Observations of The Urban Spaceman 
A couple of weeks ago, I invited Fatma Alici to play a little game of writing tag with me. I gave her some prompts and she picked the following:
“After a thousand years of darkness, he will come.”
From this prompt we both wrote a story. Mine is below, and Fatma’s can be found over on her site here. Please take a look, review if you like, and feel free to start your very own game of Take Two Tag if the idea interests you. ‘Guidelines’ can be found here.
For anybody interested, the initial prompt was from Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, an excellent animated movie by Hayao Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli. I rate it highly.
Now that it’s time to Tag a new person, I was going to try to entice Rebekah Spark away from her novel-writing. However, Fatma beat me to tagging Rebekah, so I’ll save her for another round. Instead, I will tag Mozette with a choice of the following prompts:
1: A tragic expedition
2: Shadows in the mirror
3: The unexpected windfall
If you’re interested in writing a flash fiction for one of these prompts, Mozette, just let me know which you want, and your preferred deadline, and we’ll meet up after to compare notes!
.
Dawnbringer
“I hate you.”
“I know.”
Adain looked at me with those damned calm eyes, and they twinkled.
“I really mean it. I actually hate you.”
A World Full of Nothing
My Granddad travelled a lot, when he was younger. He went to France several times, crossing the sea in a small boat when the water was least violent, and claimed he even made it as far as Italy before coming home and settling down with Grandma. Once, when I was just a few years old, I asked him what the rest of the world was like.
He said, “Child, every place on Earth is different. But no matter where you go, it’s all the same.”
I was twenty six years old before I learned what he meant by that.
Image is © Copyright Paul and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence
The Iron Road
When Mama died, Granddad decided to take me away from Edinburgh. He had a cousin in Carlisle, so we followed one of the Iron Roads for a hundred miles or more. Granddad said that in the times Before, the Iron Roads carried great vehicles upon them, and thousands of people rode to distant places in only an hour or two. After The Cataclysm, the vehicles were stripped down for materials, and even their bones were carried away by Scavengers.
Another of his wild stories. I can’t imagine what it would be like, not having to walk everywhere.
When I was eight, I found a beautiful flower peeping shyly out from a crack in the concrete. Granddad told me, that Great Grandpa told him, that before The Cataclysm, flowers used to grow everywhere. They grew tame in Gar-Dens and wild in great fields called Maid-O’s. They filled the world with a wonderful miasma of perfume, their hues and shades too many and varied to name. A blanket of colour upon a carpet of green, or so he said.
Granddad made up many fanciful stories; he liked to give me hope that our world could be something more.
Mark Gardner of Article 94 is, along with fellow writers David Kristoph and Greg Dragon (who has an awesome pen-name), writing a 21-chapter sci-fi/mystery web serial revolving around a mining-ship space disaster. It sounds awesome. It probably will be extremely awesome. Check out the landing page and link to chapter 1 below.
Take Two Tag
(or, The Urban Spaceman plays writing games with you)
At the end of February, the Queen of Quotes, Jade M. Wong, and I had a play-date with our inner-fangirls, and the result was two Harry Potter one-shot fanfics based on the prompt of “Arthur Weasley at work” — one of three prompts I suggested, and the one Jade liked best.
It was super fun. The goal was to see how one prompt could inspire different stories, and to offer up some good old feedback on what we thought worked well—as well as what needed improvement—in each others’ stories. Then Jade was all like, “Hey, we should play this on WordPress, too!” only she was much more articulate about it. And since the idea works equally as well for WordPress/Blogger/<insert your blog type here> as it does for fanfiction.net, I’m game for a bit of Take Two Tag here as well.
The premise is fairly simple: one author runs up to another author, whacks them with the flat of their hand and goes, “TAG, HAHA!” then runs off whilst the tagged author is still recovering from seeing Roger Rabbit-style stars.
I’ve adapted my rules (they’re more guidelines, really) from ff.net since blogs do not suffer the same constraints — we don’t have to write fanfics. But we totally can, if you want!
Some guidelines!
• Story must be flash fiction, between 500 and 5,000 words.
• Any tense (past, present… future???) and perspective (first, second, third, fifth???) goes.
• The author who is “tagging” should ideally suggest 3 prompts, and allow the “tagged” author to make the final decision on which prompt to use. What kind of things should you prompt with? Anything. A genre. A title. An opening line. An idea. A theme. A description. A piece of dialogue. Whatever the hell you like! Though I would recommend avoiding anything too specific, such as “Erotic steampunk supernatural thriller involving three protagonists and one of them is a robot.” I’ll give an example below the guidelines, as I’m about to tag my very first author.
• Deadline should be agreed upon by both authors in advance
• Rating should be agreed on by both authors (not everyone likes to read smut or strong violence) — this isn’t as much of a problem here, since I doubt <insert blog type> will go deleting your posts/account simply because you wrote some naughty bits (ff.net will actually do that from time to time), but it would be nice just for politeness’ sake if authors could discuss whether there are any ‘areas’ they should avoid.
• Critique should be as fair as possible, with aspects of positive and (constructive) negative
Today I am tagging one of my favourite flash-fiction writers, the talented and creative Fatma Alici (whose Instagram would probably be worrying if her love of dragons and owls didn’t seem to rival my own).
Dragons AND Owls *nods sagely*
I’d just like to say that no author I tag has to accept my tagging. If you’re too busy, not in the mood, or just plain don’t like the prompts, please feel free to say ‘No’.
Today, I offer Fatma the choice of following lines as prompts. They are just lines. Themes. Ideas. They don’t need to be used as titles, or as part of the dialogue; they don’t even have to feature directly in the story. Just pick your favourite (tell me which you’re picking so I can write too!) and we’ll set a deadline (say, end of March? Feel free to suggest something different if it doesn’t suite).
We go do our stuff, reconvene, do the whole read and review thing, then Fatma gets to be the “tagger” and have some creative fun with one of her readers. Woo!
Line 1: It’s still just the heart of a child.
Line 2: After a thousand years of darkness, he will come.
Line 3: There’s probably some kind of secret society behind all this.
And because no post is complete without a shameless plug, here are the results of the first round of tag:
Jade’s Story: Weasley’s Work Woes
Spaceman’s Story: Weasley’s World
As you can see, the Alliteration is strong with us.
Bonus points to the max if any of you reading this can ID where any of those prompts are from (without using Google! *stern glare*)
Today is Thursday Friday, which means it’s surely time for another of Chuck Wendig’s attempts to break his web server by having his many loyal fans flood it with their responses to his challenges!
The challenge for today is right up my wormhole. I’ve been experimenting more with shorter flash fiction in an attempt to curb my tendency to ramble (the result is a serial of short stories found here) and Chuck now wants his dedicated followers to write a five-sentence story, no more than 100 words. Perfect! This is exactly 100 words (not including the title).
. .
Colony
. .
“Come to Cimmeria!” the frenetic advertisements opined, “Amazing Opportunities for All!” Of course, we believed them; we, the desolate and the downtrodden, so desperate for a chance to be masters of our own lives that we signed on the dotted line without reading the fine print. Perhaps they hadn’t known about the psychotropic compound-releasing fungi endemic to Cimmeria, or perhaps they simply didn’t care. Eight thousand colonists driven insane—a public relations nightmare back on Earth, but a literal nightmare for us. Evacuation was never promised and never came, but I don’t mind; you learn to live with madness, eventually.
When I was young I found, buried beneath the last century’s ash and dust, a book about the end of the world. Written before the The Cataclysm, it told of how invaders came in gargantuan ships, raining down laser death upon wings of steel. There were dogfights in the sky, great heroics on the ground, and always the altruistic and fearless to lead the way. Humanity went out in a fierce blaze of rebellious glory.
The story wasn’t very realistic, but I had a good fire that night.
Great Grandpa used to tell me stories about the time right after The Cataclysm. He spoke of suffering and despair and death. Of bodies piled in the streets, rotting where they fell. The flies and rats and crows came in floods. Rivers blocked with bloated corpses. Groundwater tainted by seeping fluids. He told of the sickly sweet smell of decay. It flooded the nostrils and infected the mind with a fearful madness, driving out all thoughts but one: ‘I will be next’. The whole world was putrefying.
Then the dogs got hungry.
I try to imagine a world inhabited by seven billion people. I try to imagine what it would be like to see other human beings, every single day. I try to imagine how easy life would be if such things as supermarkets and shopping malls still existed; if hunger was not a constant companion. I try to imagine a world in which dogs are just pets, not ravenous beasts which feast in packs. I try to imagine a summer rainstorm which doesn’t melt flesh from bone.
I try, but my imagination isn’t that good.
Glorken
The Urban Spaceman
Observations of The Urban Spaceman 
Things humans said