Writing Prompt #6
I just realized that I'd been forgetting to post these! A brief explanation: I go to a weekly writing group, where we do simple, 20 minute timed writing prompts for fun.
In this one, each person came up with a title and passed it to the person on their right, who then wrote something to go with it. I got Dawn by Midnight.
On a spaceship, a day lasts as long as you want it to. There’s no sun, after all, to enforce the strict separation of day and night. The larger ships, the ones that carry hundreds of passengers, have scientists to determine exactly how many hours are best-suited to increase the productivity of the human body.
On Captain Novakovich’s ship, the night started whenever he got tired, and the day started when he saw an opportunity to make money. Novakovich flew the Eagle, a rusty bucket of a spaceship that could be turned to almost any trade: hauling crate (either in or out of the strict boundaries of the Empire’s trading laws), transporting passengers, acting as a tax haven by simply sitting around in unregulated space, or anything else that seemed likely to turn a dime. It wasn’t steady work, and it wasn’t good work, but an orphaned dock-rat like me didn’t have a multitude of career options, so I’d stuck with Novakovich and his Eagle for five Earth-years now.
I’d never seen an eagle. The bird, I mean. I doubted Novakovich had either. They didn’t have birds back on Chokin, where I was from and which Novakovich also claimed as his home planet, at least on legal forms. Chokin had no native lifeforms, only us humans and the animals we’d carted along. In my experience that was rats, mosquitoes, and other vermin. At least the mosquitoes flew - that was as close to a bird as I’d ever gotten.
This entry was originally posted at http://brigdh.dreamwidth.org/26163.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
In this one, each person came up with a title and passed it to the person on their right, who then wrote something to go with it. I got Dawn by Midnight.
On a spaceship, a day lasts as long as you want it to. There’s no sun, after all, to enforce the strict separation of day and night. The larger ships, the ones that carry hundreds of passengers, have scientists to determine exactly how many hours are best-suited to increase the productivity of the human body.
On Captain Novakovich’s ship, the night started whenever he got tired, and the day started when he saw an opportunity to make money. Novakovich flew the Eagle, a rusty bucket of a spaceship that could be turned to almost any trade: hauling crate (either in or out of the strict boundaries of the Empire’s trading laws), transporting passengers, acting as a tax haven by simply sitting around in unregulated space, or anything else that seemed likely to turn a dime. It wasn’t steady work, and it wasn’t good work, but an orphaned dock-rat like me didn’t have a multitude of career options, so I’d stuck with Novakovich and his Eagle for five Earth-years now.
I’d never seen an eagle. The bird, I mean. I doubted Novakovich had either. They didn’t have birds back on Chokin, where I was from and which Novakovich also claimed as his home planet, at least on legal forms. Chokin had no native lifeforms, only us humans and the animals we’d carted along. In my experience that was rats, mosquitoes, and other vermin. At least the mosquitoes flew - that was as close to a bird as I’d ever gotten.
This entry was originally posted at http://brigdh.dreamwidth.org/26163.html. Please comment there using OpenID.