this post if you are curious about such things.

    Feel free to skip these posts if you feel you are not the target audience. If you choose not to participate, there is no need to let us know about your preferences and opinions about these prompts, or the use of artificial intelligence to generate writing prompts.

    Today’s prompt:

    Genre: Speculative fiction

    Subgenre: Biopunk / Post-Apocalyptic

    Target Length: < 2,000 words

    Key Elements:

    • A genetically modified plant that blooms only in moonlight.
    • A rusted key that opens nothing in the protagonist’s possession.
    • The sound of running water where there should be none.
    • A faded photograph of a skyline that no longer exists.
    (more…)

  • Kasumi-no-Kuni — flash fiction

    This piece is based on the flash fiction prompt posted earlier and follows my personal guidelines as described in this post.

    Subgenre: Silkpunk / Ghost-Tech

    Rin looked out over the Land of Mists from the tower she kept her watch from, a tower built entirely of unmarked rice paper and bamboo where she slept when she needed rest, and where she ate when she was given offerings by visitors coming to pay their respect to the memories of the ancestors — those memories captured in the paper of the lands proper. True to the name, the mists and clouds flowed through the city with only a single living resident, that being Rin. The white fog snaked through the streets inked with the stories of ancestors, often obscuring the memories unless someone were to stand before them.

    (more…)

  • Dead zone — flash fiction

    See my notes in this post about the prompted flash fiction pieces on this site about personal drivers and rules I use while writing them.

    Plot Elements to Include (all prompts and genre randomly suggested by Gemini AI):

    • The Object: A heavy, brass-bound radio that doesn’t receive signals from this decade.
    • The Setting: A city perpetually covered in coal-dust fog where sound is regulated by the government.
    • The Conflict: The protagonist discovers a “dead zone” where the fog clears, revealing a sky that hasn’t been seen in fifty years.

    Genre: Dieselpunk / Alt History

    “Gimme your ETA for finishing Delta sector baffler maintenance, Zed-Ought-Three-Stroke-Seven-Ex. We’ve got a situation in Epsilon and you’re needed immediately. Dispatch over.”

    Cinder let dispatch stew for a few moments before responding. She’d been done fixing the bafflers ten minutes ago but had quickly learned that being too much of a go-getter in City Maintenance just go-got you more thankless tasks and a fistful of disgruntled coworkers to boot. No one liked a brownnoser, including the bosses because then they had to find more make-work for you and explain to their superiors why that was the case. And if their superiors thought there were inefficiencies in the system, they would reduce the workforce to account for those inefficiencies, keeping only the overachievers, who would then be saddled with more work than they could handle on their own. Let no good deed go unpunished was the unofficial motto of the dome maintenance worker.

    (more…)

  • A few notes about stories & prompts

    Photo by Patrick Fore on Unsplash

    As I mentioned a few days ago, I am going to try to increase my output of short fiction on the site to stretch out those muscles in that part of my brain which have atrophied somewhat in the past few years.

    I feel that I should provide some disclosures before publishing many more stories and to make clear what my personal rules are, and to set expectations about what you see in the coming days. Rather than post a few disclaimers for every story, I thought I’d point to this post. It is intended to be a living document and I will modify it as needed to clarify or correct its contents.

    (more…)