Tag: writing challenge

  • 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.

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  • Flash fiction prompt — 09feb26

    Photo by Patrick Fore on Unsplash

    I thought I’d start sharing those flash fiction prompts generated by AI that I find compelling enough to consider attempting to write about for my own purposes in case any of the folks dropping by here are tempted to try their hand at the prompt as well.

    It would be fun to see how others approach these prompts and contrast/compare the output.

    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:

    Subgenre: Silkpunk / Ghost-Tech

    Plot Elements to Include:

    • The Object: An ornate silk kite that flies without wind, pulling its handler toward “emotional ley lines.”
    • The Setting: A floating city constructed entirely of paper and bamboo, held aloft by the collective memories of its inhabitants.
    • The Conflict: A “Memory-Scribe” discovers a blank spot in the city’s archives—a day in history that has been physically cut out of the paper foundation.

    Target Length: < 2,000 words

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  • 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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