HOME

Today’s writing prompt comes along with a contest. And it is a very very kewl contest if I do say so myself.

A Cowboy’s Wife is having a contest on her food blog! You can win a Hamilton Beach® Stand Mixer and she’ll ship anywhere so everyone is eligible!

This is a very kewl prize for her first contest, and the blog is one of my favorite food blogs to visit. I’m sharing the contest here to let everyone have a chance to find out about it (contest lasts till the end of January), and because I really want a good chance of winnig the mixer. I need one, mine’s on its last legs.

The Writing Prompt: What’s Cooking

You can either have your character cooking something or trying to learn to cook. Maybe your heroine has plans to make a great dinner for the man she is romancing? I remember years ago my sister (then in her teens) wanted to impress a boy so she made spaghetti, poor girl, first time she ever made it and she refused to let our mom help. It came out of the pot as a spaghetti cake that was sliced at the table. Seems to me it was really good, but oh my, what a unique way to serve spaghetti.

I can just imagine some of the ways this could be used in a Sci-Fi novel, from the hero having his first experience with alien cuisine to his trying to explain a traditional Earth dish to an alien species.

In my own writing you can often tell what I was eating when I was writing, because it is often reflected in the stuff my characters are eating. So, go check out the contest at My Wooden Spoon via one of the links above, then get to typing and see what’s cooking in your story.

Okay, this is kewl. See my sidebar there, the little dealie showing random books from my library… yeah, that. It’s a little deal from LibraryThing that lets me show you what books I have in my library here. You can even click on the covers to buy one of them you might like from Amazon – pretty spiffy!

Anyway, LibraryThing is a really kewl website that I discovered this morning and have been playing with. It lets you create a virtual bookshelf of all your books (200 for free and more with yearly or lifetime subscriptions). You can see how many members have the same books as you and get recommendations for books you might enjoy based on the ones you have uploaded.

Get pictures of the covers of your books, or upload your own images if there are none on the site. I did that for one of my books today.

Okay, so…

The Writing Prompt?

A thing in a library. This opens up a lot of fascinating ideas for me as a fantasy writer. Oh what kinds of things might lurk in the libraries of fantasy worlds? But there could be a lot of fun in other genera’s as well. Horror comes to mind as a fun one hehehe. Sci-Fi could have interesting things in the libraries. Of course, the thing does not have to be a living thing. It could be some weird piece of artwork that the hero can only describe as “the thing in the library”.

I am working out a schedule for what I need to get done before January ends, so I decided that was as good a writing prompt as any for today.  Your character might be checking their day’s schedule, scheduling an appointment for something or looking over the schedule for when the next city bus will be stopping at the bus stop they are at.

Maybe they are checking the schedule book for the victim to see who the deceased last had an appointment with before they were murdered?  Or they could be checking the schedule on a shipment of stuff for a remote colony trying to establish a foothold on an alien world?   Checking the scheduled stops of an armored car they want to hijack?

There are a lot of different ways to work a schedule into your story, and it can even suggest a myriad of subplot ideas, so get to writing and have some fun.

I’m not sure what happened to the prompt that was supposed to post for today, but it seems to have been lost.  Think it was brownouts we were having, but not sure.

I suppose that makes a good make up prompt, huh?  Brownouts?  I can easily see a group of spacefarers trying to track down what is causing the power to brownout all over their ship.  Nice little side plot there for a novel.  How about plugging into the power grid at the space port and having something malfunctioning and causing brownouts and the mechanic has to stay behind even though he really wanted to go explore the local bar?

Brownouts can add a nice little bit of suspense to any modern type story, particularly crime or horror types.  Here the damsel is in distress and she’s walking around her scary building knowing there is a vampire in the city looking for damsels in distress and the power keeps browning out.

For anyone that does not know. A brownout means the lights dim really low as if they are going out but don’t actually go out, then they go back up to full.  It is usually caused from my experience by snow falling on power lines, high winds making trees hit the lines and short circuits in the wiring – among many other causes.

Have you ever had someone just out of the blue give you information that you really did not want to be hearing?  Something that just kind of set your whole day off onto a bad course and left you in a lousy mood?  It is not something you really wanted to hear, something that given your choice on hearing now or later you would have preferred to have heard it later.  You know the sorts of things I am talking about.

Today’s Daily Writing Prompt is “I didn’t want to know that”.  Is there something that your lead really would have preferred not to know about?  Maybe that their ship has a mechanical or electronic flaw?  Perhaps that there is a curse on the ring they just slipped on their finger?  Did the prisoner just escape?  Consider what might just set your character’s day off onto a path toward being a lousy day and see if it fits in with your story.  Or use it as a bit of a subplot for one of your minor characters.