Microfiction Practice #11: Surprise Party

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Assignment:

  • Genre: ghost story
  • Word: appointment
  • Action/Subject: baking a cake

Story (99 words, per Microsoft Word):

Marcella lays out the ingredients she thinks Bobby’s cake requires. It’ll be tricky: she’s “measuring” from memory, because Bobby — bless his jump-the-gun soul — has already discarded her recipe files, and the only remaining cookbook requires a Foreman grill. Luckily, she knows Bobby will be late (a podiatrist appointment on his way home).

Bobby’s astonished when he comes in, changes out of his black suit, enters the kitchen. The big word on top reads BIRTHDY, and the countertop’s a mess. But what the— who made the damned cake? Who the hell was cremated this morning, if not Marcella?

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Microfiction Practice #10: The Follow-Through

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[Don’t know what this is? See this post for the most recent background.]

Prompt:

  • Genre: suspense/thriller
  • Word: promise
  • Action/Subject: walking upstairs

Story (99 words, per Microsoft Word):

No elevator: naturally. From the bottom of the stairwell, he looked up the six-floor stairwell, sighed. Hand on the railing. His right foot on the first step. His left foot on the second…

Too late, he knew. She’d probably been dead for weeks; such victims seldom lived more than a couple days. Yet he had to check. He’d promised, after all…

At the fifth-floor landing, he briefly lost his nerve. Who knew what he’d find inside? He should’ve called the cops—

There, finally. The doorknob, beneath his hand. Then his last irrational act: placing his face to the peephole.

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Microfiction Practice #9: The Old Ball and Chain

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[Don’t know what this is? See this post for the most recent background.]

Prompt #570:

  • Genre: comedy
  • Word: stir
  • Action: yanking my chain

Story (87 words, per Microsoft Word):

Lucille could always get my goat. “Don’t do it that way,” she’d say. “Do it this way” — the it, that, and this always changed, of course. Sometimes my wardrobe, or the way I drove, or what I ate. But what never changed: really, she was just yanking my chain. Trying, hell — she did yank my chain. Until the day she stopped, abruptly.

Still, a hell of a woman Lucille. I’ll miss her until I get out of stir, which by my count will be sometime this century.

(Okay, I know: it’s dark comedy. I don’t think that breaks any rules.)

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Revisiting the Tiny

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A simple placeholder announcement for now… You may recall that last month, I entered a “100-word Microfiction Challenge.” (If you have no idea what this refers to, I first posted about it here; the, er, post-mortem post — as of the first round’s completion — is here.) That contest’s organizers will announce the results of the first-round judging process on Wednesday, June 24. The top 20 (of no more than 100) participants in each group* will advance to the second round; this runs from 11:59 p.m. Friday, June 26, to 11:59 the next night.

…all of which is to say: I hope to occasionally post a new practice story here at Running After My Hat over the next three weeks. Sadly, I can’t promise that this will be to your benefit; odds are, after all, you won’t even get to experience vicariously the thrill (such as it is) of my advancing to Round 2. And as you already know from last month’s eight practice samples, the quality of the stories themselves will be uneven. No, these practice sessions are mostly for me: to force me into something like the mindset required to “write short,” on random assignments of no more than 100 words each.

I drew my first one of these practice assignments last night:

  • Genre: comedy
  • Word: stir
  • Action: yanking my chain

…and so I’ll post a micro-story sometime today.

Thank you for continuing to indulge me!

_____

* For the record, I was in group 66, consisting of 95 participants. (All but eight groups included 95 entrants; those eight had 96.) My group’s assignment was to write a 100-word (or shorter) story in the romance genre, featuring some form of the word forget, and involving the act of roller skating. I’ll post I’ve posted the story in an entry here after the first-round results are announced, regardless of whether or not I’ll be going onto Round 2.

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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.

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Official 2010 Write Your A** Off Day (Pt 2)

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I mentioned a “contest” of sorts in my post the other day about the New York Writers Coalition’s June 12 event: write 3,000 words on that one day, they said, and you could enter a drawing. Winner of the drawing would receive a free consultation with author Jennifer Belle. But I added:

…other than this email [from a NYWC publicist], I haven’t seen any official confirmation of this 3K-word challenge — like details about how the drawing will work — particularly for out-of-town writers. I’ll see if I can learn more.

Now I’ve got some of those details (thanks, Adaeze!):

  • First, sign up for the online “write-a-thon” here. You have to register, but it’s free.

Note: New registrations do not take effect automatically, but are human-moderated. This means you should expect a time lag before being able to do much of anything at the site. Do not wait until June 12 to register!

  • On June 12th, they’ll use the honor system. (My correspondent says, “We’re relying on them to be honest with themselves” — and I’ll wag my own index finger in your direction on this point. I mean, come on: it’s not like they’re requiring 3,000 tightly written words, right?)
  • When you’ve met the basic word-count requirement, you’ll post a comment on a write-a-thon thread they’ll open at the site.
  • At the end of the day, they’ll close the comment thread and draw a winner, announcing it at the site.
  • And then, finally, they’ll provide details to the winner about the logistics of claiming his/her consultation with Jennifer Belle.

If I learn anything else about the rules, or The Day itself, or Jennifer Belle, or… oh, hell: if I learn anything else about anything vaguely relevant, I’ll post the information here at RAMH. In the meantime, if you feel ready to take the challenge, hie thee to the NYWC discussion board and sign up.

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Ultra-Short Story Competition

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Can you write a ghost story in no more than 124 characters?

Stuart Neville, author of The Twelve (which I reviewed on The Book Book the other day), is running a little contest. The occasion? That book’s publication tomorrow in the US, called here The Ghosts of Belfast. Following is a brief description of the rules/guidelines (for more information see Neville’s Web site):

  • Compose a ghost story no more than 124 characters in length.
  • By midnight, October 31, Post it in a Twitter tweet, with the hashtag #GhostsOfBelfast.
  • Sit back and wait for the adulation and/or prizes to roll in.

All right, it’s not that simple.

For starters, obviously, if you have no Twitter account you are (as the rude abbreviation says) S.O.L. If you’re in that position, you have one, maybe two options:

  1. Enter it as a comment to this post here on RAMH. I’ll tweet it for you. Since I’ve reviewed his book, I hereby disqualify myself from winning. Should your entry be a winner, I’ll put you and Neville in touch with each other. The drawback to this option: anyone on Twitter who’s following the hashtag will think I wrote your ultra-short, although they’ll know better by the time the contest is over.
  2. Neville says in his guidelines (emphasis added): “Each of those [winning] tweets will be re-tweeted by me and the good folks at Soho Press (or linked to a special page on my website if they’re too long).” This implies to me that he’s willing to consider stories which exceed Twitter’s maximum tweet length. The drawback to this option: you’ll have to figure it out on your own and/or wait for Neville to clarify. Or not. :)
    Update: On reflection… no, he’s not saying the entries can be longer than a tweet’s allowed to be. He’s saying that when he and Soho Press re-tweet the winning entries, they’ll probably be longer than a tweet may be because of extra text which Twitter adds to a re-tweet. (And no, I can’t believe adults actually talk like this.) So you’re stuck: either use Twitter to get credit for the story, or use me to front for you. It’s gotta be Twitter.

As I said above, I myself am not actually entering the contest. But here’s an example of what an entry might look like:

Old guy at the bar glares at you, at anyone who dares to sit nearby. Don’t take it personally; he’s been there since 1843. #GhostsOfBelfast

[Hat tip to Moonrat.]

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