Not all ideas end up as a full novel. Sometime’s it’s just a flash fiction, or even a mere snippet of a story. Here are a couple of particularly delicious ones from the past few weeks. All were done as a prompt (where someone asked for it or not…) to an image.

This little techno-beasty appeared in my favourite Historical Fantasy Book Club group:

Back in more rural ages, dragons terrorised the countryside, subsisting on cows. With the advent of the industrial revolution came a new breed of dragons. Lured to the big cities by the smell of smog, gorging themselves on contraptions with muscles of steel and blood of naphtha, these creatures now terrorise modern man as he makes his advances to the skies.

This was a prompt in the Dreamtime Fantasy Tale group:

Sherlock leaned over the gargantuan footprint, examining all the clues going down the eons of evolution, in his search for an answer to that most ancient of riddles – why DID the chicken cross the road?

Lastly, someone posted the following question to the SciFi Rountable:

Note: Do not say “Eww” if you’ve never tasted it. Question, what would be the perfect steak and kidney pie recipe? and second question, how could it be the centerpiece of a sci-fi short story?

I took the “no ewww” as a challenge (you may have come across my fascination with historically-accurate-yet-utterly-revolting foodstuffs), and came up with this sci-fi suggestion:

Stalk someone you hate. Send them a drink from the bar. Collect the glass. Go into med-bay. Drop the DNA sample into the auto-doc. Let the 3D printer issue a new kidney and prime rib. Cook, and serve.

Bonus point if you serve them a piece too.

That’s it for now. Contrary to the opening statement, The short Felix mystery I started to write turned out to be the opening for the next novel… But watch this space, as a new dragon-related flash-fiction will appear soon!