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.

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.

Think about the past couple of days and choose something that you did or happened to you. It should be something that lasted no more than a minute -- it can either be some short event, like a phone call or wrong number, or a small part of a longer event, such as locking the front door, getting in the car, and starting it up to get to your destination.

Now, write that thing as if it happened to your chosen character. Translate the event to whatever the character's situation is (for example, if it was Luke Skywalker, "getting in the car and starting it up" might be "climbing into the X-Wing and starting the launch sequence).

Today's challenge is figurative language, but not in the way you'd expect.

Think of an example of figurative language, such as a simile ("They fought like cats and dogs."), personification ("My heart leapt when I saw it."), hyperbole ("I have a million things to do today."), or an idiom ("A rolling stone gathers no moss.") -- basically anything that conveys a meaning without directly saying it. After all, the first example is saying that they were arguing and bickering fiercely without saying it directly, and we know that the people being described weren't actually cats and dogs.

Now, write a paragraph or two about the literal meaning of your chosen phrase. For example, for the simile, describe an actual fight between cats and dogs. Or, for the personification, describe someone's heart actually leaping. (It'd probably be very painful, and possibly lethal.)

Basically, the idea is to learn and understand what figurative language is by looking at the exact opposite.

Sorry for being really delinquent on posting challenges. Things have been a bit of a mess lately, but, well, excuses are just excuses.

Today's challenge: Write a couple of paragraphs describing an animal or a group of animals doing something. It could be a horse eating in a pasture, or a basket of hamsters scrambling to get out, or a mother whale swimming with her calf, or whatever. Your goal is to really make the reader see what's happening. Note: these should be real animals, so they shouldn't speak nor think like humans do.

Wow, it's been a week since the last challenge. Sorry!

Today's challenge: Write a paragraph in which a character gets injured. It doesn't have to be a serious injury - even a paper cut is fine - and you don't have to describe the injury or how it happened, but describe the character's reaction to the injury, such as wincing, going "yipe!", jerking the hand back, and sucking on the cut.

Don't include any other characters in scene, to avoid the temptation of turning the scene into their coming over to help or comfort the injured person.

Choose two characters. If they're fantastical (meaning, not of this world, usually doing not-of-this-world things), write about them doing something totally mundane, like going grocery shopping or gardening. If they're regular people, write about them being thrown into an out-of-this-world situation.

Word challenge today:

star

Write a couple of paragraphs about a character getting surprised. That might make you think about a happy surprise, like a surprise party or an unexpected gift, but it could also be something more neutral or even bad, like skiving off from work and walking around a corner right into your boss, or finding a mouse in your house, or bandits jumping out in an ambush.