A lighted match could burn down the cabin he built. It wasn't much, but it was his, and he liked it flammable. His daughter came up to visit and she always exclaimed with horror about the location (in a designated wildfire zone!) and the construction (flammable!) and the lack of an emergency airvac port within twenty feet, like all houses were built with nowadays, and what would he do if some disaster happened? She might have not even let his grand-kids visit, except she was more sensible about such things than some of her preconceptions made her sound, and she always checked the fire zone hazard level before visiting, and he never invited them in the driest days of the summer. It was a nice compromise, and he liked it. He never explained about the basement vault--


Inspiration: Some song on Pandora that had that as the first line.
Story Potential: High.
Notes: I at least like the setting. And then, natch, some disaster comes (while the family's visiting), and the cabin ends up being the best place to survive from.

What could dreams mean, in a world where everything was provided and the glitz and the glamor and the surreality of old world Las Vegas was there for everyone--for free? What could dreams mean, when anybody could be a celebrity, for nothing? Although knowing whether you were really a celebrity, or if your dream of celebrity was just being met, as per the dream dole, was the real question. Of course, there had to be a handful of people who made the dreams happen, and so, as a contrary boy, that was what Gerard decided he wanted to be. He wanted to be a dream-maker. In middle school, which was less school and more practice in dreams and the fulfillment of them, with a few hours of deep-teach thrown in to make sure everybody was literate and shared the same cultural etiquette--

Inspiration: "What do dreams mean" glimpsed in a news headline about Inception.
Story Potential: High.
Notes: Old-skool imagining-the-future SF, though I'm not sure if it has that extra grit and spark you need these days. Hrm. Also, sorta still missing a plot. But really, once I started writing it wanted to keep going, so I'm going to say that's a good thing.

The blank was between her ears. That was the real problem with her. She smiled, she acted fine, she remembered her past. She could think about the future. But when it came to the here-and-now, she was entirely helpless. She remembered her past so that she could make rules for the future based on it. She remembered the future because that was what her family had been bred to do for generations. It made life interesting, having her as a wife. There was no telling what she might think would fit next, because half the time she was remembering the past, and the other half she was foretelling the future, but there wasn't really a way for him to tell which was which. He'd asked her, once, in a rare moment when she seemed wholly with him, whether there was some way she could indicate whether she was in the past or the future. She'd looked at him as if he'd asked her--

Inspiration: Loading up a blank page.
Story Potential: High.
Notes: Started out boring, but I think it got somewhere interesting by the end.