Nothing grows here. I signed up for the exploratory corps because there weren't many other options for a poor girl born on Greenworld. Farmer, farmer's wife, or whore. That was about it. I didn't have the build to be a farmer, the dowry to be a farmer's wife, or the inclination to be a whore, so I signed up at the recruiting office in the capital on one of my family's visits. When they presented me with a list of specialties to choose from, I confess, I froze. Mechanic, linguistics, military--all of them things I didn't want and had no idea about. I'd had some vague romantic notion of talking with aliens and trading, but those all required previous schooling in anthropology, business, and trade. Not something I had. So I went with what I know, and signed up for the agriculture courses. Not that they were called that, of course. No, it was hydroponics and alien biota and preliminary drug assessment. And I found I loved it. Maybe I would have made a good farmer after all.


Inspiration: "Uncurl" - True Margrit
Story Potential: High
Notes: I like the character, there are good places for built-in conflict, etc. Could be good.

It was the sound of crickets and frogs that startled her awake. She was in one of the most antiseptic sleeping rooms, and she knew that there were no nature tapes of the forest--they'd found those didn't help the subjects. There were wave sounds and whale song and white noise, but no tapes of the forest at night. This was not part of the experiment. She sat bolt upright in her bed, and saw that it was floating a foot above the ground in a scum of pond water. A frog surfaced and blew bubbles at her, then let a resonant belch loose. A cricket hopped up into the bed with her. She pinched herself, hard. She felt it sharp enough. She pulled out the journal she'd been reading and stared at the pages--and--

Inspiration: Marshlands - Dan Gibson
Story Potential: High, but mostly because it would be a nice escapist fantasy to write, not because it actually seems like a good short story, if you know what I mean.
Notes: She's not dreaming, and she's not gone through the looking glass into another world. More like Mother Nature went briefly into the looking glass to let us have some room, and now she's back and it's rain of frogs time. Actually, using that premise as the background for a magical realism story that's not about this might be a good story after all.