Also, now that I think of it - a good way to give a villain a powerful minion who can be turned against him at a critical moment.

In the interest of "something small, every day," I'm going to write a drabble first thing every morning. I would love prompts -- either one word or a situation (a tall man in a bookstore or something) or even a link to a found picture, like Teppy used to do.

You get virtual cookies for every prompt. And possibly actual ones, at some point.

Of course, it would be great if everyone played and posted drabbles here again, too.

I do miss the drabbles.

I suggest: New things. And: mist.

A twofer! Nice. Thanks, Liese.

Any other prompts? I have an obvious one: snow.

An empty band-aid box.

Ooh, good one.

Based on a dream: unmixy things mixed - Superbowl anti-war demonstration.

OK far from a drabble prompt, a dream last night might make a good plot for a novel, though not one I can write. It is a sort of spinoff from Olive Twist, where at the end Oliver is happily situated and the Artful Dodger life is spared, but the Dodger is transported to Australia. So in my dream, the Artful Dodger has to survive the brutal conditions for Australian convicts. His survival instincts serve him well, but as his sentence finishes, he has to choose between true redemption and just becoming a more respectable type of predator. Meanwhile in an alternate steampunk Victorian era, the Dodger is transported to the Empire's moon colony where he faces a similar dilemma. In 21st century Bangladesh, still another Dodger, part of a notorious group of email scammers, who recruit mostly from the gigantic social medial "Like" click farms, escapes jail time after saving the life of undercover police agent "Twisty", but faces a decade long exile from the internet which is part of his probation terms. This 21st century Dodger confronts a moral dilemma of his own when he is offered a chance to return to the electronic world if he will become an agent for a corrupt and brutal task force jointly run by the NSA and the Bangladeshi police force. All three Dodgers dream of and learn from each other. Could all these worlds be real? Are any of them real ? Does some dark truth underlie the connection between the three "Artful Dodgers" in their three different universes?

Drabble prompts:

A woman, standing at a counter, stares out the window.

An elderly man takes off his hat and opens the door; from inside, lights flare and music floods the street.

A young man and a middle-aged woman, arm in arm, square their shoulders and take a deep breath. Looking at each other, they step across...