Story Starter Sunday 6/17/12

Time for this week's Story Starter. I'm still recovering from Pride yesterday. Our group had a small float and a section behind for marchers. A couple of friends wanted to ride the float, so I decided to hop on with them. Beats walking two miles in the heat, right? Nope. For future reference, standing inside a reflective metal box in blistering sunlight for an hour and a half is no less miserable than walking in it. But we had a great time.

So, today's Story Starter. Here's what I rolled (please ignore the sideways-ness):

And here's what I came up with:

Tommy Big Oak knows that most people's shadows follow them, not the other way round. But his shadow's always leading the way. When Tommy follows close, he finds a number of mysteries: fish who teach him to open locks, and the secret code on his cell phone that can switch any light on or off, or even a whole city! And when he follows Shadow to the remnants of a fallen star, he finds a bigger mystery--a starlit path from Earth to the Moon.

Anyone else want to give it a go? It's fun!

Story Starter Sunday 6/10/12

So, this past Christmas I got a fun gift from my good friend Brian. They're called Rory's Story Cubes, and they're used for...well, lots of things. Each of the cubes (dice) shows an image, and you try to create a story from the images.

I had decided to use them as an icebreaker brainstorming exercise. Then I figured, why not share the fun? So every Sunday I'll post the arrangement of Story Cubes I've rolled this week, along with my story idea. If you come up with a different, better, funnier, etc., idea, please post it in the comments! And if you manage to get a story published based on a cube arrangement, I'd love to hear about it!

So, without further ado, here's this week's arrangement. I've already formed the cubes into idea clusters, but please don't limit yourself to my pairings:

Okay, so here's my story idea for this week: An elderly optimist who can calculate advanced mathematics using an abacus forms an unlikely friendship with a pessimistic firebug with a compulsion for destroying light bulbs. When they discover the Turtle of Chaos has a scheme to take over the world's postal service, they band together to fight the foe.

What did you come up with?