Today's challenge is not directly a writing challenge, but a conceptual challenge, or perhaps a design challenge. You're going to think long and hard (for ten minutes, anyway) about a character.

Take a character from your fandom or original work that you know very well and write down at least one of each of the following things.

1. A personality trait that comes out through how they speak (e.g. things they say, what words they choose, tone of voice)
2. An event from their past that either was traumatic or they regret a lot (or both!)
3. Some skill that they have trained in and are very good at

Then, place that character in an AU that's very different from their original world, such as an alien race, a different time period, or, if you want to stay in the same time period, a different nation/cultural background or even a wildly different socio-economic stratum. Now, do the same thing: design the character in this new world and write the same three things as listed above.

What you're doing is designing the character for the new AU but adapting what's important about them to the new world so that they're still the same character. This is a good exercise for learning to create your own characters.

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Example: Donna in Doctor Who is contemptuous of people she thinks are less intelligent and that comes out in her sarcastic jabs at people. One traumatic event in her past was the events of "The Runaway Bride" and the betrayal and then death of her fiance. She is very good with numbers and knows how companies and offices (and company politics) work very well.

In a Regency AU, let's make Donna a genteel lady, but she's nouveau riche, having grown up in a successful merchanting family that bought their way into gentility. So, she still has the London accent and the non-genteel manner of speaking, and she's not afraid to insult her less-intelligent, less-capable peers in a crude manner. She's unmarried, but only because she had been engaged to a gentleman who'd broken off the engagement (a big no-no back in the Regency) and married someone else -- that's Donna's traumatic event. Having grown up in a merchanting family, she knows how to run a shop and a house.

For today's challenge, describe a group activity from the level of the group, not the individuals in the group. As an example, you could describe an army setting out on a march across the country, and you might say that from the battlements of the fort, it looks like a long line of ants. But you wouldn't talk about individual soldiers in the army and what they're doing.

Some ideas: a play in a team sports game, traffic on a highway, a bus of tourists visiting a scenic lookout, children going out for recess.

Word challenge today, a word with several unrelated meanings:

sharp

Is that the edge of a knife? Or a tone of voice? Maybe it's how a person dresses, or a musical term, or a pungent odor, or even a description of flavor (cheese, anyone?). Or something else entirely?

It's a hot summer where I am, sweaty and uncomfortable. However, a good imagination can do wonders, cooling you off even in heat like this.

For your ten minutes today, write something to cool off your reader, to make them feel that sprinkler as they run through it, or the spray of snow as they ski down the mountain, or the salty wind at the prow of a fast ship -- or whatever else comes to mind.

Today's challenge is an exercise in just getting words on paper, without any thought about writing a complete story, developing plot or characters, or polishing your writing. Below is a sentence from a book. Copy it into your writing space. Then, starting with it, write whatever comes to mind.

She strained her eyes, trying to see through it, and could just make out possibly a globe of some sort, floating in mid-air.