While she slept, #mycelium brushed across her face like a mother's hair when she bends over to tuck her child in for the night. The fungi fruited across the roof, in the shade of the solar panels. She was too feeble to climb and harvest, to stop the growth. It flourished.

Inspiration: mycelium
Potential: medium
Notes: Not sure where this is going, but it is both beautiful and weird. Not necessarily horror, just unsettling. Could be horror, though, for sure. But doesn't have to be.

Every #harvest was hard work for the farmer. When the harvest was bountiful, she worked in the field every day. When the harvest was small, she trolled the highways for field fertilizer, looking for hitchhikers and vagrants and stalled cars.

Inspiration: harvest vss365
Potential: high
Notes: This is basically a complete microfiction. Could be amped up, rewritten a little, more show less tell. And seasonal!

I #permute the summoning spell a little each time, hoping to catch an angel as yet unfallen. I tell myself the price is necessary. Only an angel can save us. But my garden grows with pretty maids all in a row, and the shovel is heavier each grave I dig. #amwriting #vss365 #prompt

Inspiration: #permute
Story potential: Low.
Notes: This is good, but it isn't actually a story idea.

When the plague came, we lost most of our doctors before we realized that the plague had a dark sense of humor. No, really! Wear a bio-hazard suit and it went after you twice as hard, three times as hard, calling in all the neighbor pathogens until it got you. The scent of alcohol sanitizers brought it running (the only way they figured that one out was by seeing that winos were dying in the same percentiles as people who were obsessive about washing their hands). In the end, we just...lived with death. We lost other people who refused to see the doctor for simple things like appendicitis, for fear of catching the plague. They may have been half-right, but it isn't a good way to go, either. Our doctors began to camouflage themselves a little more. Home visits were very popular. Boiling water and harsh soap replaced antibacterial foam. Midwives were absolutely, definitely the safest option, even though they still meant that many more women died in childbirth. The plague complications rate in the hospital was higher. So you can see that we were still holding a grudge when we found out that the plague had been engineered that way, as a "survival of the fittest" improvement.


Inspiration: Still photo of a person in a biohazard suit from Season 1, Episode 1 of "Helix."
Story potential: High.
Notes: I didn't think this was all that interesting until I realized it would have to be written from the PoV of a young doctor who has been working in this environment for most of his/her life. Then it became more interesting.

The new fashion was stripes, carved out of flesh and formed from the shadows that fell into the void. She didn't like it. She didn't like any of the really extreme fashions, and just from looking at it she could already tell that it would reduce her speed and strength and make some basic tasks difficult. But her job was to appear in the latest fashions as she sold them to others, so she dutifully signed up for a slot on the schedule to have the surgery. At least she knew for certain that all the normal extras would be saved and preserved to be replaced when fashion dictated, or at her request if necessary. The chunk of forehead worried her, and she talked quite a while with the surgeon until he agreed to shift the rest of her face forward instead of risking removal of part of a hemisphere. They could say anything about how effective the reroutes were, and how people discovered and kept new talents, but she wasn't so desperate for a job that she'd have cosmetic brain surgery! The slashes along the eyes and mouth, she acquired approval to imitate with temporary shadow tattoos--it would be another product sell for those who couldn't afford a full body job. When the work was done, she thought she looked like a mime in an old flattie horror movie, but her commissions went up when she went out on the floor, and soon she saw rich women walking around like a horror-show themselves. She didn't flaunt it, herself. She knew that some mugger would think it meant she was rich, and disappointing someone with a weapon held to your throat was a very bad idea. So she always covered up with base makeup for her face and wore clothing that would conceal the absences that other fashionistas flaunted.


Inspiration: http://www.flickr.com/photos/91240080@N03/10327289076/
Story potential: Medium.
Notes: Eh.

"We want to take him out on a fact-finding mission. He is the only chance we have to infiltrate one of our own among the ruling vamps and find out what they are up to with this new plan." She stared, aghast. "You have us torture him for more than a decade, and now you want to let him go? Are you insane? He isn’t one of our own and he never will be." "No, my dear, but you are. You have established yourself as his control. You are psychological dominant. All the controls and triggers we have carefully carved into him over the decades will help you keep him under control. He will go, with you as his blood-servant. That position will protect you from the others. You can control him, subtly--or unsubtly if need be. You are trained to battle the vamps, you can resist their whims in a way that will make it more believable that he is your blood-bonded. He will listen to you, he must, you have been the only stable point in his sea of pain and confusion." "But he’s mad!" "Indeed. And that is not so uncommon either, as we know, among the older and greater of them. It will seem entirely plausible, I assure you. You need not worry about that part of it." "That's not--I'm not worrying about a *part*. I'm worrying about the whole thing! This idea is mad! Crazy! You will be throwing away my life and all the good that we've gotten out of him over the last couple of decades." The bishop leaned back and shrugged. "The information we've gotten from him, and the knowledge of vamp capabilities and physiology, will not change. That we already have as much as we can get. What we have from him is done. We cannot get anything else out of him that will be new--unless we put a leash on him and take him out into the field."


Inspiration: "Slither" - Velvet Revolver
Story potential: High.
Notes: I like the potential for this one, even if vampires are perhaps burned out in genre. Lots of potential for some very dark stuff, studying effects of torture, Stockholm Syndrome, PTSD etc. Also potential for kinky sexual stuff--no actual sex, though. Making that a thing that will never happen between them makes the dynamic a lot more interesting, I think.

Nobody likes trees anymore. We still remember that they're necessary to clean the air and provide wood and food and shelter and all that, but nobody likes living near the trees and nobody likes going in the trees. Same thing goes for cities with skyscrapers or other tall buildings that block out the lights and leave only shadows. I think we've reverted back to the Medieval Age, when women and children were warned to stay away from the edge of the forest and where the men treaded cautiously, where half the stories around the campfire were of the bad things that could happen to people who wandered into the forest when they shouldn't. And of course, nobody would go into the woods at dawn or dusk or nighttime. Nobody goes anywhere at nighttime. We huddle inside our safe, warm, bright houses, with all the curtains pulled. Less because we don't want them to see us--what good would that do--than because we don't want to glance out on our yard and see a dark shadow scudding across it, only to look up and see a bright moonlit sky with not a cloud in sight. In addition to snow days, we now have cloud days. The weather forecast predicts how dense the shade will be, and whether it will be safe to go out and see. They're a lot more careful with their predictions these days, too, ever since that poor man in Boston walked into the studio and shot the weatherman he blamed for getting his family snatched.


Inspiration: http://www.flickr.com/photos/josepha46/9369874988/
Story potential: Medium
Notes: I like the idea of this kind of adaptation, but it's more of a setting than a story idea--the whole story would need to be something else.

When you see the man in black sitting at the bar, don't go sit down next to him. If you hear him tell somebody he's a record producer, don't listen. If you've got a gig in the bar, leave. Blow it off. You don't want the man in black to come to your attention. If you're about to leave, carrying your guitar, and the man in black looks over his shoulder at you and he's got this expression in his eyes that you know just means he's seen you and he really wants to hear you and this i your one big shot, run for your life. Why do they call him the man in black? He claims to be a big fan of Johnny Cash, and to wear black in his honor, but when he says it he gets this funny smile around the corners of his mouth, kinda like your Uncle Buck did when he was talking about the big fish that got away. It's a strange world, you should know that. You've seen some things at gigs. Don't let the man in black buy you a drink and talk you up. Especially don't let him pull out a contract and hand it to you. Don't expect to smell brimstone or see his eyes flash red or anything like that. This isn't that kind of deal. He might be a devil and he might be after your soul, but if there's that language in the contract it disappears when you show any signs of reading all the way through it. Nope, it's a standard abusive recording-industry contract, and don't you forget it. But then once you've signed on, he's got you buying at the company store, and he can send you anywhere he wants with any kind of people he wants. And if you notice that all the roadies and hangers on and even your PR agent and everybody around you is doing some hardcore drugs but functioning just fine, it might be hard to stay clean. And if he sends ten truly gorgeous strippers inside your private limousine with the tinted windows with you, because that’s the impression they want to make on the fans, and the strippers start to make advances, and you're not actually paying them anyway, and nobody will know, and there's no way your girlfriend back home would ever find out--well, that's another way he's getting you to sell your soul. If he tells you he's arranged a remunerative private performance for somebody you find out committed some serious human rights violations, it's easy to tell yourself that you're just there to perform.


Inspiration: Sheet of stamps with Johnny Cash on them.
Story potential: Low.
Notes: Eh. This is heading away from the paranormal angle, and is generally not very interesting to me.

She stood in the middle of the field, smiling although there was nobody to see, and no way that anyone could have seen through the lamp that obscured her face. It was her role in penance to serve as a direction. She would do so because the alternative was unthinkable. She would stand there in the field, wearing her best purple dress, her legs bolted into stakes that would hold her to the ground, her bodily functions handled through tubed and pipes that ached when she shifted wrong, her face and identity obscured by the blinding lamp strapped to her head. She could see, a little, out of a corner where the paint had been scratched away. She didn't know if it was an intentional sanity preserver, or if it was a factory flaw, and she didn't care. She knew that little sliver of the field she stood in as she had known nothing else in her life. She knew the rabbit that lived at the base of the tree, and the fox that sometimes slunk around the rabbit hole. She knew the mockingbirds that roosted high in the tree and--


Inspiration: http://www.flickr.com/photos/joshuamalik/8564035111/
Story potential: Medium.
Notes: Eh. Not really a story. They do say that looking at surreal things will increase creativity, though--perhaps the creativity will show up later in the day. I thought this was low potential as F/SF, but when I thought of it as horror, I liked the tone a lot better.

She was crouched behind the DJ booth giving the DJ a BJ when Death came clubbing. She heard the weird harmonics entering the music and wondered if Dylon was trying something new--she'd been lounging in his apartment, as the girlfriend of a DJ might during the off-shift from her waitressing job, and she hadn't heard anything quite like it. She couldn't deny that it caught and grabbed your attention, but she wouldn't have called it exactly enjoyable. Dylon seemed to be enjoying it, though, or so she thought at the time as his hips started to shake. She picked up the tempo, thinking that he was going to owe her big-time for this, and he better have been telling the truth when he said she was the only girl who ever agreed to do it, because wasn't that the important thing? Becoming "the only girl"? Then he fell over, so fast that she barely opened her mouth in time to keep from Bobbitting him. Not that he would have cared, she realized, as he convulsed on the floor, foam pouring from his mouth and ears and eyes.


Inspiration: "Clubbed to Death (Kurayamino Variation)" - Rob Dougan
Story potential: High.
Notes: I like the opening, but it's crass enough to be a significant style change and it might be difficult to maintain that over the long run while keeping her sympathetic and fully getting the plot. OTOH, attacking monsters/aliens/DEATH! Sole survivor!