Tag: prompted fiction

  • 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.

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  • 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.

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  • The Bell Palimpsest — a prompted fiction exercise

    Photo by Peter Herrmann on Unsplash

    The following is written from another fiction prompt from Jolene (Chico’s Mom). On-the-fly, off-the-cuff and keeping edits to a minimum (my personal rules). The required included elements from her prompt are:

    1. Person who never gives up
    2. Plastic surgeon
    3. Secret meeting
    4. Library

    As expected, it ended up like another Twilight Zone reject, and I expect that’s just the way my mind is wired. I may make small edits in the next day or so as I read it with a fresh mind, but I don’t expect anything substantial to change during that time.

    Doctor Eliot Thorne was not a patient man in the best of times. And he was losing what patience he had as he waited for Miss Clara Bell in the candlelit library of her ancestral home in the wealthy end of town. He had thought to ask for more lighting, and had turned to the butler to ask for the lighting to be increased, but Gunter, her manservant, was already through the double-hung doors before he could think to ask.

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