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Between working today, I am working on a quilt that I have been working on for my dad for a while. I’m in the process now of slowly adding a running embroidery stitch along the perimeter of the Sawtooth Star blocks on the quilt.

This has me thinking about quilting and writing. Quilts can be items of great fascination. They can hold a long history in their sewn layers. They can be pieces of mystery.

Consider the discovery of an old quilt by your character. Would they know what it is, perhaps a family heirloom or maybe the quilt has a square that identifies what it is? What if the quilt had a tear in it and in the process of repairing it they found that the quilt hid a secret. What kind of secret? A lost flag from the early days of the country? Hidden gemstones or jewelry? A map of some kind sewn into the middle layers?

This is not so much a creative writing prompt as it is an encouragement for my fellow writers, particularly those with blogs, to write something on how others might help with the Haiti disaster.

What kinds of suggestions do you have for your readers on how they can help?

Suggestions I would have include donations of money to well known organizations such as the Red Cross, which is my preferred organization to donate to for help.

Other possibilities might be what a local school might organize for care packages to be sent to Haiti orphanages and children in the refugee camps. The police Buddy Bear system comes to mind as a perfect example of what even a small stuffed toy can mean to a child that has lost everything in life changing trauma. I know it is not the same as the needed medical supplies, but sometimes comfort to a child can not be measured in a teaspoon.

If you have a blog or a website or even just an extensive e-mail list or twitter following I encourage you to encourage others to join together and help the people of Haiti get the care and support they so desperately need.

Viruses and headaches and website crashes oh my!

Just when things seemed to be going good, I found myself locked out of the Daily Writing Prompt and unable to get the site to load for days. My writing companion could see it, but I could not. I still have no idea what happened, but it makes one think of computers taking control. So, the prompt for January 15th is computer lockout.

What would the consequences be if your hero could not access a particular program when they had to? What if they had to get to a certain online location and were unable to due to some unknown computer error? What might have caused the error?

My first thought is someone trying to access a site that has taken on artificial intelligence and the computer the hero uses keeps getting redirected away from being able to access the site so that he can not shut it down.

I was over looking at a LiveJournal community on writing 100 words and I had to leave it because it seemed like every one of the posts on the first page were dreary and two of them ended with “Today is the day I die”.

I have never been much of a fan of doom and gloom and people dying, and I think that right now we do not need more of that in this world, we need more cheerfulness. So, that is my prompt for today. Cheerfulness.

Find something, anything, to be cheerful about and write about it.

This prompt is brought to you by the cuteness of my dad’s new kitty. My dad has a little kitty named Patches, a lovely Siamese kitten with Calico patches where she should normally have dark seal points. He also has a Shitzu that belonged to my mom that we call Wookie.

The Wookie normally scratches at the bottom of his water dish when it is empty to let me know it needs refilled. I was in the kitchen watering plants and realized that the Wookie was acting like he wanted water in every way except he was not scratching at the bowl. Curious I looked back at his water bowl. It was bone dry with Patches curled up inside it spinning around as she chased her own tail around and around in the bowl by scooting along with her feet along the side of the bowl.

I looked back to the Wookie and realized he had this ‘Ummm… There is something in the water’ look to him as he looked between the kitten in his water bowl and me.

She was having so much fun I hated to shoo her out so I could put water in it.

It did make me think, though that “There is something in the water” would make a good prompt.

What might be in water that would make a good prompt? What if someone did find something weird (weirder than Patches at least, which is hard) in their dog’s water dish? What might it be?