Today is the birthday of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, author of the Sherlock Holmes mysteries.

This is close to my heart, not only because I love mysteries in general and Holmes in particular (and everything it has inspired), but also because, when I was at university, I used to go past Sir Arthur’s old house every day: he was a student at Edinburgh University and his lodgings are  still in use by the university.

So, today’s post is:

Write something inspired by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

It needn’t be a mystery or a Sherlock Holmes-like story, but perhaps you could have a faithful sidekick whose job is to stand around and say ‘what did you just do there?’ like Dr Watson. Or perhaps you’ll use the word ‘elementary’. Or write something with a brilliant, or manic, or extremely logical lead.

Go!

Um…yeah. Your prompt for today (for no particular reason) is

Late!

Go!

• 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!