Rebecca M. Douglass, Author

This week's Wendig Challenge was to use your smartphone's predictive text feature and, starting from "Once upon a time," pick words until you had a story, or at least an opening line. My own efforts were pretty boring, but follow the link and see what some people came up with. Since I didn't like what I got, I picked one to use to start my story. I stole the line, "Once upon a time, I could change time," and got something from someone else mixed in, which gave me a story to write. I even hit 1000 words spot on. And maybe I have another flash-fiction anthology to put together sometime: the end of the world. I think I've destroyed it quite a few times on this blog. Time Was Once upon a time, when there was time, I could change time. I could speed it up or slow it down, even stop it altogether for…a time. 

The only thing I could not do was the one thing I wanted to do. I could not turn time back. But I had to.

It’s not that time is a river, the way th...

Chuck's challenge this week was to pick a random image from Flickr and let it inspire a story. After a long trip down the rabbit hole, I stopped looking at pretty pictures and selected one. The photo is by Truus. Since I'm not sure if it's okay to post, the picture is here . And when I went to find that link, I found a photo that is even better for the story . Check them both out! The World In the Palm of Her Hand All Lissa knew was that she was supposed to save the world. In point of fact, she didn’t really know even that: she’d had a message from some mysterious old man who refused to show his face, exactly according to regulations. The message read, “She has the world in the palm of her hand. Don’t let her drop it.” In theory that left the field so impossibly wide open that there was little hope of finding the right woman, but Lissa had a bit more to go on than the message suggested. For one thing, since she got the memo, she could assume that the woman ...