I’ve always loved detailed models and have had a fascination with stories like The Borrowers, where tiny people live inside the walls of a normal-sized house. Part of the fun is seeing how they overcome obstacles that are easy for us (getting up onto the table is like climbing a mountain, for example), but the…
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Muse on Monday – November 3, 2025
People act in different ways on a bus or train or other means of public transportation. Most people are on their phones or reading, or sleeping but sometimes people can strike up conversations with the person next to them. This can go a lot of ways. One thing about public transportation is that the people…
Muse on Monday – October 27, 2025
I’m just getting back from a trip, which is why I haven’t been posting lately. I was going to schedule posts while I was gone, but…oh well. Normally, in October I like to do prompts about scary stories since it’s that type of season. There are a lot of things that could be scary, depending…
Muse on Monday – October 6, 2025
Last week I didn’t post a Muse on Monday since I was feeling sick. It wasn’t anything serious, but it’s hard to do some things when you’re not feeling well. Of course there are a lot of types of sickness. In stories, they are handled in different ways: There are other types too, of course,…
Muse on Monday – September 22, 2025
Sometimes we might do something impulsive, like do a lot of baking late at night. Maybe it’s because we’re stressed or to take our mind off something worrying. Maybe guests are coming suddenly. There could be a lot of reasons. Story Prompt: September 22, 2025 Write a story about baking late at night. You could…
Muse on Monday – September 15, 2025
We often think of settings as discrete things: this story takes place in a city or in the countryside or on a boat, etc. However, it’s interesting when various settings are blended together. One that fascinates me is the post-apocalyptic city, where nature is starting to reclaim the city and trees are growing up out…
Muse on Monday – September 8, 2025
It is common in a story for a character to have an epiphany or realization about their life at the end of the story. For instance, maybe they realize that after a year of struggling through med school, they really want to be an actor (or vice versa). After all, a story is a journey,…
Muse on Monday – September 1, 2025
There has been a trend in the past few decades of retelling fairy tales or other old stories. This could mean putting them in a modern time period or in another setting or changing other details about the story. This is an effective technique since fairy tales tend to be universal stories that many cultures…
Muse on Monday – August 25, 2025
Darkness falls. Color fades. All that is left are shadows and silhouettes. Sounds become sharper, smells take on new meaning. It can be a challenge to write a story that takes place in darkness, similar to the challenge of writing from the perspective of a character who is blind. For one thing, the conflicts are…
Muse on Monday – August 11, 2025
Writers, almost by definition, love books, and so a lot of story characters love books by extension. There are probably more stories about libraries than, say, dentist offices. I don’t have the stats but it’s a good guess. Story Prompt: August 11, 2025 Write a story that takes place in a library. There are a…
The Green-Walled Treehouse 