Writing Prompt 5.17: You are walking down a back alley,
and you meet Jason from DragonMount. He’s getting
all uppity about how good his submission was. What
do you do to him?
A Prompt Walk Down a Back Alley ...with Jason from DragonMount
I like to walk down alleys. Especially while I'm trying to think about something to write. They're very inspirational. Dark and rough and... Who was this guy? Some dude standing on an apple box wearing a tux. Whose bow-tie wasn't tied very tight and kind of sagged. I thought he looked familiar, but he had his nose turned up, so I couldn't be sure.
“Do I know you?” I asked him.
“Probably not by sight.”
“You look familiar.”
“Its probably the cadence to how I talk,” he said.
“But you hadn't even started talking until after I asked if I knew you.”
“Do you read?”
“Yes.”
“Do you listen to Writing Excuses?”
“YES.”
“...”
“Wait, are you Jason?”
“From DragonMount”
“So this is... the prompt?”
“Yeah.”
“So this is you being all uppity?”
“Yeah.”
“Good job with the no-eye-contact and the acting as if you're tossing your sentences from the heavens.”
“Thank you.”
“Weird, I thought-- well anyway nice to meet you.”
“And...”
“What and?”
“What are you going to do to me?”
“Huh?... Oh, right... um... hmmm”
“Come on man, I have my nose in the air, we're in the back alley, do you have any idea how many people I have to meet tonight in similar alleys to have all sorts of things done to me?”
“How many?”
“Things or alleys?”
“People.”
“Quite a bit.”
“How many exactly?”
“I don't know exactly. The exact count isn't the point... but there's more than you think.”
“OK, well what do you think I should do?”
“To me? Really? You want me to come up with your ending for you?”
“Who says its the ending?”
“I do.”
“Well don't get so uppity about it.”
“...”
“Oh right. Nice job... Alright, I have a great idea on what to do to you.” I pointed. “Stand on that.”
That was a set of these short rods set in the wall. Wooden stumps hammered in-between the rocks. For what, I had no idea, but there were five of them. Set up in an odd pattern, kind of like a Pachinko machine.
“Which one?”
“The one on the top.”
He climbed up. Through much difficulty. I don't know if it was because he refused to lower his nose for the climb, or if he just wasn't an “outdoor activities” kid, but it took him a about five minutes to finally get up there. And of course when he did he popped his chest out. Proud.
I promptly shoved him.
His arms spun in a big flourish of clumsiness. Then his left leg slipped out and hit one of the pegs below. He kind of saved himself in lunge position for a second, but then his other leg went the other way. He banged his shins. Wobbled. Then steadied himself and stood.
“Was that it?” He asked me.
“Yes.”
“What was the point of that?”
“I knocked you down a few pegs.”
His smile returned, that stupid half smile. With his nose literally in the air. He stood as straight as that silly tie sagged. But now he was restored to the height of his uppity-ness. Ready for whatever somebody was going to do to him next.
Writing Prompt 5.18: Start with hard science-fiction, move to werewolf romance.
THE WOLFROSE
(Excerpt from the novel)
Nanotechnology is so clunky. Its true that without nanotech we wouldn't have The Explorers and without The Explorers we wouldn't have had e-nanotech and then we would never have had B. Gregory George Gaines pivotal book “The World Inside the Atom”, but that doesn't make the fact that nanotech is clunky any less true.
I'll always remember when Gaines' book came out. It was all over the news and the nets with its suggested impossible thought of moving inside an atom. Then R. Portis Einstein actually did it. He keremerged the atom, looked inside it, then actually got inside it. And discovered the truth of the atom. It was a building block, sure, but it was also an entire universe, and it was nothing. It was why each thing was why it was. Which opened up the possibility of manipulating what was inside, to change what was outside. Because that's what we do. Us humans. We manipulate. And thus eatomtechnology was born.
Of course there were groups that were against it, some religious, some not. Some said it was like dissecting God or it was a slight against him and his masterpiece of life. Some said that it was worse than splitting the darn thing and would destroy the whole world. Some thought it would open a gate to another world. Some thought it would save us all. When they announced that they would be applying it to humans everyone speculated on what this meant for us. How would it change the human? Where would this take us? What would we be like in the future? It would eliminate disease, some said. It would eliminate obesity. It would make us live forever. It would this. It would that.
Concerning the elimination of disease, that hope was only half true, but the half truth was better than the hope. It didn't destroy disease, eatomtech used it to make us stronger. The more diseases that you had, the stronger you became. It did eliminate obesity and braindisease. It made us all the best we could be. It opened up parts of our brains that we had never known. It added a hundred years to our lives. And most importantly, it didn't make us lose the individuality that some thought was inevitable.
No matter how far you went down inside the atomiverse. Whether it be in the ekeyatoms or the lessor. We did not change. Which made a great argument for the evidence of the soul. Which, in turn, made some religious groups press harder with the atomists to delve deeper into the atomiverse and brought the late question of whether an atomiverse was filled with other beings. People predicted a lot of what went on after eatomtech was developed, what seemed like every result possible, but one result they could not predict was the werewolves. And one thing that I could not predict was how deeply I would fall in love with one of them.
I wrote this as 3 paragraphs originally, but it seemed to flow much better as 5