Flash fiction prompt — 17feb26

I am sharing those daily flash fiction prompts generated by AI that I personally feel are worth pursuing. Readers are welcome to try their hand at writing based on the prompts generated for this exercise, the goals of which are explained in this post.

Today’s prompt:

Genre: Noir

Subgenre/Theme: Occult Detective / Rainy City Cynicism

Prompt Elements:

• The Neon Confessional: A low-rent detective agency located directly behind a massive, buzzing neon billboard that flickers in a sequence that inadvertently mimics Morse code.
• The Lead-Lined Briefcase: An anonymous client leaves behind a case that is impossibly heavy for its size and remains freezing cold to the touch, even in the sweltering city heat.
• The Silver-Nitrate Source: A cynical morgue photographer who develops crime scene photos using a strange chemical wash that occasionally reveals the last shadow that fell across a victim’s face.
• The Charged Downpour: A localized, three-block radius where the rain carries a faint, static charge. It doesn’t electrocute, but it raises the hair on the back of the neck, makes the air taste sharply of ozone and copper, and leaves a mild, stinging prickle on any exposed skin.

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 comment about your preferences and opinions about these prompts, nor about the use of artificial intelligence to generate writing prompts.

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. This is currently a trial-and-error iterative process of providing instructions to the AI.

If you join in, try to keep to the genre (even if it is unfamiliar) and feel free to modify the prompt elements to better suit your story while striving to keep in the spirit of the suggestions.

There is no deadline for sharing your answer to the challenge should you choose to pursue these prompts. I don’t expect anyone else to make my personal goals their own. You are not constrained to writing only prose.

If you post something on your own site, let me know in the comments below. I recommend providing a link over posting in-comment. While I appreciate any backlinks, it is not a requirement for jumping in.

Most importantly: Have fun with this.

Caveat: This doesn’t really need to be mentioned for most of you but any links within the comments MUST be an entry for this challenge; all comments will be “sanitized” of any links redirecting traffic for other purposes or deleted wholesale as “spam”. I will check to make sure it is related to the prompt shortly after a comment goes live.

Change Notes:

[12feb26] I made additional modifications to the AI instructions to broaden the scope of the prompts beyond speculative fiction and those subgenres to include “tangential genres including, but not limited to: Weird, New Weird, Penny Dreadful, Pulp, Noir, Gothic, Grim Dark, Low-magic fantasy, Hardboiled, Gothic, Horror, etc.” Using previous instructions, the AI trended towards clockpunk, deiselpunk, biopunk, and other “-punk” suggestions. I felt it was too limited in the prompts it was suggesting and some were not very inspiring as a result. Exact wording:

Generate a daily flash fiction writing prompt (under 2000 words). Select a random genre from: Speculative Fiction, Weird, New Weird, Penny Dreadful, Pulp, Noir, Gothic, Grim Dark, Low-magic Fantasy, Hardboiled, or Horror. Provide a random subgenre/theme and 3-5 key elements (briefly described). Do not recycle ideas or iterate on previous conversations.

[10feb26] Gemini already started to iterate previous conversations and prompts to try and “please me” in less than a week since I first gave it instructions. I have reframed the scheduled prompt instructions with the intention of eliminating iteration of my previous conversations with the chat AI to hopefully provide more randomness to the prompts. Additionally, this post’s template was modified to simplify language and tighten up the content.