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…)