A New Challenge

A New Year – and time to kick this blog into life again. For the last couple of months, the majority of my blogs have been for Six Sentence Sunday. However, the SSS blog hop is sadly ending this month, so I’ve been giving some thought to my future blog posts.

 

I’ve signed up for the 100K words in 100 days challenge (on Facebook) – not sure I’ll manage it, but hey, it’s worth a try! Sally Quillford, the instigator of the challenge, recently listed some possible ‘prompts’ for writing.

 

One of these was:

 

Go to Wikipedia.org and click on Random Article. Write something inspired by the post that appears. Feel free to keep clicking till you find something that inspires you.

 

Okay, that sounded interesting – so I decided to have a go, and set myself the extra challenge of writing about the first article that came up, rather than searching for one that immediately inspired me. I also decided I would try to link it in some way to romance writing in general.

 

So the first ‘Random Article’ was about a book entitled ‘Biotechnology and Applied Biochemistry’. Gulp! I haven’t done any biology or chemistry since I was about 14, but I read the article anyway

 

The book deals with the “translation of discoveries in life sciences to therapeutic and diagnostic products for the benefit of mankind” which includes things like stem cells and tissue engineering (and a lot of other things about which I didn’t have a clue!)

 

As I’d set myself this challenge, and didn’t want to admit defeat on the very first attempt, I started to think of all the discoveries that have happened during my lifetime. Without knowing a lot about medical advances, I could still list quite a few basic ones: antibiotics, the eradication of smallpox, the development of vaccines, the amazing advances in heart surgery (I remember the first heart transplant in 1967 – it seemed nothing short of miraculous then!), the many advances in cancer treatment, and IVF treatment.

 

Linking a topic like this to writing in general would probably be fairly easy for someone with a medical background – doctors and surgeons are always popular heroes or heroines, and someone involved in medical research could also provide an interesting story. The nearest I’ve got is a veterinary surgeon in one of my current ‘works-in-progress’ but there are other possibilities that might provide the basis for a story, even for a non-medical person like me.

 

Here are a few that have jumped into my mind:

- Hero and heroine meet at a clinical trial for a new medication.

- One character donates bone marrow or a kidney to another, or to the child of another.

- Character , after discovering a possible new treatment of a disease, has to decide whether to allow his (or her) spouse/partner/lover or parent or child to be the first recipient of this treatment.

- Parents disagree about treatment for their sick child.

- Heroine gives permission for her husband’s heart to be donated after his tragic death, and then meets the recipient of the heart.

 

Have you other ideas you could add to this list?

 

Next week I’ll do another ‘Random Article’ search and see what comes up! Watch this space…