“The secret of fortune is joy in our hands.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
If you could picture your intuition as a person, what would he or she look like? If you sat down together for dinner, what is the first thing he or she would tell you?
(Author: Susan Piver)
“If there’s one thing I can’t stand it’s people telling me they know what I’m thinking.” A short-short inspired by the prompt.
Identify one of your biggest challenges at the moment (e.g. I don’t feel passionate about my work) and turn it into a question (e.g. How can I do work I’m passionate about?). Write it on a Post-It and put it up on your bathroom mirror or the back of your front door. After 48 hours, journal what answers came up for you and be sure to evaluate them.
Bonus: tweet or blog a photo of your post-it.
(Author: Jenny Blake)
“We are afraid of truth, afraid of fortune, afraid of death, and afraid of each other. Our age yields no great and perfect persons.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
You just discovered you have fifteen minutes to live.
1. Set a timer for fifteen minutes.
2. Write the story that has to be written.
(Author: Gwen Bell – no relation, as far as I am aware.)
My ‘story that has to be written’ follows.
The first prompt I received as part of Project Domino’s #Trust30 writing challenge – an initiative that encourages us to look within and trust ourselves, reflect on our now and create direction for our future – was from author Liz Danzico:
How would you describe today using only one sentence? Tell today’s sentence to one other person. Repeat each day.
A noble call to action, but after retweeting and commenting on it today, I remembered that all of my days have to be described in exactly one page: an A4 sheet of my Impact desk diary. On 1 January 2011 I committed to keeping a page-a-day diary as a way of marshalling my mind and disciplining myself to write about something without excuses.
DIGITALLY I HAVE ceased to exist. Like most things it happened gradually. I first began to notice that no one was replying to the comments I leave on blogs. Then my emails began to disappear – or at least people gradually stopped thanking me for them, and then they stopped replying altogether. There always used to be a little something in the Junk Mail folder, and I’d have to go and check for false positives in the spam folder at my ISP every couple of days. Now there’s nothing. Louis has stopped telling me at length about 3D/2D Animation services – Cartoon Movie – 3D modeling. No naughty Russian ladies who want to meet me. No naked pics, no fake Viagra, No generous Nigerians, no Chinese belt conveyors, no unexpected lottery wins, no PR agency press releases.
This short-short was inspired by a vintage advertisement for a product which, as far as I know, is sadly no longer available.
Even Timo can see this is a moment that will change everything, and he is only eleven. Set in Germany in 1989.
The Franz Kafka masterpiece known as Metamorphosis in English isn’t about a cockroach. Gregor Samsa’s transformation (Verwandlung without the masculine article was its original title) was from man into “Ungeziefer”, which can be translated only to “vermin”. The generic term “vermin” didn’t work in translating Metamorphosis into English. I wondered what would happen if I wrote a short story that turned Metamorphosis on its bug-headed head.
On the spur of the moment the European decided to head north in search of adventure. He hired a hatchback for 29 dollars a day, all inclusive, and at 18:15 on Saturday he found it on top of an ancient Maori fortification, Rangikapiti Pa, just north of Mangonui on New Zealand’s North Island.
“In this world,” wrote Benjamin Franklin in a letter to Jean-Baptiste Leroy, “nothing is certain but death and taxes”. That was in 1789 and there have been a lot of deaths and tax returns since then. What if, in an uncertain future, the Revenue became literally ‘Internal’ and, through the wonders of cortex implants, began demanding a tax based on what citizens were dreaming?
