What should Death's bride wear? It wasn't even really a question. If you were going to be Death's bride, you wore the traditional white dress covered with an overdress of ashes. Over time, that had evolved into a silvery gray embroidered overdress that managed to be mournful and celebratory at the same time. Some of the past brides had spent the last day on the earth worrying about accessories and putting their final affairs in order, but Gita's affairs had always been in order from the day she was old enough to take over managing her father's accounts, much to his relief. The house was cleaned, she'd arranged that the neighbor women should bring in food for her father for the next month while he adjusted to living without her, and she'd prominently placed the name of a good local bookkeeper on top of the neatly stacked books and beside the spike where her father usually just stuck whatever papers he thought might be important. She expected that when the spike was full, he might actually notice the bookkeeper's name. She had written farewell letters to all her extended family and to all the friends she'd made in the short 16 years that she'd spent on the surface of the world--but she reminded herself sharply that she'd decided not to think about that.


Inspiration: http://www.flickr.com/photos/closetartist/6955948306/
Story potential: High.
Notes: Something about the practical choice of the rake really appeals to me. So she faces him with rake in hand. I like this character. And I think these photos are going to be some great inspiration for me.

The dying do their own work. They finish what must be finished--which is their death. That is all that they need to do. A very few have other things that must be done, even at the end. Words to a loved one. Reassurance. The last piece of a project. Usually these things fall away as death grows near, but sometimes the need grows. We think that's what happens to create zombies. You thought I was going to say ghosts, didn't you? No. The mild hauntings that you hear about sometimes? Those are just--


Inspiration: "Letting Go of What Cannot be Held Back" - by Bill Holm
Story Potential: High, mostly because of the tropes it spins about.
Notes: A zombie death before completion? That's what causes Hungry Ghosts--MUCH harder to deal with. Also, 'hauntings' is so a word!

He said the dead would come back to us on Easter morning, and lots of people stocked their pantries and armed themselves for a zombie apocalypse, but it wasn't like that at all. Like I said, a lot of people prepared for a catastrophe. A lot of other people mocked the prophecy--or, like me, didn't even bother to mock it, just wrote it off as another crackpot spouting off in our increasingly religion-led state. So I was shocked when I came down to breakfast Easter morning and saw my mother sitting at our kitchen table, the same table she had sat at and paid bills in the evenings as I was growing up. She looked up and saw me, smiled, and just got up and walked out the door. By the time I ran to the door and threw it open, she was gone. I saw she'd organized my messy correspondence into neat stacks.


Inspiration: Thinking what holiday comes after Christmas. And the personal.
Story Potential: High?
Notes: I want more of a magic realism feel to this "dead coming back to life" idea. More of an influences and remembrances sort of thing. Not sure I can write this now, though. Too close--I might not be able to judge whether what I'm writing is any good or not.

Caves ran in the runnels of melted flesh, places where the waxlike slow drip of her features created caverns. They lived there. Some of them remembered her; some of them didn't. *None* of them worshiped her. She was dead; she didn't care. But wars were fought along her skin, and children born, and other good things. The caves ran deeper, near to her bone, and the population grew, and generations lived and died inside her...and she became less dead even as her flesh stretched out to tenuous unrecognizability. Some shred of less-than-conscious--

Inspiration: The way the wax ran inside my desktop candle.
Story Potential: Er, high?
Notes: This is interesting, but I don't know where (if anywhere) it might go.

The interring of the living went smoothly, he thought, as he watched the living being pushed into their cryogenic tubes and tucked away in the formerly inhabited catacombs. The dead bore them no real malice--after all, these were their own descendents!--but the living had ruled for long enough. The dead deserved a small break from the boring work of keeping the spiders and worms occupied. So they rose up and forced the living out. A few of the living had decided to join the dead during the process, or had ended up so because of actions they took opposing the dead, and that was just fine. They'd ended up on the winning side, after all, and now they too could enjoy ruling the world. But now what was there to do?

Inspiration: Typing "interesting" into Google, having the clock tick over at "inter."
Story Potential: Medium.
Notes: Meh.

I expire in two days. That's been rough to adjust to. I mean, I always knew I'd expire someday, but I never actually went around hunting to figure out my expiration date--that's not in my nature, or so I thought. I didn't find out what my expiration date was until another me tried to kill us. Then I had some serious reason for wondering why and what I needed to do to protect myself. Turns out, not much. Not getting killed for two days is something most anybody can handle. The real question is why somebody would try to kill a person expiring in two days anyway. Sure, I've heard the rumors about the transformations some of us make when we start to expire, but it never really made sense--

Inspiration: Checking when library holds expire.
Story Potential: High?
Notes: I guess it's high potential, because I really want to know why somebody would try to kill him. Of course, my brain could always come up with a stupid reason that would make this a low potential story.

Death's mum had made him a sweater. It was fuzzy. It was a shade of peach that she probably thought was quite masculine, it was fuzzy, and it was a sweater. It looked very comfortable and warm and the sort of thing one would wear to be hugged. Death sighed. He'd tried explaining, "But, Mum, I'm Death!" before, but it never worked. He might be Death, but she was still his mum, and he looked cold as, well, cold as Death Himself, when he went out on his rounds. He might be Death, but he was also Sam Frampton, and his mum didn't want to see her Sammy get cold. Such frightful places he ended up--

Inspiration:

Potential: Actually, high perhaps.
Notes: It's an interesting character, at least, which is not necessarily the same as an interesting story. But this is definitely a character that could be in an interesting story!

In the garden of the dead, there were two trees. They were most annoying. They kept having living branches that Death had to prune and ferry to the Upperworld, to keep the trees properly dead. It got so bad that he began to feel like a gardener, and that simply wouldn't do. Some might use it as a metaphor, but he knew the weight of his job, and he enjoyed a peaceful dead garden, filled with things in their proper places that required no more action or attention from him. Living things might die, and then he'd have to shepherd them from one state to the next, but the dead offered no surprises.

So it was that Death decided he needed a gardener.

Inspiration: This picture: http://www.flickr.com/photos/violen/3512611964/ Also, we have two Russian olive trees, which are apparently the worst kind of tree to own ever, because parts of them constantly die randomly.
Potential: High, I think? Could be fun.
Notes: Something of a humorous tone, but not Pratchetty. Could be fun.

The cemetery fairies were lonely. Nobody buried the bodies in winter, and it made them restless. Not to mention the cold made their wings stiff and likely to tear if they tried to move too fast. The fairies made little snow fairies over the graves, they cleaned away lichen that was stiff and dried, and they recited the names and lives of the people buried beneath them. That only took a little of their time, however, so most of the time they spent huddled inside urns and pine trees and mausoleums, their wings wrapped round themselves to keep the cold from getting too intense. They weren't weak Southern fairies, to drop off into hibernation at the touch of a chill breeze, but--

Inspiration: http://www.flickr.com/photos/piedpiper1/3058008086/
Story Potential: Medium.
Notes: Not really a story here, but I like the idea of cemetery fairies. Must remember it when I write a fantasy world.

Small children could be lost in her folds of fat, smothered to death in her ponderous embrace. She smelled faintly. It wasn't a fat-person-doesn't-bathe-enough smell, like cheese and old socks. Her smell was less ordinary. It smelled like clean death and salt and fries. There was a little smell of a pork chop, and a little of somebody's tears. She smelled a bit like chocolate and a bit like vomit. A bit like artificial cherries and a bit like fresh blood. Just sitting too close to her made him hungry and scared at the same time. He wanted to ask her what was in her bag and if she'd brought enough to share, and he wanted to run away very, very fast.

Inspiration: Well, I'd just been eating.
Story Potential: High.
Notes: There's something here, yes there is.