Another Wednesday, another writing prompt. (Also, the lifelong Durannie in me would be remiss if I didn’t say “happy birthday, Simon leBon!” since this was written on October 27th.)
Last week, I did a whole explainer about what writing prompts are, then shared one of my older ones. Looking through the ones I’ve earmarked to share on the blog, I decided to share another faerie-themed one this week. I swear, they won’t all be faeries!
This one is one of the “grid” prompts I talked about last week. The prompt was pulled from an Excel grid with lists of items under five topics: Genre, Scenario, Tone, Setting, and Character. The grid has a random shuffle feature by column, to give you a random item under each category. Sometimes prompts from the grid are cool. Sometimes they’re… not.
This one was one of the crazy ones–but I think it worked out okay. Let’s see if you agree…
10/27/12
| Genre | Scenario | Tone | Setting | Character Archetype |
| Mystery | Faery | Children’s | The Moon | Unwilling Hero |
Tiny footprints in the dust let me to the edge of a large crater. After that, they stopped. They didn’t continue down the sharp edge of the great impression, nor was there a long streak, as though the owner of the itty-bitty feet had slid down the decline on their itty-bitty behind. That could mean only one thing: the tiny-footed one had flown away.
So, it was a pixie I was following.
Now, pixies on the Moon are very different from pixies in most other places. The Moon has only one-sixth the gravity of the Earth, and pixies don’t weigh more than a hummingbird on Earth. Flying on the Moon is tricky for a pixie, because of that low gravity. It’s very hard to stay close enough to the ground to safely land again. But this one had tried it, and I had to find out why.
I’d been sent to track the mystery pixie by Mr. Verdi, who owned one of the many cheese shops on Main Street. It seemed those same tiny footprints I’d been following had been appearing in the soft cheeses for upwards of two weeks, and the cheese maker was at the end of his rope. “Customers don’t want to buy cheese full of footprints,” he’d explained to me when he hired me. “Not even ones this small. I tried to pass it off as Swiss cheese, but then I started hearing the rumors that my Swiss cheese tasted like Stilton and feet, which of course is what it really was.”
I’d nodded politely while he went on, waiting for him to show me the footprinted cheese so I could begin tracking. I didn’t know then, of course, what I was dealing with, and actually expected that it was simply a moon mouse or even an odd-footed bird.
The prints, however, looked very much like human feet, just a whole lot smaller. That meant a member of one of the Faery races, though it could have been any of a hundred different kinds. When mankind came to the moon, all manner of things once believed to be only myth and legend had decided they wanted in on the ride enough to come out of the creature closet and declare themselves. Most were denied access; nobody wanted vampires and werewolves on the Moon, but everybody thought that Faeries were cute and harmless, due to reading too much Barrie and not reading enough Grimm.
It could have been any of a number of tiny fey folk, but pixies were the worst. As soon as I realized what I was tracking, I actually toyed with the idea of going straight back to the cheese shop and refunding Mr. Verdi the first half of his payment. Now, you might not think a tiny pixie is any big deal, but let me tell you. They don’t just steal cheese and mark it up with their smelly feet (though that is how some of it gets its particularly feet-y smell), the also bite, scratch, claw, pull hair, and poke eyes. There are some varieties that even have stingers. I really hoped I wasn’t tracking a stinger-pixie.
I turned away from the edge of the crater. I would have to return to the cheese shop and wait for the dinky culprit to return to the scene of the crime, as there was no way to track it once its feet left the ground. I’d have to stake out the shop overnight, which I loathed doing in the best of circumstances. I headed back, stopping at Luna’s Apiary Supply on the way back to get myself a bee hat, just in case.
