Monthly Archives: March 2020

19 COVID-19 Story Prompts

You’re stuck at home, all you can think about is COVID-19, and you’re in the mood to write a story. You’re stuck for an idea. Below, in no particular order, are nineteen free story prompts involving diseases. Some may be similar to stories already published, but you can write your own version.

  • Character A, hated by the family, returns home from travel and spreads coronavirus to the family. Character A recovers, but beloved family member Character B dies. Character A must live with the guilt and with being blamed by the rest of the family.
  • In a near-future world, everyone is isolated from each other. Social distancing is detected by implants and enforced. People maintain contact virtually. Reproduction occurs under strict, sterile conditions. People are repulsed by old movies showing close contact between characters.
  • A variant of the Loxothylacus panopaei barnacle mutates and now affects humans as it did with crabs, turning them into zombies. Stay out of the water!
  • A deadly virus, able to persist in air for a long time, spreads through Earth’s atmosphere. The only human survivors live separated from the atmosphere—submariners, astronauts, people in artificial biospheres, etc.
  • Two rival countries each have biological warfare research programs and struggle to create a deadly disease targeting only one area, or one race. A double-agent spy participates in both country’s programs.
  • A ‘covidiot’ character deliberately engages in disease-spreading behaviors, either from ignorance, denial, or perverse delight.
  • A freedom-loving country with limited government reluctantly imposes strict controls to limit a disease’s spread. Once a vaccine is found and the danger is over, the government becomes more autocratic, having discovered a taste for power.
  • In response to an outbreak, the government forms a task force including expert scientists. However, their guidance worsens the spread and accelerates the curve instead of flattening it. Only a brave ‘crackpot’ scientist from outside the mainstream has the answer.
  • A contagious disease induces a death-like coma. Humans can fight it off, but only by enduring the coma for some period of time. Panic ensues until the first victims begin recovering and scientists discover the disease has a zero percent mortality rate. But damage done by the panic is far worse than the disease.
  • A sort of ‘sloth disease,’ perhaps transmitted to humans by sloths themselves. It’s very slow to infect, so a victim is contagious for many years before any symptoms appear. By then, the entire human race is infected. Symptoms, when they eventually manifest, can be whatever you dream up.
  • Someone introduces a new breed of dog or cat, so lovable-looking that it catches on immediately. However, this breed spreads a disease to its owners.
  • A disease with two symptoms—one good and one bad. Perhaps it triples its victim’s IQ or makes them immune to all other diseases. However, it has some undesirable symptom, too, like a horrible skin condition or other deformity. The disease doesn’t spread easily, and once scientists figure out how to control it, people may choose whether to intentionally contract it or not.
  • A disease that increases its victim’s sense of fear and desire to be comforted by others. However, the mere existence of the disease causes these same emotions in unaffected people so it’s difficult to tell who has the disease and who doesn’t, since everyone shows the symptoms.
  • Write a story from a COVID-19 virus’ point of view.
  • Imagine a variation of a team sport like football, baseball, or basketball, a sport that maintains social distancing without contact between players.
  • A performer, (singer or stand-up comedian) must adapt to performing without a live audience.
  • A virus targets human DNA with a specific range of damage, only killing victims within a narrow age range, say ages 18-22. Anyone outside that range is immune. See this article.
  • A ‘mood virus’ that causes symptoms to worsen with any negative mood such as anger, anxiety, guilt, sadness, and shame. Maintaining positive emotions is the only way to stay immune.
  • Isolation, shelter-in-place, and social distancing become permanent. In time, extroversion is bred out and no longer exists as a human trait. One day a single extrovert is born and must contend with a population of introverts.

Please understand, in providing this list, I’m not making light of the deadly COVID-19 coronavirus. I’m just thinking about it as a writer does—grist for the idea mill. Now sit down and write your story. After writing ‘The End,’ you can express your gratitude to—

Poseidon’s Scribe

March 29, 2020Permalink

12 Cures for Stir-Craziness

Stay in your homes, the experts tell us. Keep away from others. Don’t gather in bars, restaurants, or theaters. There aren’t any sports. All your club meetings are cancelled. The boss called off that business trip and made you telework. You’re bored, being at home all the time. You’ve gone stir-crazy. What to do?

Here’s my answer—write something.

That’s right. Sit at your keyboard, or grab pen and paper, and write something.

“But,” you’re saying, “I’m not a writer!”

My answer—how do you know?

Here’s my list of stir-craziness cures, staring with the easiest ideas:

  1. Why not make a list of supplies you’re going to need soon? Wow! You’re writing!
  2. Remember that personal organizer book you bought back in 2015, and never used? Dig it out. You could come up with some life goals, and plans to achieve them. Maybe even a personal mission statement. Or a bucket list. You never found time for that before, but you’ve got time now.
  3. Start a journal (or diary, or logbook—call it what you want). Write down whatever occurs to you. Write about social distancing, and how much you hate it. Write about feeling like you’re under house arrest, the isolation and loneliness. Get the emotions out. Write as if nobody will ever read it.
  4. Write emails to relatives and friends you haven’t connected to in a while. Write tweets and Facebook posts. Write old-fashioned letters, on stationery; the Post Office still delivers.
  5. Write an article, essay, or vignette. The topic should be something you know about. At first, write as if you’re not going to send it anywhere. Later, as you look back over it and fix it up, it might not seem half bad. Perhaps it’s publishable.
  6. Start a blog. You can do it. It probably won’t change the world, but it might help you, and that’s a beginning.
  7. If you’re up for fiction, start with something short. There’s the six-word story, the 280-character story (twitterature), the dribble (50 words), the drabble (100 words), sudden fiction (750 words), or flash fiction (1000 words). Editors are looking for good stories of these lengths, and readers like them too.
  8. How about poetry? Can you make words sing, or fly, or lift a heart?
  9. Create a short story, with a few characters, or even just one. Focus on a single effect or mood. Editors and readers love well-written short stories. In fact, I know two editors searching for 3000-5000-word short stories inspired by Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Read the rules here, write your story, and send it in!
  10. Write a non-fiction book. You’re an expert in something. Perhaps you can expand that essay you wrote (see #5 above) to book length. Cookbooks, history books, coffee-table books, memoirs—they get bought all the time. Ooh, how about a travel book? Few people are traveling now, but everyone longs to.
  11. Write a children’s book, or YA (young adult). You’ll need a good imagination and the experience of having been young.
  12. Write the Great American Novel. As they say, writing a novel is a one-day event (as in ‘One day, I’ll write a novel’). You’ve got time now; excuses are gone. No need to wait for November; you can have a personal Nanowrimo now.

You may be cooped up, but your imagination isn’t, your words aren’t. Set them free! There’s no charge for this prescription for stir-craziness written by—

Poseidon’s Scribe

March 22, 2020Permalink

Quarantine and the Writing Scene

The spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus has got us all thinking. Each of us is reacting in his own way. As a writer, my mind turns toward fiction possibilities.

Please don’t take this post as some attempt to minimize or make light of this contagious and deadly disease. The numbers of infected and dead continue to mount as this new virus spreads around the world. Nobody knows how bad this coronavirus will get. Though panic may be unwarranted, so is blind optimism.

So far, I’m not showing any symptoms and am not under quarantine, neither the imposed nor self-directed kind. To my knowledge, that’s also true of everyone I know well. I’m not blogging about quarantines due to any personal experience, but merely because the topic is timely and it interests me as an observer of society.

COVID-19 is causing some changes in our behavior. For the most part, we’re all washing our hands more often and more thoroughly. We’re travelling less, and going to fewer well-attended events. We’re practicing ‘social distancing,’ and greeting others with fist or elbow bumps. We’re staying in our homes more and connecting with each other virtually.

When TV journalists conduct video interviews of symptom-free people who’ve been quarantined out of caution, the people all say they’re binge-watching movies and playing games to pass the time. (Not reading books? Come on!) But they feel lonely and isolated. They want the two weeks to be over.

That’s understandable. We’re social animals. We gain comfort from the close presence of others. If we now must view others as potential bringers of disease, that sets up an internal conflict, a tension between self-preservation and a need for acceptance.

For most writers, a symptom-less quarantine wouldn’t be so bad. Writing is solitary anyway, and necessary social interaction represents an interruption of the writing process. To some extent, writers practice a quasi-quarantine all the time.

Perhaps because of their self-imposed isolation, authors sometimes write about disease pandemics. Early examples include The Decameron (1353) by Giovanni Boccaccio and The Last Man (1826) by Mary Shelley.

More recent novels about pandemics are The Plague by Albert Camus, The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton, and The Stand by Stephen King.

All these works depict horrible results after the disease has run its course. Few novels (except The Plague) show the effects of quarantine, of forced separation.

One extreme fictional example of human separateness, though not involving disease, is The Naked Sun by Isaac Asimov. In it, citizens of the planet Solaria grow up detesting the physical presence of other humans. They don’t mind robots, but can only talk to other people through holographic communication, a sort of 3-D version of Skype.

Could COVID-19 or some later, more deadly virus, force us to behave like Solarians, alone in our homes, communicating only by email and text, with drones delivering all our supplies direct from robot factories? What would that isolation do to our psyches, to our instincts for close contact?

There’s your next story idea, free of charge. You may thank me for it, but not in person. Alone (with my spouse) in quasi-quarantine, I’m—

Poseidon’s Scribe

March 15, 2020Permalink

My Muse Walks into a Blog

I haven’t invited too many guest posts on my site, and today both you and I will discover why. I invited my muse to write a post. She accepted right away. That was three years ago.

I prodded her about it recently, during one of her rare visits, and she said she hadn’t forgotten. She’d just been busy. I think she was lying. In any case, below is what she gave me, and it sure doesn’t read like three years’ worth of work. More like a last-minute, slap-dash, hodgepodge mess.

______________________________________________________________________________

Hi! I’m Steve’s muse.

Never written before—more of an idea girl myself. Talker, whisperer.

(Have you ever thought about—) No, wait. Supposed to explain, not suggest.

Just, I’m full of ideas today. Suggesting’s what I do.

(How about a driverless, autonomous car story? That’d be timely.)

They fill me, ideas do. I whisper to Steve, then move on.

Don’t know what he does with ‘em, don’t care.

(What if someone learned to talk to a dolphin, and the dolphin was the only witness to a crime—would a dolphin’s testimony be accepted?)

This language Steve uses, these punctuation marks—too constraining.

ideas are where i live          in the mind    anything is possible

i hate constraints

(What if a spaceship used a ‘gravity sail’ instead of a light sail? So fragile it couldn’t enter a solar systems’ gravity well?)

Why    cant’    I           write    like      this?

Or

            like

                        this?

(Time for someone to write about a murder on a magnetic levitation train)

Sorry, gotta go.

.

.

.

.

Back now. Don’t ask.

What’s the topic? Oh, constraints and rules…hate ‘em.

(If there are cruise ships, why aren’t there cruise submarines?)

Stupid topic, rules are. Moving on…

About me: Idea Girl. Creativity Girl. Muse.

(What about a time-travelling fish?)

A thousand ideas a second. Flitting sparks, nebulous, ethereal.

Gotta tell Steve. He’s my guy.

(A setting. Planet covered with muddy swamps and permanent, pea-soup fog.)

Steve’s slow, though.

Always wants me to tell him more…to flesh out my ideas.

(What if a character couldn’t read minds, but her mind could be read by anyone within a few feet of her?)

I don’t flesh out ideas, Steve.

Your job.

(What about the first robotic NASCAR driver?)

I just whisper and leave, that’s my job.

Wow! Shiny object over there! See ya!

______________________________________________________________________________

That’s all I got from my muse. Now you know what I have to put up with. I doubt I’ll be inviting her to guest-post again, ever. In conclu—

Ooh, ooh. Steve. Can I do the signoff?

What? No.

Pleeeeese?

Well…if it’s that imp—

Squee! Here goes. That’s it for the best-ever post on Steve’s blog by his favorite—

Now, wait a minute—

—his favorite best friend ever—

Poseidon’s Scribe’s Muse!

March 8, 2020Permalink

Prompts for Your Next Story

Got some story ideas for you!

As you know, I’m co-editing an upcoming anthology called 20,000 Leagues Remembered, a collection intended to commemorate the sesquicentennial of the publication of Jules Verne’s classic submarine novel. My co-editor, Kelly A. Harmon, and I are are still accepting submissions. Click here for details. This image is what we intend to use for the cover.

We’ve received a good number of submissions, and have accepted several. There’s still room for more, though. I’ll be providing a list of prompts that might help you write a story for this anthology. Feel free to use one, or your own variation of it.

Before I do that, I’ll state the rules for the anthology. Your story:

  • must pay tribute in some way to Jules Verne’s novel;
  • may be set in any time or place;
  • may use characters from Verne’s novel or you can make up your own;
  • need not be written in Verne’s style;
  • need not be ‘dark’ (as stories in other Pole to Pole Publishing anthologies have been);
  • must capture, in your own way, the sense of wonder and adventure for which Jules Verne is famous;
  • demonstrate a significant and obvious connection with Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea; and
  • must not disparage either the novel or its author.

Some of the prompts below may describe stories we’ve already accepted. That’s okay; write your story your way. Here are those promised prompts:

  • What if Captain Nemo had a time machine?
  • What was Captain Nemo’s (Prince Dakkar’s) origin story?
  • What adventures did Nemo have aboard the Nautilus before the events of Verne’s novel?
  • Did the Nautilus survive the volcanic eruption on Lincoln Island? What if it were salvaged today?
  • Did any of the Nautilus crewmen have an unusual talent, or a story worth telling?
  • What if a Nemo-like character were captain of an airship, a spaceship, a mole-machine?
  • What if a theme park (not starting with ‘D’) featured Twenty Thousand Leagues-inspired tour submarines, but one of the subs broke free of the designated ride?
  • What if Jules Verne rode a submarine before writing the novel?
  • What if a high-tech submarine manned by mysterious pirates began endangering sea travel today, how would the world’s navies react?
  • What’s the story of Captain Nemo’s wife? His children?
  • What if, in reaction to Nemo’s attacks, one or more of the world’s navies built a squadron of submarines designed to hunt down and destroy the Nautilus?
  • Did Captain Nemo have a pet? Tell its story.

Admit it. Some of those did get your creative fluids pumping around, didn’t they? Now all you have to do is write your story and submit it here. The hard part’s already been done for you by—

Poseidon’s Scribe

March 2, 2020Permalink

The Life-Cycle of Technology

On occasion, I blog about the ways society reacts to new technology. Today I’ll consider the life-cycle of a technology.

Graphing a technology’s life-cycle isn’t new. You can see this graph on Wikipedia. It’s the standard view of the profitability of a new technology over its life, including the four phases: Research and Development, Ascent, Maturity, and Decline.

I’ve built on the standard technology life-cycle curve by adding several points of interest to it. These don’t occur with every technology, and don’t always appear in the same order. But they are common enough that I’ve seen them frequently. These points of interest fascinate me, and I explore them in my fiction.

C1A. Clumsy First Attempts. Often the first prototypes of a technology are crude, fragile, ugly things that only a laboratory scientist could love. In no way do they resemble a marketable product. On occasion, these breadboard prototypes do not work at all.

IH&O. Initial Hype and Overpromise. When dreamy-eyed advocates of the new technology get hold of a gullible press, news articles will appear about the technology, touting the marvelous future that awaits us all when the technology revolutionizes our lives. Sure.

CEU. Careful Early Use. Particularly when a new technology involves some danger or personal risk, the researchers proceed in a deliberate, methodical manner in testing it. They take safety precautions. They go step-by-step, fully aware of the hazards. This is good, but it contrasts with the CU point occurring later.

GA. Gaining Adherents. Some technologists call these people ‘early adopters.’ They can hardly wait for the technology to hit the market. They’ll stand in line to be the first to buy.

RbT. Reaction by Traditionalists. People accustomed to older technology will be quick to point out any defects in the new one, even if there are far more advantages than disadvantages. They are resistant to change, but won’t admit it. Instead, they will seek out the slightest reason to criticize as a way of rationalizing their resistance. They start with “It’ll never work,” then after it does, they’ll say, “It’ll never catch on.”

PD. Path Dependence. I’ve blogged about this phenomenon before. Developers of new technology will imitate the appearance and terminology of existing technologies. This tendency will be abandoned later at the DfC point, but it often characterizes and constrains new technology, while at the same time making it easier to relate to.

CU. Complacent Use. After a long period of successful testing, researchers will reach a comfort level with the new technology. They will abandon the care and precautions they employed at the earlier CEU point. This complacence can result in a bad outcome, a failure. If this occurs, they will refine the technology to correct flaws before marketing it to users, who will also grow complacent and not treat risky technology with respect.

DfC. Departure from Constraints. At some point, developers and imitators free themselves from the Path Dependence tendency. They start to explore the realm of possibilities of the new technology, no longer bound by past precedent.

NPT. Nostalgia for Previous Technology. This is similar to RbT, but slightly different. We expect traditionalists to object to new technology, but at this point, even some regular users—advocates of the new tech—begin to pine for the previous technology. They miss it, recalling its advantages and forgetting its quirks.

Q?$?. Quality Up, Price Down. At this point, the technology comes into its own. Original developers, as well as imitators/competitors, improve the technology and the means of producing it. Price drops and product quality improves. It’s a period of rapid growth and acceptance, a boom time.

NPL. Nearing Physical Limit. Late in the Ascent phase, producers or users begin to sense that things can’t go on. The technology is bumping up against some limitation, or has begun to cause an unanticipated problem, or is fast consuming some scarce resource. Producers try some tweaks to counter the problem, to hone the technology so as to mitigate the impending limit.

RPL. Reached Physical Limit. At the peak of the Maturity phase, when the technology is providing the most profit to producers, it can go no further. It cannot be improved sufficiently to overcome whatever limitation constrains it.

NR. Negative Reaction. Users start rejecting the technology, blaming it for the problems it caused. Engineers and researchers cast around for possible replacement technologies. Market demand and profits both plummet.

CNT. Competition with New Technology. In this period of chaos, the technology struggles against an emerging rival. The technology is fated to either die entirely or steady out at some low level, continuing to be used by die-hards who prefer it to its replacement.

There you have it, your newly-labeled technology life-cycle curve, provided by—

Poseidon’s Scribe

March 1, 2020Permalink