I've been working on that fairy tale thing I mentioned months ago. Words have been coming very slowly, like maybe a sentence or two a day, but it's getting there, as in almost a finished first draft. The final dialogue is really difficult. I'm also doing a lot of editing on it, so nothing I can really post, but hopefully I'll get it done and posted for real in, oh, I don't know, a couple of years? ;)
All right! We just did "forty years in the future", so now let's go backwards and do "forty years in the past"! Choose a character and write about what happened forty years earlier than their contemporary period. Depending on how you approach it, this could be difficult or easy. Maybe it's them as a child; maybe it's them time-traveling back to when they were a child, or even before that. Remember that whatever you write should fit into the character's story: they can't know things that they only know in the future, they can't know people they haven't met yet, etc.
Is your character at least forty years old? If not, you may have to choose to write about something that leads up to them: maybe a story about their parents, or even a story about the people who previously lived in the house that they grew up in.