Dark Promptings: Uncanny Surprises with Sally Bosco

“Dark Promptings” is a special series of guest-written creative writing prompts, aimed at sparking the imagination’s gasoline for writers from any genre…but with a dark or devious discoloration, just like the Instigation department at Gorelets.com. The guest contributors are folks who wrote articles appearing in my fat new non-fiction book for fiction writers of all kinds, Many Genres, One Craft: Lessons in Writing Popular Fiction, making a stop here at gorelets.com as part of their Virtual Book Tour across the web. (You can find my own VBT essays elsewhere).

Writers and creative people: drop on by our book’s meaty weblog to learn more about the book, or order Many Genres today.

Our next “Dark Promptings” come from Sally Bosco, author of the new novel, The Werecat Chronicles, a young adult horror novel available now on Kindle and Smashwords.

In what follows, Sally kindly provides you with a large number of offbeat situations and bizarre scenarios… See where your characters go when they experience these “UNCANNY SURPRISES”…

DECOMPOSITION CLASS
      As he held the bottle of acid in his hand, he thought about how he hadn’t signed up for a course in how to get rid of a dead body.

UNHEIMLICH HOUSE
When he looked around, he noticed that the house he was standing in was not exactly the same as the one he’d left. In it’s place stood an exact mirror image.

THE FACE IN THE MIRROR
      This was the tenth day she noticed it. The face she saw in the mirror was gradually morphing into a ______________.

A BAD PLACE FOR VAMPIRES
      Florida was the worst place in the world to be a vampire. Gone was the dungeon he loved to languish in and in its place a big bright sunroom. Not a good thing for a creature of the night.

A SURPRISE IN THE CRAWL SPACE
      There was no mistaking it. Something thudded around in the crawl space under her house. Something big.

THE LIVING UN-DEAD DOLLS
      The Living Dead dolls. Every time she moved them away from each other, the next morning she’d find them moved back together into a cluster. As though they were plotting something.

THE UNFORTUNATE 3 A.M. VISITOR
      At 3 a.m. something knocked on the sliding glass doors at the back of her house. At noon, the same noise would have been nothing, but in the deepest part of a lonely night, it made her heart nearly explode in her chest.

PORTAL TO HELL
      She’d always knows that some day something that wasn’t a kitty would come through her open kitty door.

SHADOW PEOPLE
      They weren’t ghosts exactly. They were shadow people.

Sally Bosco writes young adult dark fiction. She’s inexplicably drawn to the uncanny, the shades of gray between light and dark, and the area where your mind hovers as you’re falling off to sleep. She loves writing young adult fiction because she strongly relates to teenage angst, the search for self-identity and the feelings of not fitting in. Originally from Connecticut, she graduated from the University of Florida with a BA in Graphic Design and then went on to complete her MFA in Writing Popular Fiction at Seton Hill University. Her published novels include Alt.Death.com, Shadow Cat and The Werecat Chronicles. In spite of her affinity for the dark and macabre, she lives in sunny Florida. You can read more of her writing at http://sallybosco.com

Sally’s article in Many Genres, One Craft: Lessons in Writing Popular Fiction is “The Manga Explosion.”