Fantasy writers are a special bunch. The fantasy writer, like most other fiction writers, takes a look around their world and asks, “What if?”. The difference is that the playground the fantasy writer gets to explore is completely boundless.

Fantasy can take us to new worlds or let us stay in the comfort of home. It can give us new, remarkable powers beyond all limits, introduce us to amazing creatures and still have us looking at our everyday realities in ways that will change us forever.

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• You find yourself in Narnia, but it’s nothing like the Narnia from the original tales.

• A gnome starts talking to your young child.

• The alphabet is used as currency.

• A young boy is drawn into the world of Slavic legend and changes the course of modern history. 

• Every time you read a fairy tale, something from the story appears in your real life.

• A young prince discovers he is destined to become a farm boy.

• A princess slays a dragon. 

• The locals in a small fishing village suddenly all find themselves living in a black-and-white horror movie. 

• You start to hear voices in water. 

• A magic system that relies on weaving natural fibers. 

• A werewolf and succubus form a partnership. 

• “Inside this box, you’ll find the answer to every question about the origins of human life. But you’re not ready to open it. ”

• Cats tell a homeless man a secret that changes his life forever. 

• A saber-tooth tiger is spotted wandering casually along an ordinary suburban street. 

• Your child’s puzzle game unlocks an alternate world. 

• “Do his ears look normal to you?”

• You find a small door in the bottom of a large tree. 

• A young girl believes a ball of wool is a luck dragon. Her parents think she’s just imaginative. 

• A city that trades in gems is overrun by otherworldly thieves. 

• A Buddhist monk starts to dabble in the occult. 

• A leprechaun appears in your dreams. On the fifth night, you begin to understand why. 

• A person suddenly develops the ability to control the weather with their emotions. 

• A young girl discovers she’s the descendant of Cinderella. 

• A person is given the opportunity to change a single aspect of the present by altering a single aspect from the past. 

• “It’s a head. And there’s the body. ”

• A professional thief gets more than he/she expected after stealing an item that once belonged to a god. 

• Once a month a wolf turns into a human girl. 

• An army of women from an alternate dimension descends on a sleepy rural village by accident. 

• In the middle of a raging storm, you hear a voice in the wind. 

• A court jester is accused of murdering the court magician. 

• A widow sees a mermaid while staring out into the sea. 

• The attractions in a traveling freak show reveal a dark secret about the town they’re visiting. 

• A witch falls in love with a blind warrior. 

• An old billionaire businessman decides to join a mentor program. His new student has some surprising abilities that make the old man question everything he has ever held as important. 

• Devotees of a snake cult are all granted a special power. Some use it for good. Others not. 

• A child has the ability to talk to birds. 

• A warlock, a wizard and a witch are locked into a political battle. 

• A 500-year-old samurai wakes up in a museum in the modern world. 

• A priest witnesses a crime and then is drawn into an alternate world. 

• A man believes his clothes grant him magical abilities. 

• A friendly dragon is accidentally slain by a bounty hunter, and no one is happy about it. 

• God goes on vacation. 

• A prince and princess arranged to be married devise a devious plan to destroy their respective kingdoms in their union. 

• Small creatures start whispering in dark corners, and only your grandmother can hear them. 

• “I think we’re in New York. But I don’t think it’s the New York we just came from. ”

• A writer’s stories start coming to life around him. 

• An ordinary colonial woman suspects she might be a werewolf. 

• A wizard is held captive by a princess.

• A paralyzed man is given one wish. The wish cannot be that he can walk again. 

• An angel appears at a dinner party. 

• “I know no one really likes their mother-in-law, but this is different. She’s different. ”

• A woman looks out a hotel window and sees a sheep in the building opposite. 

• A dinosaur hatches in a natural history museum. 

• A teenage girl discovers she can pause time once a day. 

• A lonely old woman finds a friend in the local library. 

• You’re granted three wishes under three conditions. You break two of the three conditions and the third wish is denied. You decide to fight back. 

• A team of Sherpas is forbidden from ever climbing a local mountain after their leader hears a voice on the wind. 

• Plants become sentient. 

• A medieval knight is abducted by aliens. 

• A woman confronts Death after he takes her husband. 

• A team of paranormal investigators, who believe they are actually charlatans, discover a ghost. 

• A king decides he’d like to take on a wizard’s apprenticeship. 

• A troll is accidentally trapped in a metropolitan zoo. 

• A sick young girl meets a young boy in her feverish dreams. 

• A woman discovers she can change the physical properties of matter. 

• A man cannot take off his sunglasses because…

• “I know tarot cards are a load of bollocks. But these cards are different. ”

• A person can feed off the psychic energies of others through conversation. 

• A sick person escapes into an imagined world to avoid dealing with their illness. The world might not be imaginary. 

• A professor is given a strange object by a student and is shocked to learn of its dark connections to a local church.

• A character trio: a priest, a rancher, an exotic dancer. 

• An immortal queen learns she is terminally ill. 

• A female warrior in an ice age setting must choose between love and power. 

• “You’d better come and have a look at this before it makes anyone else deaf. ”

• An artist discovers their muse is not as figurative as they thought. 

• A cantankerous old woman working in a secondhand bookshop upsets the wrong customer. 

• Characters from classic literature are mingling in the pages of books that aren’t their own. 

• A young girl reads a story in which the hero directly asks her for help. 

• A magician curses a couple that they can never physically see one another again. 

• An elf (or other mystical creature) learns that s/he is actually human. 

• “The way it shimmers like that, it looks just like a dragon’s eye. ”

• The mayor of a bustling metropolis discovers something strange about the head of his support staff. 

• A man holds up a convenience store, getting more than he bargained for from the store clerk. 

• A traveling circus turns up in a town one day, but no one noticed it arrive. 

• Every morning, a muddy set of footprints marks a track right by your front door. 

• “I just don’t believe in trolls. ”

• An alien is abducted by forest sprites.

• A person listening to their favorite late-night radio show starts to hear messages directed to them specifically. 

• A man with a compulsion to count everything discovers his counting is having a supernatural effect on the world.

• The color orange develops sentience. 

• A wealthy teenager receives a pet [supernatural creature of choice] as a coming-of-age birthday gift. 

• A woman accidentally leaves a bag beside you on the bus. You eventually open it and suspect that woman might have magical abilities. 

• You start to feel emotions coming from everything: food, clothes, cars, furniture, buildings, etc. 

• A civil war tears apart a forest kingdom ruled by fairies, and the human world suffers a serious side effect. 

• A writer believes his/her laptop is haunted by William Shakespeare. 

• A person discovers a secret power hidden in Lorem ipsum text. 

• Every morning at dawn, you hear a strange sound. You discover the sun is crying. 

• Your local butcher comes to you with a strange plea for help. 

• A family goes to bury a time capsule. When digging, they find another capsule has already been buried in that very spot. 

• What if karma was instant?

• Numbers are stolen from the world.