{Daily Prompt] May 20 – New Frontiers

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On May 20, 1932 at 7PM, Amelia Earheart set off from Harbor Grace, Newfoundland, Canada, to become the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic. The flight took 13 hrs and 30 minutes. Now there are somewhere around 300 transatlantic flights every day, carrying hundreds of passengers each. Five years after her historic flight, Earheart would disappear, along with her navigator, Fred Noonan, between Lae, New Guinea and Howland Island.

I think this suggests a prompt in lots of different genres: speculative fiction and historical; stories set on planes, stories set across continents and cultures; explorers; innovators; tragedy; scientific inquiry…so today’s prompt is:

Write a story for Amelia Earheart

 

Go!

{Daily Prompt] May 19 – Dark Day

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  • In 1780, in New England at midday the sky grew dark and no scientifically verifiable reason has ever been found. Some people thought it was the end of the world.
  • 1816 was known as The Year Without A Summer. Crops died, people starved, and a group of poets hung out in a cabin and told each other stories (resulting in the composition of the seminal “Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus” written by Mary Shelley. Her friend John Polidori wrote “The Vampyre” and their buddy Lord Byron wrote the poem “Darkness “.) A child named Justus Von Leibig was so affected by the famines that, when he grew up, he became a chemist and invented modern fertilizers. But no-one could explain the phenomenon until  over 150 years later. In our lifetimes  researchers have pieced together disparate strands of evidence and realized that the cause of all this choas and creativity was the catastrophic 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia – an event that was not properly catalogued because it was so destructive that there was no-one left to chronicle anything but the secondary effects.
  • British author Arthur C. Clarke stated, as one of his ‘three laws of prediction”: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

 

Your prompt today is to write about something that is inexplicable to the people in your story. You may choose to offer, as a twist, a modern, scientific explanation, or you may leave it to the imagination of the reader.

 

Go!

 

 

[Daily Prompt] May 18 – Court

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Today’s prompt was inspired by a board game we were playing tonight (we’re big board gamers in our house). Strictly speaking the prompt should be “tennis court” but I’m allowing the simple “court”, since that has more meanings.

So here’s your prompt:

Court

Go!

[Daily Prompt] May 17 – Creative Copy Challenge

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Today’s prompt is a guest prompt from Shane Arthur of the Creative Copy Challenge website.

Their regular challenge provides ten words that their readers weave into a story. Some are hilarious, some are moving, some are silly, but everyone has fun. Check out the site for examples.

Today Shane has provided this list of words and challenges you to create a story containing all ten. I’m looking forward to seeing what you come up with.


1.  Regular
2.  Sun
3.  Wild
4.  Muck
5.  Shoot
6.  Frustration
7.  Hand
8. Take
9. Push
10. Trip

Go!


Shane is a freelance editor/proofreader. He runs the writing prompts site Creative Copy Challenge in his three seconds of spare time.

[Daily Prompt] May 16 – Over

Daily Prompt LogoThis is personally & selfishly inspired today.

Today I’ve had a big, emotional family event that we’ve been building up to for weeks (and anticipating for what, months? Years?). I’ve been looking forward to it, I had a wonderful day, and now that everyone has just left I feel … as if someone has cut my strings. I’m sagging, I’m flagging. It’s not a bad feeling, but it was entirely unexpected.

The word that formed in my head wasn’t as complicated as “relief” or “pride” or “excitement” or “exhaustion”.

The word that formed in my head was:

Over.

So that’s your prompt: Over.

Over to you, now.

Go!