The post of Writer for the Sleeping Child was a fairly prestigious one, and well-paid, and it wasn't as if anything bad was happening to the Child. The Child--slept. The Child would always sleep, until it was no longer a child. Then it would wake up and be taught all the things about the world that a non-sleeping child would have learned from the time it could open its eyes and look around. Except how to talk, and certain other aspects that were significantly distressing to most people who interacted with the former Child. He was pondering what he would do when the Child woke. He had not had it for its full life; there was a previous Writer who had decided to stay on for the next Child. He did not think he could do that. He knew too much of her sighs and the slight lisp with which she talked, he knew what many of the symbols meant and annotated them in the Writing as should be sent. Some Writers adopted the Child when it awoke, took it home with them and made it part of their family. If he had a family, he thought he would have done that, but he did not. He knew very little, really, about even normal children, and so he worried that he would not be able to take proper care of her. His family still lived out in the country, by the foothills, a journey of a week's length that he made only once a year, in time for the annual Moon Dreaming festival. He would not be able to rely on their support as another unprepared father might. And he could not move back, first because his entire life as far as he could remember living there was devoted to escaping, and partly because his only chance at making a good income to support a family was to stay in the city. He did want a family, he just wasn't particularly good at talking with women, and he knew none of the ways that a solitary man might acquire a family. If his sisters had lived nearby, he assumed he most likely would have been married for a good ten years already.


Inspiration: http://www.danielmerriam.com/index.php?option=com_ponygallery&Itemid=0&func=detail&id=150
Story potential: High.
Notes: She wakes up early, say at--oh--ten. And no, there is not nor ever will be anything romantic between them. Ew. But because she wakes up early, she retains more of the powers of the Dreaming Child than normal, at least when she sleeps. And then plot ensues.

She did not like to share. Now. Not yet. It wasn't that she was selfish, but she saw the future and knew the end of her story, and she knew that it would require her to share far more than she wanted. So for now she huddled over her toys and her food and her love, trying to keep it all for herself until it came the time when she wouldn't be able to not share. She told her prophecies easily and for free, most of them--only the way of her death did she keep to herself. She was thoughtful about it, though. She didn't know exactly when it would happen, but she knew she'd be neither a child nor an old woman. She switched to eating only vegetables and was extremely careful with her health. They would find no worms between their teeth, no infections to spread to cuts in the fingers that would butcher her. It--

Inspiration: Thinking about Christmas, and what Christmas is really about. Sharing.
Story Potential: High.
Notes: Might be a flash story. I don't think it needs to be spun out far.

The visions endured. She had, in a fit of despair in her teens, stabbed one of her eyes with a pair of scissors. In her waking life, she had to navigate a narrowed depth of field, but in the visions, she saw in full, glorious depth of field. Full color, full sense. Everything as if it was unrolling right in front of her. At first, after they put her in the mental institution for "depression and delusions," she'd wept over the useless stabbing out of her own eye. Yes, she'd just seen her own terrible fate--which came almost-true three weeks later, after she'd been checking into the asylum--but she soon came to realize the value of knowing what was true and what was illusion. She hadn't always been able to tell; not at first. Too often the visions were triggered by her wandering into the area where the event would take place--

Inspiration: "Enduring Vision Awards" from the 2007 Bush Event, funnily enough.
Story Potential: Medium.
Notes: Well, it's really a character, not a story.