Haven't written here for quite a while. I snapped a photo today, and had an idea for something I’d be more interested in reading than writing. It's phrased as an API prompt.
Write a children’s story for adults, about a bunch of books in a town's mini-library box. All the books are unwanted cast-offs, and they all want to have someone take them in and read them, and hopefully keep them, much as a child in an orphanage wants to be adopted. All the books are anthropomorphized, and have ongoing conversations with each other, as humans do. All the books talk to each other in the same voice as their authors. So, one book is by Dan Brown. Whatever that book says as dialog reads like a sentence in a Dan Brown novel. Another book is a romance novel by Danielle Steel. One book is Class, Race, and Gender, by Michael Zweig. One book is about how to get teams at work to better collaborate. One book is a volume of cute poems about cats. One is by a Portuguese novelist who won the Nobel Prize. One book is Data Structures in Java. One is a diet book that's been discredited by scientists. And so on. There’s much potential here for amusing dialog for each writing style, with each book steering conversation to what it wants to talk about. One day, a new pair of books arrive. They’re about how to handle grief and sudden traumatic loss of a child. All the other books are aware these new books have issues. They find it difficult to talk with the new books. Maybe the two grief books manage to talk to each other a little bit, but conversations with the other books are always halting and awkward. The other books find other things to talk about, like cats or data structures. To add to the back story, there were a couple of dozen other grief books. The book’s owner had them stashed in his basement for years, and got pretty good at not looking at them. Some brought back flashbacks of standing on the sidewalk outside MGH after being in there for nearly a week. The doctors and nurses gave him a consolation basket with a bunch of random nice little things, like chocolates and cards and books to help cope. He felt like an idiot standing outside on the sidewalk carrying the stupid basket. He later read a couple, but couldn’t manage any more. Nothing in the Didion book came as any surprise. The C.S. Lewis was way too much an attempt to rationalize and bargain with God, and so forth. He found them all just exhausting. Eventually he decided to shed all these books, but didn’t want to put them all in one place. Too much bad energy. Of all the unwanted books, these are the least wanted. He put a couple here, a couple there. So there are other mini-library boxes all over town with more of these books. The two books wonder about the rest of the books and what they’re up to.
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