Writing Excuses 10.1 - First Exercise

I'm following along with the Writing Excuses podcast's Season 10 Master Class series. Here's the exercise from the first episode.

This week’s writing exercise is:

Writing Prompt: Write down five different story ideas in 150 words or less. Generate these ideas from these five sources:

• From an interview or conversation you’ve had
• From research you’ve done (reading science news, military history, etc)
• From observation (go for a walk!)
• From a piece of media (watch a movie)
• From a piece of music (with or without lyrics)

1. An author decides to let off some steam in order to distract himself from an impending deadline and writes a terrible porn novella. On a whim, he releases it under a pseudonym, and it’s a surprise hit. The publisher (would this work if self-published?) demands more of him, resulting in pressure to punt his other deadlines in order to continue to produce terrible porn. Ending could go full O. Henry, with the author punting his porn deadline in order to finish the novel he was originally working on, or could go darker with some trope about art vs. Paying the bills.
2. In 1493, the author cites modern genetic research that indicates that the native lack of resistance to Western European diseases has a genetic component. What if a particularly gifted shaman discovered genetic manipulation via shamanic healing techniques, reversing Clarke’s Third Law (”Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.”)? The discovery could lead to, say, genetically altered berserker warriors (my alternate history project posits early, sustained contact with the Vikings, who melt into the indigenous population as they tended to in other areas where they colonized).
3. Do not drink from the sprinklers. Who does that? Thirsty runners, homeless people, aliens misunderstanding how water distribution works on this planet? What happens as a result? Superpowers? What if it’s a communication to someone, or something, cleverly disguised as a health and safety warning regarding potable water? What would it be communicating, and to whom? And what might happen to someone who inadvertently cracked the code?
4. After watching a lot of History Detectives and Discovering Your Roots, it’s interesting to see what kinds of stories can be written about objects and their provenance, and about familial relationships. A young woman discovers an object (to be determined) among her otherwise unsentimental mother’s belongings while sorting through them after her mother’s funeral. The object’s story winds up revising a lot of the stories that she had been told about her family history, leading to a disruption of her remaining familial relationships and/or a new relationship with a distant branch of the family whose story was unknown to her.
5. A young technomancer, working on a musical side project, downloads a file that’s supposed to be a set of samples, loops, and/or full tracks for remixing. It’s not - someone has leaked a file containing something entirely different (perhaps an encoded intelligence?), and soon the Black Hats come looking for whoever downloaded the file. HIjinks ensue, including a chase scene through an Itchy-O concert, before the technomancer finally figures out how to release the “djinn” from its digital “bottle”.