Warm Up: Creative Challenge

 

“Don’t look away, son.” Ishhel told the scrawny boy crouched in the hay. “Focus.”

  Jargeth nodded in response and shifted his weight on his hunches. It was hard to concentrate in the stables, even in the furthermost stall. Outside the stall’s gate riders nosily bustled about the pens; hauling feed, hay or rigs to and fro. There were the roars of stubborn creatures spitting and snapping in protest, and the clucking of ones eager to be brushed down and talked to. The entire building was hot and damp as the acrid odor of scat burned nostrils.  

Warm Up: Creative Challenge

As Albert climbed out from his window onto his water tower perch, he fell in love with the city all over again. It happened every night, for everything was different when the sun sunk behind the buildings and the lights flickered on. When the sun shone it was nothing but a grey anthill, hardly interesting in it’s colorless sprawl as the heat of the day cooked the cement. However the city became a creature all it’s own at night. Neon made it shimmer like winking eyes. The heat and toil was replaced with cool breezes and carefree behavior. It’s veins pulsated with yellow headlights, and it’s mouth was the mouth of thousands. It breathed, it laughed, it cried, it moved with every cell that made it up.

Warm Up: Concept Art Prompt

   I kept telling myself the pay was good as I strapped the canvas bags onto the muttering, slobbery lipped camel. The sun was coming up over the dunes, whipping the cold black night back with it’s early pink rays as I loaded up the post. I kept playing the pitch in my head over and over to keep me going. The pay for a postal run across the dunes from the Midway Sand to the major cities was high. Hazard pay they called it, ten thousand cube for three months of work. Young men and women only, those over thirty summers need not apply. No one I knew up in the high rocks had ever seen that that much. Not even those blessed to be grey.

I've been wanting to do some writing exercises as I have been writing exclusively in comic format and fear I have not exercised my other storytelling muscles. So I came up with this thing called PPG which stands for Person (or creature or thing), Place, Genre. I randomly put up a PPG request on a website and them someone comes up with the three. Taking the three, whatever they are, I write a quick short story. The idea is it really forces me to think outside of the box.

10 Min Warm Up

Isadore lingered off to the side as the others pushed around the railing, vying for the perfect spot to view Pratchett’s new contraption. As the gaggle in front of her traded theories on this grand new invention that had been promised, she looked off into the distance. For there, amongst the towering skyscrapers, an airship glided in. It was coming towards the through the fog like a ghost materializing out of either. Isadore knew it wouldn’t be long before the others spotted the elegant device but she was the first to see, and took pleasure in knowing that.

Something I did on io9's glorious o-deck as a morning warm up for the mind grapes. Little Dragon gets cred for posting the creative challenge of writing 50 or more words based on the above image. I just added on a time constraint of 10 mins.

originally posted Dec 3 2010