Running After My Hat

Ridiculous pursuits, matters solemn and less so

Microfiction Post-Practice Obsession: Random Story Ideas

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[Image: screen shot of my little form for generating random story ideas from a database of over 46 million possibilities]

This past Friday night, at midnight, I got my first-round assignment in the 2020 NYC Midnight 100-Word Microfiction Challenge: a romance (aaaiiieeee…!), featuring roller skating in some way, and including some form of the word forget… to be written and submitted electronically by midnight Saturday. I did that, and so now the wait begins: Round 1 results will not be announced until the last week of June.

While this seems like a long wait to hear back about such a short bit of writing, the reason is obvious: they received over seven thousand six hundred entries. I don’t know the back-room details of the round’s judging; I do know they’ve probably got dozens of judges. Each judge will be assigned to assess the stories in one or more groups (a/k/a “heats”: entries sharing the same genre, action, and required word). I don’t yet know how many groups there might be, but I can tell you I’m in Group 66…

At this point in the cascade of numbers, the mindset of the former database guy kicks in and I start to wonder about all the data. Here’s what I can tell you so far, based on the list of first-round assignments:

  • Number of genres: 11
  • Number of actions: 80
  • Number of words: 80

Multiply all that out and you get 70,400 possible combinations. (That many possible assignments, divided by the number of entries, works out to just a little over 9 — i.e., most groups have nine entries, and the rest have ten.) Which is a lot of ideas, right?

Well, yes. But then of course we could also factor in that, for last week’s practice sessions, I already had a list of 50 randomly generated words, and a list of 37 “actions” brainstormed with a subset of Facebook friends. So, let’s see… 11 genres * 117 actions * 130 words… yikes: 167,310 story ideas!

So then I started to think about the NYC Midnight short-story challenge I entered a couple of years ago. The criteria were slightly different: a slightly different list of genres; almost 300 “subjects” (very similar to this contest’s “actions”); and almost 300 characters: a factory worker, a magician, a blind person, etc. Suppose…

To make a long story short, I rolled this year’s (Round 1) microfiction options together with the old list of characters to come up with a possible 4,182,750… plus the 11 genres… for a total of over 46 million story ideas.

Yes, I did consider including the previous list of “subjects” as what this year’s contest calls “actions.” But the numbers were already getting out of hand: I ran into hardware, software, and simple time obstacles which made it not worth carrying out. One of these days I’ll spend some time learning how to build and maintain databases online, and then those obstacles become more manageable.

So what could I do with all this data? Easy (well, as such things go): I could generate one or more random story ideas — and never again whine about not knowing where to start!

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Microfiction Practice #8: Design Flaw

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[Don’t know what this is? See this post for some background.]

Prompt #979:

  • Genre: science fiction
  • Word: ferry
  • Action: killing a spouse

Story (99 words, per Microsoft Word):

You could don the O’Tempora Timeshirt; then you could visit whenever you wanted. But once in a time, you couldn’t exit — not without help from someone at the admin console. Hence historian Rafe’s tragedy: after he’d left for his fourteenth attempt to witness John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry, his wife unplugged the admin console and headed over to eBay. “No Timeshirt available,” said her ad. “Works fine otherwise.” Rafe himself was wounded during the raid; the Timeshirt, discarded by a Union doctor, surfaced in a 21st-century archaeological dig, thus changing history’s course — certainly for O’Tempora, LLC.

All the Wisps of a Day

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[Image: “Ghostweed (#everydaybandw 868 / 2020-02-11),” by John E. Simpson; original in my SmugMug gallery. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH).]

From whiskey river (a few additional sentences included here):

Living like this means the year stops making sense, and the month and the week. The dates fall away from the days, like glass punched out of window frames, or ice cubes out of a tray into a sink, identical, dateless, nameless durational blobs, melting into an undifferentiated puddle. Is that a Saturday, a Friday, a Monday? Is that an April 13, or a November 2? Living like this means you don’t have a container anymore for the different days, can’t hold in a little twenty-four-hour-sized box set of events that constitute a unit, something you can compartmentalize, something with a beginning and an end, something to fill with a to-do list. Living like this means that it all runs together, a cold and bright December morning with your father or a lazy evening in late August, one of those sunsets that seem to take longer than is possible, where the sun just refuses to go down, where the hour seems to elongate to the point that it doesn’t seem like it can stretch any farther without detaching completely from the hour before it, like a piece of taffy, like under sea molten lava forming a new island, a piece of time detaching from the seafloor and floating up to the surface.

(Charles Yu [source])

…and:

Summer Solstice
(excerpt)

I am visiting my life with reckless plenitude.
The air is fragrant with tiny strawberries.
Fireflies turn on their electric wills:
an effulgence. Let me come back
whole, let me remember how to touch you
before it is too late.

(Stacie Cassarino [source])

…and:

One advantage in keeping a diary is that you become aware with reassuring clarity of the changes which you constantly suffer and which in a general way are naturally believed, surmised, and admitted by you, but which you’ll unconsciously deny when it comes to the point of gaining hope or peace from such an admission. In the diary you find proof that in situations which today would seem unbearable, you lived, looked around and wrote down observations, that this right hand moved then as it does today, when we may be wiser because we are able to look back upon our former condition, and for that very reason have got to admit the courage of our earlier striving in which we persisted even in sheer ignorance.

(Franz Kafka [source])

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Microfiction Practice #7: The Satisfactions of Cocktail Hour

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[Don’t know what this is? See this post for some background.]

Prompt #988:

  • Genre: action/adventure
  • Word: industrious
  • Action: painting the ceiling

Story (99 words, per Microsoft Word):

Clarkson was climbing the stepladder to paint the ceiling fan in his jungle shack. Suddenly two ragged soldiers from the local militia burst through the door, shouting manic threats, spraying bullets – but only at floor level. The ladder toppled, striking one unconscious. Clarkson fell, grabbed the ceiling fan — bloody damn ceiling hole! — and flung it in the other’s direction…

He hog-tied both, wrists to ankles, and finished his ceiling work: industriously repairing the new hole. Satisfied, he dragged the soldiers to his backyard, tied them to a tree, and awaited the arrival of sundown — and the cats.

Microfiction Practice #6: Melovi

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[Don’t know what this is? See this post for some background.]

Prompt #973:

  • Genre: fairy tale/fantasy
  • Word: bait
  • Action: facing a firing squad

Story (97 words, per Microsoft Word):

Of all his hive’s leprechauns, Melovi wasn’t the smartest: no ideas sprang unbidden from Melovi’s noggin. But he could certainly procure outcomes, by Og! Good, bad, indifferent: Things happened around Melovi!

But finally, gold’s fatal gleam… gold: leprechaun bait, a pretty fishhook on an invisible string… This time, a simple earring, on a deceptively unguarded tabletop. Melovi had but reached for it — and was stuck fast, epoxied in place.

He had told the human little. But he’d told the human enough. And now, his last sunrise: blindfolded, before six master archers. Things still happened around Melovi!

Microfiction Practice #5: Nara

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[Don’t know what this is? See this post for some background.]

Prompt #504:

  • Genre: comedy
  • Word: wide
  • Action: milking a yak

Story (100 words, per Microsoft Word):

A native Nepali, Sreva fascinated me; we began dating soon after meeting. Later, she invited me to her family’s Colorado yak ranch. Sreva’s father spoke no English, but led me to the barn one morning to meet the pride of their herd. “Nara,” he said, gesturing in the yak’s direction. He sat me on a stool beside Nara, handed me a pail, and mimed milking her.

I woke up in the hospital, my forehead hoofprint-dented; Sreva’s wide mouth barely restrained her laughter. “Dad’s joke,” she said: nara — not a name, as it happens — simply means male in Nepali.

Microfiction Practice #4: The Erasure

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[Don’t know what this is? See this post for some background.]

Prompt #312:

  • Genre: drama
  • Word: superficial
  • Action: mopping the floor

Story (99 words, per Microsoft Word):

The housekeeper, Mrs. Parker, obsessively ran a mop over the same foot-wide tile of the ward’s cafeteria floor: over, and over, and over. That mirrored spot gleamed with a sheen of strange, focused intimacy. Someone would have to stop her soon: visiting hours began at 2:00. Residents’ families wouldn’t object to a floor even only superficially clean — but they’d complain about Mrs. Parker’s mophead: dry, filthy, a handful of filthy socks. The spot recalled a face: a curve of gray-brown hair across the forehead, a blurry swoop of silver mustache, a teasing smile.

Mr. Parker had passed overnight.

Microfiction Practice #3: Mush!

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[Don’t know what this is? See this post for some background.]

Prompt #214:

  • Genre: romantic comedy
  • Word: action
  • Action: enlisting an ally

Story (100 words, per Microsoft Word):

Why had I hopped the dogsled in Iditarod? Dunno. I must’ve been (haha) barking mad; I was certainly freezing. Nor was I competing — they weren’t even my dogs for chrissake. But in the spirit of things, I shouted “Mush!” like you’re supposed to. Before the dogs could take off, though, there she stood: the Inuit woman in the seal-fur-lined parka. “Yes?” she asked, and seeing my confusion, added, “My name is Mush. And you?” The cops raced towards us — no avoiding them now. “My name,” I said, accepting my fate, “is now pretty much mud. Marry me, Mush?”

Microfiction Practice #2: Daina and Idris

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[Don’t know what this is? See this post for some background.]

Prompt #366:

  • Genre: romance
  • Word: price
  • Action: checking the files

Story (99 words, per Microsoft Word):

Daina was waiting to hear from a colleague, a specialist in immunosuppressants, for advice about her patient in 304B. She glanced across the counter. Whatever he sought in that file cabinet on the other side of the nurses’ station, Idris Marker’s long-fingered riffle of its folders shook her with a tremor something like anticipation. Her legs weakened; she dropped her pen just to excuse falling to her knees momentarily. When she pulled herself back up to counter level, his eyes sought hers. She realized, startled and suddenly, dangerously unprofessional: I will pay any price to see behind that mask.

Working in the Small

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[Image: “#everydaybandw 699 (2019-08-26),” by John E. Simpson; original in my SmugMug gallery. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]

I’ve never thought about my fiction in terms of its scale — its genre (if any), sure; its word count, of course (one must at least feign practicality, even if one seldom practices it)… But are my stories, y’know, sweeping? Am I a miniaturist, or do I paint with a big brush? And, for that matter, do any authors typically think of themselves in these terms? Or is it all just a critic’s shorthand for the endpoints of a continuum…?

A couple years ago, in my annual mid-June “Potpourri” post, I described a writing contest I’d been participating in that year. For that contest, whose three-round timeline sprawled across five or six months, entrants in each round had to compose a short story of N words or fewer, in a particular fictional genre (mystery, romance, etc.), on a given subject, and within a particular period of time. The maximum word counts and times-to-write were shared by everyone in a given round, and both went down as the contest went on: ranging from a maximum 2,500 words, written over eight days, for Round 1, to 1,500 words and 24 hours, for Round 3. Of the 4,000 entrants at the start, I placed sixth overall. This sufficiently swelled my self-regard that I entered the 2019 edition of the same contest… with a much more humbling outcome: I wiped out in the first round.

This year, I promised myself I wouldn’t get sucked in — a promise I kept… sort of.

Because, you see, I remain on the mailing list for the contest organizers, an outfit named NYC Midnight LLC. They’ve been running writing competitions since 2002 — short stories, screenplays, and so on, pretty much year round, contest after contest. And this year they added a variation which seems tailored to a quarantined-at-home-and-retired-to-boot writer’s context: a 100-hundred word microfiction contest.

I suspect the number of entrants for this one to be orders of magnitude larger; a hundred-word maximum, for aspiring writers who are confined at home all around the world, will most likely prove just too tempting a target to ignore.

Aside from the word-count ceiling, to meet the contest requirements each story must meet several other requirements, as I described the other day. Also as I explained then, I threw together a list of over 20,000 “prompts” to be used to practice with during the next week — I have vanishingly little experience “writing small” like this, and I want to be in something like (haha) shape for the first 24-hour round (which begins at 11:59 PM on May 8). (By contrast, my photography — as in this post’s cover image, above — very often drifts small-ward.)

Yesterday afternoon, I posted the first of those practice-session results. Today, and on subsequent days between now and then, I hope to post a new practice micro-story sometime in mid-afternoon. Maybe by Friday it will feel like a ho-hum challenge.

(And for the curious: today’s prompt is: romance genre (crap…!); required word “price”; required action “searching the files.”)

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