Posted on by Chris Sarantopoulos

Inspirational prompt 35

Let’s see what paths this takes you 🙂 Lots of things to play with here. Characters, setting, backstory, conflict. Take your pick.

———

“Go on, open the umbrella, Richard. Now’s a good a time as any.”
“No.”
“Open it.”
“I said, no.”
“open the umbrella, or I’ll smack you in the head with it, you old geezer.”
Henry puffed and huffed and rolled his eyes. “Who you’re calling old, you, you, you overripe prune? Your senility makes you forget I’m the youngest. Four moon turns. Y-O-U-N-G-E-S-T. Youngest.
“You’re older than me. Four moon turns OLDER! Father mixed us up at first, remember? I’m the youngest.”
Richard harrumphed and turned his back, one leg over the other, foot bouncing up and down irritably.
Henry rolled his eyes and kept drumming his thigh with his fingers.
“Open the umbrella.”
“Huh-uh.”
“You stubborn old fool. He’ll die with everyone else in less than five minutes. What difference does it make if we claim him now? Open the damn umbrella.”
“Oh, no. I’m not getting the blame again for another early reset.”

Posted on by Chris Sarantopoulos · 2 Comments

Inspirational prompt 29

“If we want to be completely honest with each other, my short friend, it was the silence that woke your queen, not I.”
The constable still struggled to maintain his grip on the ever shifting apparition that looked like that feisty woman from last year, the only one who had managed to ruin a perfectly well-organised execution. “Don’t give me that. Silence doesn’t wake anyone, nor does it put them in a slumber afterwards. We saw you -”
“You saw me doing what exactly?”
“Pulsing,” the constable said and made a point by waving a fat hand before her face when no other descriptive word came to his mind, “over her head. Now she can’t wake up.”
“That’s ’cause she stopped listening. It demands her attention. Mine as well, and your voice is so annoying.”
“Listening what? What does it say? Who says it?”
The shimmering woman paused, focused on the air around her, listened earnestly. “It says, ‘we should talk about your unborn ancestors and the crimes they’ll commit’.”

Posted on by Chris Sarantopoulos · 4 Comments

Inspirational prompt 28

Tom blew smoke from the edge of his mouth and eyed me askance through the haze. “Back again? You going for a record or something? How did it happen this time? No, wait. Lemme guess. Bullet, right? Angry husband.”
I sat on the chair facing him – more like collapsed, to be precise. ‘Re-establishment,’ as I liked to call the procedure back then, was – and still is – a pain in the ass. Drained all my strength for a whole day. I barely had enough energy in me to reach out and snatch his cigarette. “Nah. Not how I died this time, man.”

Posted on by Chris Sarantopoulos

Inspirational prompt 24

Last time I posted a prompt I added a poll asking your opinion on these prompts. Thank you all for voting. By the way, the poll is still open and you can vote if you want to. The more answers, the better it will be. So, most of you asked for a few lines of prose rather than images, so here it is.

=======
Brightness painted the inside of her eyes in orange and red. She winced, turned her head, focused on the dry rubbing her hair made on the pillow. A small groan escaped her. Someone mimicked her from her left. She whipped her head towards the sound, regretted it. Her head was swimming, and as if that wasn’t enough, there was a little troll up there, a troll with a hammer enjoying itself with the insides of her head.

Another moan from her left. “Garry?” She tried getting up, tried moving her arm to lean on her elbow, but something pinned her down, straps around her wrists, something across her chest. She opened her eyes; she was strapped on a bed.

Posted on by Chris Sarantopoulos

Inspirational prompt 18

Here’s another image to set you creativity gears in motion. What do you think happened? Accident or something deliberate? WAs someone dear to the girl in the picture lost or is it just a reaction to the loss of worldly possessions? What if the character you create is more selfish and cries not over the ashes and the destruction, but because now she won’t be able to fulfil some self-centred whim? What if she was misguided into doing something that resulted in the fire.

There are a lot of stories you can come up with this one. Try one 🙂