NYC Midnight – Page 2

Microfiction Practice #5: Nara

May 5, 2020 by John Leave a Comment

[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

May 4, 2020 by John Leave a Comment

[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!

May 3, 2020 by John Leave a Comment

[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

May 2, 2020 by John Leave a Comment

[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.

Microfiction Practice #1: Witmers and Sheila

May 1, 2020 by John Leave a Comment

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

Prompt #211:

Genre: action/adventure
Word: quixotic
Action: balancing the books

Story (98 words, per Microsoft Word):

Sheila’s quixotic pet project – planting an Earth Day flag in the rain forest – had surely been doomed from the start. Her accountant Witmers had said so on Day 1, repeated it on Day 2 and all the other days. Sheila didn’t care. “Just get us the money,” she said. Witmers got them the money, yes. But did he really have to grasp the expenses with such a tight fist? Could he not have reconsidered the truly fatal decision: helicoptering them in, but trusting the guides to get them out – the damned bargain-basement Sherpa guides in their Everest off-season?

A New Writing Challenge

April 30, 2020 by John 2 Comments

Details forthcoming, probably in a real post on Saturday. For now, though: I’ve entered a fiction-writing contest, the first round of which will take place next week. Stories to be submitted to the contest in each round will have to follow these rules:

be of a fictional genre randomly assigned to each entrant by the contest organizers, from among this list: Action/Adventure; Comedy; Drama; Fairy Tale/Fantasy; Ghost Story; Historical Fiction; Horror; Romance; Romantic Comedy; Sci-Fi; and Suspense/Thriller.
include a word randomly assigned by the organizers;
include an action randomly assigned by the organizers (this apparently will be loosely of the [verb]ing a/an/the [noun] format, à la the old Mad Libs game); and
be no more than 100 words long.; and
take no longer than 24 hours to write.

It is, in short (ha!), a microfiction-writing contest.

With the assistance of several Facebook contacts, I’ve come up with a list of 37 “actions.” I also used a random-noun generator page I found on the Web to give me a list of 50 nouns. Putting this together with the 11 possible genres, this yielded a total of over 20,000 possible combinations. I then ran a little program to randomly select 1,000 from among all these possibilities, and you can find that list here (in the form of an Excel spreadsheet).

Of course the contest organizers will have their own lists of random words and actions — lists which they will not publish in advance — so this isn’t a real test. Nonetheless, I hope to practice for the first round, at least: every day, starting tomorrow, I’ll pull a randomly selected combination of those three main constraints from the list of 1,000 randomly selected possibilities. And I’ll write a 100-word “microfiction” based on it. And of course, I’ll post that little story here, together with the prompt which led to it.

(I will not post here the actual contest entries I may come up with, lest I run afoul of some little micro-rule or other designed to guarantee the contest rights to first “publication.”)

We’ll see how this goes. Things being what they are, here and everywhere else right now, I may well opt to continue the experiment through the rest of May.

In the meantime, expect my first practice story by tomorrow afternoon sometime. I anticipate no applause.

Potpourri, June 18th (2018 edition)

June 18, 2018 by John 1 Comment

[Above: I have had this track playing incessantly in my head for the last couple of weeks… maybe by posting it here I’ll free myself of it, at least for now. The performance is not a particularly famous one to those who haven’t heard it; it came at the tail end of a suite of songs, a sort of “history of jazz” which Goodman et. al. performed that night (particularly for the sake of those unfamiliar with the sound of jazz in such a venue). Billed as a “jam session,” although they’d rehearsed it earlier in the week, it worked out more or less to earn the billing. A series of foreground soloists (some from Count Basie’s and Duke Ellington’s bands as well as Goodman’s) take turns improvising against one another’s themes — all over Gene Krupa’s driven backbeat. Harry James’s trumpet, it seems to me, kind of owns the thing.]

...and so the prequel to the Main Event comes to a

Follow the #jesstorypix link in my profile's Linkt

Another year gone by… time for my annual brain dump on no particular theme, for no particular reason other than because I can… It occurs to me now that — except for the word “annual” — that pretty much describes how I started blogging at Running After My Hat in the first place, haha.

—

Over there at the right, we have evidence of one highlight of my past year: the two most recent posts from my Instagram feed, most recent one first. And yes, I really mean two most recent: every few hours, the feed as displayed here will be refreshed — the one at the right will be replaced by the one to its left, and a different “most recent” one will shown up in the primo spot. (Obviously, or maybe not, if I haven’t posted anything new on Instagram in the interval, the “refreshment” will have no obvious effect.)

[Read more…]