Whether you’re stuck somewhere in the middle of a story or stalled at the start, keeping your creative soup constantly on the boil can make the difference between giving in and finishing.

These posts are about bubbling forth some of the best and most unusual ideas for short stories from the always steaming bowl of internet soup.

So without further introduction (or needless metaphor), here are the best ideas for short stories trawled from around the web in the last month:

• Harvard’s fascinating collection of scientists’ field notes now available
• The search for monsters among us
• Voyager 1 may have reached the edge of the solar system
• Gale crater on target to become next Mars landing site
• City living changes brain’s stress response
• What would happen if Earth and Mars switched places?
• Guy updates his Facebook page during 16-hour police standoff
• Why China’s ghost towns matter for our economy
• Smart contact lenses to diagnose disease and deliver drugs
• Airport geese to be cooked for poor
• Thoughts within thoughts make us human
• Brain implant restores memories in rats by recording and playing them back
• Mother searched internet for ‘chloroform’
• Flesh eating drugs hit US

As per usual, if you happen to… Read more

A fresh crop of ideas for short stories for the fortnight ending May 23. If any of these prove useful, please let me know by dropping a comment below.

• Apocalypse Now: Why believers will grow stronger if the world doesn’t end
• How Darpa’s tiny robotic hummingbird hovers and films
• One death provides new life for many
• Science fiction classics that have rewired your brain
• Ink spill from UPS truck paints a highway rainbow
• Dead human skin hels clean the air by breaking apart ozone
• Private prisons: not just evil, but expensive
• New elevators segregate rich from poor

Looking for some creative boost juice to kick your week into gear? Here are this week’s best ideas for short stories, plucked from the depths of the net, hand sorted, free for the picking.

This week’s selection canvases a pretty a pretty sizeable chunk of the globe, from environmental desertification in China to abandoned amusement parks in America. There should be enough ideas for short stories here to keep your right side humming for quite a while.

• SETI halts alien search due to funding cutbacks
• Inside the drone missions to Fukushima
• The social and environmental impact of ‘desertification’ in China (inc photos)
• Robots evolve to look out for their own
• Sense of justice built into the brain
• Second experiment hints at seasonal dark matter signal
• Digital legacy: the fate of your online soul
• Depressed people make better decisions than happy ones
• A tour of an abandoned amusement park in America’s heartland (video)
• Mayor rescues man trapped in women’s prison (probably my favourite)
• Easily distracted people may have too much brain (finally, an acceptable diagnosis!)
• When we tested nuclear bombs (amazing photo gallery)
• 13 year periodic cicadas emerge
• Snow melting, seas rising at unexpected rates

New sources added this week… Read more

Stuck for ideas for short stories? Or just looking for some literary perk? Each fortnight I trawl the interweb to present a hand picked selection of story starters and writing laxatives for you to sling around.

Ideas for short stories can arrive in all sorts of forms, and whether you are writing hard sci-fi or children’s fiction, real life can be a consistently forgiving muse. Hence each of the ideas below comes from articles of interest around the web.

They may blow your mind, they may only blow a small part of your mind (or maybe just your little toe), but with any luck one will become a catalyst for a deeper, bigger (or smaller), better idea that’s perfect for you.

So here are this week’s best ideas for short stories…

• What the next 50 years hold for human spaceflight
• A single source for clean water and fuel
• Woman mutilates cat for Lady Gaga costume
• Astronomers say: spew 20 tons of dust into orbit to clear the junk
• Soap actor dies five times in 24 hours
• Police sniff out millions buried in garlic fields
• Man arrested in fake US Army unit scam
• Skyscraper contests imagines buildings of the future

… Read more

Fresh ideas for April Fools day writing:

• Brain-computer implant has passed 1000-day milestone
• Noise kills, and blights lives in Europe
• Artificial leaf might provide easy, mobile energy
• Colouring book used in jail drug smuggling scheme
• FBI probes possible bullet hole in plane
• Store data in your body without cyborg modification (the news we’ve all been waiting for!)
• US in deadly hospital germ probe
• Dark matter could be the life of the party for starless planets
• Japanese spaceship loaded with garbage burns up in Earth’s atmosphere
• The search is on for water on mercury
• 10 mysterious underground cities
• Obese man found fused to chair dies

Let me know if any good comes of this in the comments below…

Apologies for my impromptu break from this series last week, I was temporarily indisposed. This week there is probably no greater story starter than the situation in Japan.

To clarify that statement: I don’t want to trivualise what I’m sure, for many people, has been and still is a harrowing experience. Instead I am merely highlighting that in the aftermath of terrible events, history has proven the worth of fiction in providing a voice  to the dispossessed and a vehicle through with traumatic experience can be worked through, when the recounting of facts alone does not suffice.

I hope that explains why in this list I have included a few ideas/prompts from the unfolding tragedy in Japan.  I mean no disrespect for those still dealing with the situation.

• Dinner argument leads to murder
• Worms on special diet make fluorescent silk
• One Third of Staten Island Is On Pain Pills
• Giant refinery becoming unwelcome guest in Curacao
• How does radiation travel, and what kinds of damage can it do?
• Japan Quake: first-person tsunami video becomes iconic
• How the Japan Earthquake Shortened Days on Earth
• Fire did not spark human colonisation of cold Europe
• UFO conference called off due to wet weather
• A

… Read more

A selection of the best story ideas for the week ending March 5th.

• Thousands of trucks stuck in 11km traffic jam
• The forgotten history of Muslim scientists
• Balloon launches breach North Korea’s bubble
• Mock Mars explorers say farewell to virtual red planet
• Bodegas replace bankers in disowned Caracas tower
• What happens when an insect scientist develops invisible bug syndrome?
• Man shoots sister’s donkey dead
• 17th century witch trial notebook goes online
• Mathematics could be used to predict which dictators will be next to fall
• The best of UK’s newly opened UFO files
• Antarctic ice sheet built ‘bottom-up’
• Baby loss impact ‘can last years’
• Large Hadron Collider may soon prove supersymmetry theory is wrong
• Robots become self aware

I think my favourite is the 1km truck jam. A guy says that he’s been stuck in the jam for three days, and his only complaint is that he’s becoming ‘impatient’. A story to be told right there.

As always, please feel free to drop any of your own ideas in the comments below. And let me know if you use any of the ideas, would be great to hear about the results.

Apologies for the brief hiatus, but one does need to go on holiday every now and then. Here’s a selection of the web’s most interesting ideas over the last few weeks:

• Robot marathon kicks off in Japan
• Earth-like worlds might be as common as ants at a picnic
• Without language, numbers make no sense
• British town to heat pool with crematorium
• Bird kills man at cock fight
• Red planet for sale? How corporate sponsors could send humans to Mars
• Hunter sues after failing to find elephant
• Researchers convince people they have three arms – then threaten one with a knife
• Climate change halves Peru glacier
• Dictator declares war on people

As always, if you have any good story starters that you’d like to offer up, drop them in the comments.

This week a change of tact as we focus on crime related story starters. The result is a fairly bleak set of ‘ideas’ (if you could call it that) which I put forward without any pre-text of what sort of stories/articles might come out. I just want to just that by posting these links I am by no means condoning or making light of the serious topics they cover, they are simply what they are.

Without further introduction, here are some of the more interesting crime genre ideas trawled from the web this week.

• Pakistan court extends detention of US diplomat
• Police hold man over Churchill fake signatures
• Huskies massacred after tourism slump
• Fingerprints on fabrics could now solve crimes
• Poisoner jailed for ‘entertainment’ offence
• Gangs Hunt Journalists and Rights Workers
• Monster or Savior? Doctor Draws New Scrutiny
• Jailed former Enron boss Jeffrey Skilling’s son found dead
• Violence traps Aussies in Cairo hotel

Did I miss any? Post your own ideas in the comments below.

As promised, here are some of the most cracking story ideas picked up around the web this week:

• Crew of 520-day mock Mars mission nears mock landing
• Mystery of sandbank piano solved
• Body of TV quizmaster snatched from grave
• Lost islands of the crows revealed in DNA study
• Ecologists propose ousting species to save ecosystems
• Polar bear swims for nine straight days in search of ice
• Man wins world record for pi calculation
• And my personal favourite: Drunk sumos trash curry house

Next week will be crime week!