Jump-start request
Feb. 21st, 2011 04:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
in_the_blueSo I've been feeling less than thrilled with myself lately as far as writing goes. I haven't written anything original in a long time now, and that pains me.
I'm going to ask a favor. Give me a prompt and a setting, anything from vague to intricately detailed, and I'll come up with something original for you. If you have some preferred character archetype or set of character archetypes for it, don't be shy.
I sure don't expect to be overwhelmed by too many prompts, but if I am, I'll let you know I've got all I can handle.
ETA: Wow, you guys, thanks. I have enough prompts for now. You're all awesome.
I'm going to ask a favor. Give me a prompt and a setting, anything from vague to intricately detailed, and I'll come up with something original for you. If you have some preferred character archetype or set of character archetypes for it, don't be shy.
I sure don't expect to be overwhelmed by too many prompts, but if I am, I'll let you know I've got all I can handle.
ETA: Wow, you guys, thanks. I have enough prompts for now. You're all awesome.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2011-02-22 12:19 am (UTC)coffee shop
blue jeans
the Beatles
Go!
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Date: 2011-02-25 11:12 pm (UTC)***
My criminal mind sloughed through the stow, the stone, no, the snow, and that was a critical mind, critical mind. Remember, I asked myself, remember the days when the words came out correctly the first time around, when what I saw in my mind's eye and what I heard in my heart correlated to what fell off the tips of my fingers, not these butterflies that panic to escape, backwards and criss-crossed, tied up in mash. The day I meant to type "the legal parameters of the case have yet to be determined but the evidence is solid and points clearly in one direction" and typed "flying backwards, we die slowly in one emanation" instead and didn't even know it was the beginning of the end of the transformation, the mutation, the slow suicide of healthy cells into rude abhorrent bullies pushing everything else aside. Oh hi, you have brain cancer (can we) it's inoperable (oh my) three to six months (I'd better get my) affairs in order.
That first night, I picnicked. I didn't panic, I picnicked, it was my favorite thing about this intruder inside my skull. We went on picnics filled with treats and glory. I didn't know I could but after that first night, so exhausted I thought it was nothing more than hallucination, I grew to love the freedom and intimacy of these trips, these backsplashes, these journeys into never-was and always-was, the way Jack (I had to name the tumor so I could own it) led me to the most fantastic places in my memory banks. A trip to the penny candy store at age five to buy wax lips and Nik-l-Nips, perennial favorites, to play the jukebox, to watch the evening go by snug in the arms of my momma. One time I took a picnic on the parameters of a high school prom, complete with the goofiest purple chiffon anyone had ever seen and a matching nosegay and a boy named Peter Cliff who didn't even try to fumble past the snaps and clasps and eye-hooks that worked their way up my back. I sat back, ate my pain-au-chocolat and drank my pinot noir, me and Jack, and laughed at how awkward it was and wondered what Peter Cliff was doing these days. Probably a dot-com millionaire, we decided, but Jack had seduced me into staying with him and enveloped me in darkness. Take me on another trip, I implored him and he obliged, devouring another part of my cerebellum to make it possible.
I love you, I told him.
And I love you too, he replied, folding blackness around me.
What can we do to help, friends said when what they really meant was how far can we stay away? You are a disease, you're contagion, you're a reminder that we are so mortal and as such not the perfect beings we think we are and I said nothing, nothing, but answer when I call, heed the signs, care for yourselves. I had a secret lover who gave me all I needed. Sometimes he was tall and slender and dark-haired and other times he laughed like a drunkard and still other times he bellowed at the top of his lungs, draped in leather and spikes.
Was there ever a time, I asked him, where life was so simple?
Yes, he said, I'll take you there, I'll take you to the time when you were seventeen and so full of amusement, when you and your girlfriends sat in the coffee shop and pretended to like the stuff but secretly doctored it with gallons of sugar and cream, wearing blue jeans and denim jackets and laughed about how when you were little, you fought over the Beatles like they were prizes for each of you to claim. I'm marrying Paul, you said, and they were so jealous you'd gotten to him first.
Right, right, I forgot about that, I told him, laughing from the bridge up above, legs dangling over the side, a glass of absinthe in my hand. I wish you could take me there forever.
I can. Jack, the ever-attentive, the clad-in-black bad boy of my dreams, the closer-to-John-than-to-Paul one I'd ended up with told me that all it would take to be there forever was a simple leap of faith.
What are we waiting for, I asked, and when he stood and took my hand I rose with him and in that moment, in the moment we took the leap together, I had never felt so free.
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Date: 2011-02-27 04:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-02-27 09:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-02-28 04:40 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-02-28 04:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-02-28 04:55 am (UTC)So weird, because I didn't check my email all weekend while I was away, and I was just telling someone how back before my mom was diagnosed with MS, my parents and the doctors thought it might be a brain tumor, and she was so relieved it wasn't cancer, she was like, we can deal with anything now.
I love that you went with what started going in your head when you sat down to write instead of with what might've been more lighthearted. Because this was amazing. Did I already say that? Well, it is. :P I kind of can't stop thinking about it.
no subject
Date: 2011-02-22 12:39 am (UTC)a watch
freckles
snowfall
no subject
Date: 2011-02-22 02:07 am (UTC)Soon, summer would be here, and no school, and that meant causing all sorts of trouble with her best friends, Pam and Julie. Sometimes, when it was just the three of them, they talked about running away to Mexico where Julie's family came from once upon a time. It sounded magical, all sand and water and swimming and green-on-earth, and pyramids and jungles and exotic birds and butterflies. We can't just go to Mexico, Rachel, Pammy had said in a hushed voice, it's dangerous. Pam's father was a cop so everything was dangerous, from the weapons he kept at their house to a trip to the corner store for bubble gum.
It's not dangerous, Julie retorted, lower lip out in defiance. The truth was that she'd never been. Born and bred in the United States, she didn't really want to go any further south than they already were. For her family, the danger of Mexico took on a whole different connotation and now, with places like Arizona being stupid about people like them, she didn't even want to go there. Besides, Pam told her how her dad had warned her one time that there was a lot of money changing hands down there over girls like her and her friends, and if people weren't careful they could find themselves being bought and sold.
Some days, Rachel mused to her friends, I wouldn't mind it if someone sold me to another family. They all laughed over that one because they'd all had the thought at one point or another. When they were just six -- it seemed like ages ago -- they'd hatched this plot to switch places with each other at night and see how long it took their families to realize the wrong kid was in their house. Rachel bet her own parents wouldn't notice for three whole days. They all agreed Pam's family would be the hardest because her dad had such an eagle eye for detail or couldn't be a policeman, even if everyone knew they really spent their nights eating donuts and drinking coffee down at Dunkin Donuts on 34th. They figured out of the three of them, Rachel stood the best chance at fooling Julie's family for a day or two, but the problem with their plan was that they were going to have to stay up past midnight, sneak to each others' houses, and switch places without anyone noticing.
Julie's little brother was a brat and said he'd tell. They never could stay up til midnight anyway and eventually forgot all about their plan.
It seemed like such a long time ago, now that she thought of it. The cottonwood swirled around in the skies. It made her sneeze sometimes, right into her cupped hands and in those moments she always noticed the weight of her brother's watch on her wrist. It was so weird the day she came home and found him hanging in the garage. At first she didn't even know he was dead, not until she told him to cut it out and get down from there or Dad would kill him.
She'd regretted that choice of words every day since, and now all she had was his watch. By now, his body had to be all eaten up by worms and stuff and idly, she wondered if they had worms in Mexico. Worms that they didn't put in bottles of alcohol and that didn't jump around in beans, but the kind that could keep her brother company in the ground.
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Date: 2011-02-22 02:23 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-02-22 02:30 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-02-22 01:26 am (UTC)lost opportunities
new hope
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Date: 2011-02-22 01:56 am (UTC)Sirius
The Marauders
Star Gazing
Whisky
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Date: 2011-02-22 05:51 am (UTC)"Don't you think you ought to be paying a little more attention to the road? I mean, far be it for me to tell anyone how to drive. I only magicked a bloody motorbike to get it off the roads. But you've not got that luxury, have you. I'd slow down." His fingers pinched together. "Just a bit."
"Yes, sir, she'd answered aloud, and didn't even think it was unusual to be talking to a fictional character. This was her car. Whatever people did in their cars, it was for them alone. If she had money for every nose-picking zipper-dropping makeup-applying newspaper-reading driver she'd ever seen, she could quit her stupid job and retire to some nice warm Caribbean island.
"Would you go with me?" As long as she had Sirius's attention, she figured she might as well ask.
"I don't know." He was taller than she expected, and younger too -- this was the man himself before Azkaban wore holes in his heart and mind -- and his grey eyes pierced the space between them with such clarity that it took her aback. Later, she'd tell herself it was all idle fantasy, that she'd been seeing things, but for the moment she wasn't about to kick him out of bed for eating crackers.
"What would it depend on?" There was no harm in asking.
"The time of the month, of course." He shook his head as if she should have known better. "Someone's got to look after Moony. I can hardly leave him to James alone, and Peter would be scared out of his rat-tailed pathetic gourd."
"Well then." There was nothing remotely sarcastic about her smile. "We'll just have to look at a moon chart when we get home so I can book the tickets."
She heard a laugh, one so short it almost sounded like a bark, but it disappeared abruptly as another stupid SUV moved into her lane. "Goddammit!" She hated having to slam on the brakes in the middle of a 65-mph zone, but there was no alternative. When she turned back to the passenger seat, no one was there.
That night after sheepishly checking the phases of the moon ("you are so fucking stupid, Tricia Tucker, talking to invisible playmates, and you are not going to the Caribbean") she found herself outside, a bottle of Jack in hand, looking up at the stars. Work stress, she told herself, that was it. She hadn't really talked to a fictional character. It was just blowing off steam, the same way she sang along to the songs on the radio, the same way she talked to herself when she needed the company. Right there, right up in the sky to the south, she found Orion. One of the first constellations she'd ever learned to recognize back when she was a kid: she saluted the Dog Star and took a healthy sip from the bottle.
As if someone had turned a radio on very softly, she heard a voice. "She drank it right out of the bottle. Don't they have glassware in America?"
"No, Moony, they don't. That invention hasn't made it over here yet."
(Those were new voices. Maybe she really was going crazy. Maybe she'd just been too in love with the words on the page. Maybe someone was playing a trick on her; that was probably it. One of the girls from work or better still, one of the guys. Assholes. She'd get them.)
"D-don't listen to him, Remus. He's lying."
Two voices, strong and clear, answered as one: "Shut it, Peter."
Okay, okay, she thought, I give up. What was there to do but let herself be surrounded by Marauders and share the bottle? Not a thing, not a thing: Tricia gave herself over to the night sky and to the vast and incomprehensible hands of fate. Who was she to question how things worked?
"Tell me one last thing," said Harry. "Is this real? Or has this been happening inside my head?"
"Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?"
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Date: 2011-02-22 05:59 am (UTC):SNIFFLES A LOT:
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Date: 2011-02-22 06:10 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-02-26 12:00 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-02-26 12:43 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-02-26 04:31 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-02-26 01:40 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-02-26 01:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-02-22 01:57 am (UTC)Location: Airport Bar
Detail: Both are career driven (the reason their relationship didn't work out)
no subject
Date: 2011-02-22 04:50 am (UTC)***
"Steve Lewis. I don't believe it."
He couldn't believe it either: her hair was still red, and her body still showed every curve and every muscle, fine and toned and still in competition form. Fuck, but she'd been good. She'd beaten him every time they met up in a match except for one, and after that they'd sparred in a completely different kind of way, the kind that lasted off and on for years. Opportunistic as hell at first, but then he'd started looking forward to it, then realized it was something he couldn't live without just about the time she'd decided it was getting too confining and it was time to put an end to things.
Maybe he should've fought her for the right to make the decision. After all, they'd started off as enemies, at least on paper. And that's what they were now, although maybe not in so many words. Only in the way that happens when an affair that damn torrid splinters into a million little pieces.
Well, this was bound to happen, running into one another somewhere along the line, even though it was still a big solar system and there were a lot of spaceports in a lot of cities on a lot of planets and moons. Mars was close to home, though, in a lot of ways, so why not here?
"Hey. You look great." The spark of competition still sat squarely on her face. Mostly in her eyes, that's where it always was, always had been, everywhere from in the gym to the bedroom, and wasn't that what had attracted him in the first place? The words weren't even meant as a compliment, just as honest observation. "Still taking names and kicking ass."
She laughed, and for a moment it softened her measurably but just as in competition, the weakness only showed for an instant before all the walls went right back up. "You know it. And my kids are still kicking your kids' asses all over the effing galaxy."
Just like before, he thought, just like before: they always were on opposite sides of the fence. That flare between them? Never should have happened. It would make it so much easier for him to sit down with his kids after hours and hours of workout and tell them to go beat the crap out of her kids, no matter how hard it was, no matter what obstacles got in their ways. And if they questioned why he never made the trips with them on the competition circuit, they did so in private.
Fucking pride. Man's greatest damn downfall.
"One of these days, my kids will take yours. First place. Second place. Third place. You'll see, Red. You'll see."
She turned back to her martini, amusement written all over her face. "You still call me Red. After all this time, you still do."
"Yeah." It wasn't as uncomfortable a truth as it might have been. "And you still call me Steve. You know, that's never even been my name."
Fuck yeah, it was worth it to drop that bomb on his way out. He didn't even have to look back to feel the flush of anger rise on her face. There were... a hell of a lot of ways to win a game: she never even saw that one coming.
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Date: 2011-02-22 02:34 am (UTC)Location: the breakfast table
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Date: 2011-02-22 02:51 am (UTC)Time frame: past and present
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Date: 2011-02-22 02:52 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-02-22 02:54 am (UTC)