puzzleprompts | Puzzle Reveal

Power Hour: Teleportation

Creature Feature: Spider Crickets

Classifieds Section: Military

Cosmic Constant: Wormhole

Random Object: Compass

Sense and Sensibilities:
Sight: blue
Sound: clicking
Smell: ozone
Taste: sour
Touch: slick
Emotion: traumatized

Thanks for checking out our monthly art and writing challenge. Puzzle Prompts is meant to give you the building blocks of a story when you need some inspiration, no matter your genre or creative outlet.

The Way This Works:
I give you some prompts. You use as many prompts as you can to create a story, essay, poem, work of art, or even gaming campaign. Prompts are organized into categories you can use for setting, action, conflict/crisis, who, what, when, where, why, and how of a story.

Each category prompt is meant to have multiple variations in order to be useful for any artist or writer - be they into fantasy, paranormal romance, science fiction, space opera, historical fiction, steampunk, urban fantasy, non-fiction, and poetic writing.

Teleportation could be used by a person with magic or genetic superpowers, a spaceship using space folding technology, or a Greek god coming to Earth from Mount Olympus. It could be the way your villain breaks into museums, how your time traveling archaeologist escapes from danger, or the curious side effect of your magical character sneezing. To read how teleportation has been used in comics, see DC Fandom: Teleportation and Marvel Fandom: Teleportation.

Rhaphidophoridae are commonly called spider crickets where I’m from, and in my opinion, they are the creepiest insect. This article from the Washington Post Spider Crickets: The Bugs You Don’t Want in Your House This Fall does them horrific justice. Ensure your story is nightmare fuel by making your spider cricket threat irradiated, cat size, alien, demonically possessed, or ground troops in a primordial god’s reclamation army.

Also known as Einstein - Rosen bridges, wormholes are still theoretical to scientists, but wildly popular in fiction for a very good reason. They literally open up all kinds of storytelling possibilities, from time travel, interdimensional travel, intragalactic travel, to as many other fantastic speculations as your imagination can come up with. To see how they’ve been used in various media, see TV Tropes: Wormholes.

Your story could center around engineers studying natural E-R bridges in order to design teleportation technology for use by firefighters, police, or orbital guardsmen. Your children’s story might find some foster kids using the wormhole in their neighbor’s garden shed to go to a world where everything appears animated. The main character in your queer romance novel might find one that leads to Renaissance Italy or the Edo period in Japan. Or an alien army might create artificial wormholes to move troops between battlefields, planets, or galaxies.

Sense and Sensibilities is a reminder to make your story come alive using the senses and emotions of the POV character.

Puzzle Prompts is meant to inspire. To tickle your muse and get you exercising those little grey cells. Maybe even try out something new in your writing. Above all, have fun!

For more inspiration, check out The Art Room and our Music Monday posts.

Happy Creating, Everyone!