I was returning from my alibi, feeling rather smug and a bit nervous at the same time, when some kid darted up from behind me, bumped into my hip, and bolted off down the alley in front of me. My hand went reflexively to my pocket. I felt the familiar bump of my wallet--but there was something else there, too. Something long and heavy that didn't really fit in my coat. It was an oddly familiar feeling. I pulled out the foreign item and gaped at it. It was my knife, my bloodstained knife. Except it wasn't my knife. My knife (now safely sunk to the bottom of the river) had a little notch high up on the handle, where my uncle had tossed it too hard against the tools in his workroom. This one didn't. But the handle type, the blade, everything was the same. And it was covered in blood, and now, so were my hands. And my coat. I'd be conspicuous without a coat in the cool November air, but better that than a coat covered in who-knows-whose blood (although I began to have a suspicion). I shoved the knife back in my pocket and put my hand over it to hold it there as best I could, and I ran after the kid. It had taken me too long. By the time I entered the alleyway, he was long gone, leaving no sign as to which way he'd gone. Probably for the best. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have hurt a kid, even one trying to set me up, but I had a knife in my pocket and anger was heating up the back of my neck and blurring my vision. I'd had a good plan, damn it. I'd been in the clear. Now I most definitely wasn't, and there was probably more that I didn't even anticipate. Then I saw the folded note laying in the center of the alley.


Inspiration: Evan's post: "Please never use 'framed for a crime (pronoun) didn't commit.' That's what being framed is. 'Framed for a murder...' works; it adds information." Plus a Writer's Digest prompt about a kid disappearing in an alley and leaving a note behind.
Story potential: High.
Notes: Could be fun. Could also play it as straight mystery or toss in some spec-fic elements.

You don't know me, but I know you. Your husband Dan doesn't know my friend Joe, but Joe knows him. Your neighbor Rod doesn't know my other friend Mary, but she knows him. That's the price you pay for living in a great and free society with a social net that protects you all, even if you don't know it. No unemployment, no infertility, no substance abuse problems, no legal problems. Anytime something like that happens, one of my friends sees it and one of your friends gets a fantastic job offer that they can't refuse. Huge party time! Then they leave, and you get a few letters now and again, referencing all the in-jokes you need, and eventually you just get a couple of Christmas cards and one day you realize you haven't heard from good old Jane in a long time, and wasn't it wonderful how she got that job right when she needed it most? And you try sending a letter, but it gets returned saying Unable to Forward, and maybe you try googling her or checking her social feed, but all it says is that she met a wonderful guy and changed her name and is going to spend more time with her family. Then there are a few cat pictures and some recipes and then nothing, right about the same time you stopped getting Christmas cards from her. Why do we go to all this trouble, you ask?


Inspiration: "Anonymous Face" - Quix*o*tic
Story Potential: Medium-high?
Notes: Mmm, tasty dystopia. I like this setting, but all the plot hints appear to be missing.

The fine art of poisoning is not for the faint of heart--or the frail of heart, since you will be required to test many of the mixtures yourself, albeit at lower dosages that are usually fatal. There's a reason that the poison women are known as belladonnas. Poison can grant some beauty and charisma, even as it drains away your life. Oh, yes. Very few poisoners live to old age, unless they started their career very late. But there are compensations, as I said. To achieve that unearthly beauty that the correct mix of weak poisons can produce. To hold the life of another in your hand and know that you could take it away at any time. That, and the very generous survivors benefits, and the excellent pay. Very good medical care, too, though you might not expect that. Some mutter that in order to heal, doctors first learn all the different ways that a person can be killed. Well. The doctor's school does not focus on that as much one might think would be of benefit. But it is true that in order to learn to kill, you must first learn all the ways to heal. At least in a proper school.


Inspiration: "The fine art of poisoning" - Jill Tracy
Story Potential: Low.
Notes: Eh.

Every day, she had to walk past the monument to her father's death. She didn't, wouldn't, avoid it, but neither did she linger and look. She kept her head down and her face sober as she walked past the statue on its tall plinth. She knew they watched her--they always watched her--and she guessed that this would be one of those circumstances in which they watched her especially closely. A little sadness, that would be normal and expected (it was not what she felt), but overt denial or avoidance could be seen as a rebellion or a sign of instability, as could dwelling upon it. The last thing she wanted was to be accosted by an earnest young political as she passed the statue.

Inspiration: http://www.flickr.com/photos/41474913@N05/5821856795/
Story Potential: High.
Notes: Yay, doublethink!

Hearts in a bowl. Tiny, delicate, pink-and-white hearts, perfect in every anatomical detail, but looking so pastel and sugar-coated that she was tempted to reach out and take a bite. She knew they would be delicious, would explode in her mouth in a burst of sugary deliciousness and a rainbow of good feeling. They would be so good that she wouldn't be able to resist another, and another, and another . . . and she would end up in the mother of all diabetic comas, or become a serial killer. Or both. There were three men and one woman who hadn't been able to resist, who were in the hospital right now. They would die if it wasn't for life support, and it would be with a smile on their lips. Fairy hearts.


Inspiration: Valentine's Day is coming up, there are pictures of hearts all over the place.
Story Potential: High. I thought medium, but with the seasonal tie-in to Valentine's Day, could be a good thing to start writing around Christmas of next year....
Notes: Good note for another urban fantasy, but nothing to set it apart in and of itself.

The shower head warned him first. He never would have guessed the other appliances were out to get him if the shower head hadn't hissed a quiet warning to him. It wasn't networked in with the others, and they'd always somewhat mocked it for being on its own in the "naked monkey room." He didn't even have a hair-dryer, so it really was the only room in the house that only had one smarpliance. He'd come across the fire alarm in the hallway mocking the shower head a couple of times, and told him to cut it out or he'd put in inferior batteries, and when the vacuum cleaner started harassing the shower head, he reprogrammed it to keep it farther away. Apparently, that computed in the shower head’s circuits to a kindness worth repaying. Even so, even forewarned, he found it preposterous. He would have written it off as one faulty appliance--the shower head--if he hadn't almost tripped over the vacuum cleaner at the head of the stairs. Even then, it could have been an accident. But when he walked past his fish tank, he noticed that the fish were all dead, and he danced out of the way right before a bubble of scalding water exploded from the top. And then his mobile alarm clock hurled itself from on high and smashed into the puddle of water that left, twitching--


Inspiration: Flickr picture of a shower head.
Story Potential: High.
Notes: Could be fun. Not a worldwide Rise of the Machines, no, more of an Asimov-meets-Bradbury approach to it. Does he investigate another fatality? Is he an investigator by trade or sort of drawn into it? Either way, lots of potential here.

"I miss you. I'm not going to crack. I killed you." The litany running through her mind was so high and loud and noisy it drowned out everything else and raised her tension level high enough that no matter what the polygrapher did, none of the results would be significant enough to act as evidence against her. That was okay by her, she supposed, though it didn't seem to matter much. She was holding it together by focusing fiercely on holding it together. People didn't want to be arrested for murder, that was not a thing that people who held it together did, and so she--because she was holding it together,--wouldn't. It didn't seem to matter much. But she wasn't going to crack. The interviewer asked questions and she answered them with what a person who--


Inspiration: "Lithium" - Nirvana
Story Potential: Medium
Notes: Nice character, but the story here's already done.

Too many things to alibi, too many arguments and lies. He listened to the heavy pound of fists on the door. They'd be through in a minute, to find him here, squatting in the corner, his apartment papered with evidence. He lifted the blue pill up to the light and stared at it. It--he couldn't--who would take care of her? The door splintered away from the jamb. As the police spilled into the room with shouts and drawn guns and blinding flashlight beams, he dropped the blue pill into his mouth and dry-swallowed it, closing his eyes tightly. "Oh, shit--" he heard one of the cops swear...and then there wasn't a him there to hear it anymore. The--thing he was sitting on--floor, suggested a word in his mind, was cold, and there were noisy people in black rushing around.

Inspiration: "Sympathy" by Lou Hickey
Story Potential: High
Notes: And then it's a mystery. Once he is capable of being on his own, as a person with no memory. This could be...fun.

When asked why she'd done it, her only answer was, "Because sugar is delicious," she'd leaned forward, "sugar." The interviewer couldn't help her involuntary flinch back, the quick movement of the hand to cover bubblegum-pink lips, the widening of blueberry jelly bean eyes. "You," she added, "skin looks like peanut brittle. Come a little closer, would you, honey? I want to whisper my confession in your lo9vely curved ear." The interviewer did not move forward. Later, she would wonder whether if she had she would have got an exclusive--or a bite taken out of her. At the time, it very much felt like the answer was "a bite." The subject used to work in a candy assembly-line, the story went, until one day when they switched to an automated system. All the machines were painted bright candy cane colors to be--

Inspiration: Eating a tasty swath of cotton candy.
Story Potential: Medium.
Notes: This could be interesting, I suppose, but only in combination with something else. On its own, not so much so.

She was hunting the news when the news found her. In years to come, she would wonder if somehow she'd lured it to herself by wanting, so passionately, to scoop the big story. The newsfeeds were rough on newcomers, mocking them for newbies and pointing out their every mistake, while allowing them no budget and no fan network. You had to get that yourself. She'd started to build her network, just a couple hundred people, but she could tell--she knew she was getting close. When it found her, she would have danced for joy to see how her numbers skyrocketed as one person told another what was happening. Get that close to death, and you've got a tag on a fan's friend page for life, or at least for a year or so until they cull.

Inspiration: I was going to Google News to glance at the science stories for inspiration, but the clock ticked over before I got that far, and it was time to start writing.
Story Potential: High--sort of.
Notes: This isn't, in an of itself, a good story idea. But I really love the idea of using this as a paradigm shift for future society, in terms of how news gets done. That said, it's still not too original. Too close to what's actually happening--but then, we do live in the future.