Archive for the ‘Creating’ Category

So NYCMidnight.com is holding a contest for writers to craft Twitter-sized stories of 140 characters or less, which must include a supplied word.

So all of the entrants were split into 20 groups, with a different word for each group, and we all wrote (my word was "heaven").

So the first round now has been judged, and the best 15 stories of each group have been chosen, and now everyone gets to vote on their favorites out of each group.

And of the 15 chosen in my group, 2 of them are mine.

And now it's time for you to vote. I'd appreciate it if you voted for mine (although there are some excellent competitors there). You can even vote for both of mine, if you've a mind to.

Go to the first round page and click on Group 1. Mine are the top two stories in the list, the ones by Chris Bridges. Vote!

Voting goes on till next Monday night. The writers of the 5 top stories of each group will go on to the finals, and I'd sure like to be there. I hear it's nice. Thanks!

The first round of the "Tweet me a Story" writing contest from NYCmidnight was last night. Entrants were assigned a word at 7 p.m. and had 5 hours to come up with up to 3 stories, under 140 characters each, including that word in proper usage.

My group got the word "HEAVEN." Here's what I submitted (titles added for fun afterward, not included in submission):

SUBMISSION #1: "Watching the Fur Fly""

"I don't think 'All Dogs Go to Heaven' was a suggestion, Bill."
"Just keep feeding me cartridges," Bill said. "This is gonna take a while."

SUBMISSION #2: "Sacrificial Yammering"

"What do you mean I can't come in," he said. "I gave up everything to get to heaven."
"Exactly," said St. Peter. "You're too boring now."

SUBMISSION #3: "Afterlife Is a Bitch, and Then You're Dead"

Listen: Sometimes Heaven and Hell swap, as a lesson to the saved and damned souls alike.
Where will you go if you die tonight? Depends…

Granted, they're more like scenes than actual beginning-middle-resolution stories, but those are a pain to cram into a tiny box.

On June 1st, 15 winning stories from each group get posted for online voting, and the winners progress to round two. I expect slavish, devoted voting for me from all of you.

That… was an excellent movie.

I'm about to go into detail, so don't read on if you're avoiding spoilers. Lots of them.

Read the rest of this entry »

Missed this when it came out, but some time back the folks at the SAMBA blog decided to see how tough it was to come up with new ideas for products or businesses, and offered them free to anyone who wants them. It's worth skimming through just for the laughs or the "huh, why hasn't somebody…" realizations. Some of the suggestions already exist in one form or another (which could be why one suggestion is for a service to tell you if your idea has been done; I smell some desperation there) but some are just inspired.

A church-issued credit card that automatically deducts your tithe? Movie theaters that display televised sports events on a 70-foot screen? A cellphone with a USB memory stick built in? In-grocery-store food prep that would chop your veggies while you shop? The notion of creating a portable drive-in theater with two semis (one to be the screen, the other to be ticket sales and concession) to go around showing independent movies appeals to me. And I would go for this one: "Rent a llama or goat to eat your front yard."

A few display the thinker's personal pet peeves, such as "A self cleaning microphone that never smells like breath or beer." At least one contributor seems fascinated by the concept of having your stuff — cell phones, TVs, computers — smashed and returned to you as art, although I can't tell if it's from a love of art or hatred of electronics. Many of them are just suggestions for services that the suggester wants, like public nap stations and professional obituary writing and people to deliver the single 3/8" nut you need for your repair job to your house. And some are just silly, such as "A place where you can go and pop bubble wrap. Possibly a bar of some sort."

Of course, now that I said that someone will open a chain of "Popper's" restaurants and make a fortune.

Some suggestions are illustrative of how the social interactions of the Web have changed how we think of things, such as the one that suggest a Web site that, for every product you buy, ships a mystery product to a friend for the cost of shipping and handling. Improve the economy and bewilder your friends! Win!

And some are just wrong, such as Nicocream, the nicotine ice cream. "Comfort food that helps you quit smoking (or addicts you to ice cream)."

But this one? "An application that you have your friends fill out that will compare against your answers and give you a compatibility score. In addition, tips about their personality." Totally exists. It's called "Facebook."

Next time you get a free hour or five, check out "Hamster Burial Kits & 998 Other Business Ideas" from SAMBA. If ideas are a dime a dozen, here's $8.35 worth to get you started.

It's National Kazoo Day!

Please plan your activities accordingly, especially if you're planning anything formal tonight. Remember, kazoos fit nicely into even the smallest purse or tux pocket, and nothing finishes off a romantic evening better (or more completely) than a kazoo.

This is also as good a time as any to mention the movement at kazooamerica.org to make the kazoo America's National Instrument. This plucky music maker is an ideal choice for our national musical mascot. After all, it's so democratic: anyone can play a kazoo successfully (for a given definition of "successfully").

The movement has already made great strides with appearances on Late Night with Conan O'Brien, Fox and Friends, CBS Sunday Morning News, Martha Stewart, and has won approval from bemused and often bewildered politicians across the country.

So join the hordes of buzzing musicians and help us fight to honor this lowly instrumentby raising it to the level of national recognition. Wouldn't you love to see President Obama playing the kazoo, possibly leading Congress into a rousing rendition of "America the Beautiful"? Some days, I can think of little else.

Sure, you want to send your Facebook buddies a beer or a bouquet or a box of chocolates or a plant or a pet or any of a zillion other virtual items available through the many Facebook gift-giving apps, but who can afford them?

Times are tough, and even free gifts might be too a little too much for your strained budget. Fortunately, I can help.

Depression Gifts allows you to send economy-appropriate presents to your friends. Pencils, apples, sticks, and more easy-to-afford items are available, with more coming. Your friends will appreciate the thought and your wallet will appreciate the break.

Depression Gifts. Available wherever lots of sad-looking people stand in line, in black and white.

Want to read some quick fiction?

It doesn't get quicker than what you'll find at Thaumatrope , the first zine I've seen published through Twitter.  I'm assuming you know what Twitter is, of course.  Social text messaging service where messages are limited to a dumbphone's text message limit of 140 characters.

And yes, you can deliver complete stories in that amazingly limited amount of space. Earnest Hemingway once famously wrote one in six words: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” And Wired asked lots of writers for their six-word creations last year. It can be done, and it's a cool idea.

Thaumatrope bills itself as "a magazine for Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror fiction".  So far it features reviews of books and games, intensely short fiction, ongoing tweets from the future, and even an interview with author John Scalzi ("Why?" "There is no why. Causality is for amateurs.") And the part that amuses the hell out of me is this: they pay for fiction. 5 cents a word, average for the market. Actually they pay a flat $1.20 per accepted story.

I love stuff like this. If you recall I made the cover of The Writer for their feature on shortingly-short fiction. It's challenging and fun and maddening. So you'll be seeing my tiny byline there a few times over the next year, until they make me stop.

I hope. Setting up Twitter Tool is getting me a daily digest of my tweets posted here, which I wanted, but alao generating another tweet about my digest of tweets to Twitter, which i didn't want as that's just getting silly. Settings say not to do that; it's doing it anyway. Time to hack.

Twitter also about to play a larger role (but not much) in my job as I begin sending tweets for breaking news, polls, quick hit news blurbs, and other stuff to my paper's account, @dbnewsjournal . Had a lot of fun explaining (along with the younger reporters who already Twitter) to management what, exactly, Twitter is and what it's for and how it could possibly help our traffic. Hey, all the cool kids are doing it…

So now I get to search for the elusive balance between promotional tool and actual useful I-want-to-follow-this Twitter account for my job, which I'm actually kinda looking forward to. What makes a useful Twitter feed if it's not one of your friends or a celebrity you want to casually stalk?

The latest in the hot and highly profitable line of pre-teen supernatural fantasy romance books, "Lightning" tells the story of a young and tragically misunderstood girl with low self-esteem, new to the area and the school, who falls in love with the one mythological being of horror she shouldn't. Author Lyzabeth Mary Sue Powers wrote "Lightning" in segments for herself on her LiveJournal page over the summer of 2008, and was gratified to see such widespread appreciation from her bank account.

Read the first chapter!

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"Lightning" by Lizabeth Powers

Chapter One:

I approached my new school with trepidation borne from past experience. No point in trying to fit in, as my alabaster hair and waifish looks automatically kept me from fitting in to any of the established cliques. My stylish clothes wouldn't fit in here, nor would my professional hair style or my curiously clear teenage skin. I didn't know what the kids at this school would be like, but as my own interests included reading books and brooding I was sure we'd have nothing at all in common.

My mom was oblivious to my concerns, as usual, even though I had provided her with a cross-referenced list (with footnotes), and she kept jabbering on about how we'd make a new life here and how she was sure the new meds would do the trick. I fairly leapt from the car. Around me crowds of teenagers were swarming toward the school. They all knew each other from birth, obviously, and I could see several of them glancing at me. Suddenly I was even more aware of my hideous appearance. I held my books up flat in front of my face and walked on, accepting the occasional fall or brick wall collision as fair payment for my anonymity.

The first few classes were a nightmare. All of the boys – and a few of the girls – kept staring at me the whole time with hungry expressions. Were they so eager to start making fun of me? Six different guys, two girls, and one teacher asked me out for that weekend but I knew they were mocking me so I simply fled. Read the rest of this entry »

Back to funny fantasy. Since I had just gotten into collecting autographs myself, it seemed like a natural thing to give my protagonist my obsession. He was also a sniveling, selfish jerk, but obviously that part was all made up. Ahem. Attempting to liven up his life a little, he clicked on a joke eBay auction only to find it wasn't a joke.

It wasn't a novel, either, but it may be someday. Didn't hit 50k this year, either. I'm slipping. Note the Hiatus references…

The Highest Bidder
by C. A. Bridges

Chapter One – Cons and Pros and Cons

Bought: Kevin Sutton (2); Mark Goddard (1); Erin Gray (2); Playboy Playmate Miss November 2008 Grace Kim (1); George Lowe, voice of Space Ghost (1)

Morton would never have bought the souls in the first place if it hadn't been for the girl with the Captain Crunch box.

As far as Morton Sezlick was concerned, science fiction conventions existed for one reason and one reason only: commerce. You went, you sold, you bought, you moved on. There was a great deal of money to be made if you knew what you were doing, which he did, which was why every minute stuck in this half-mile autograph line that was not moving was driving him crazy with the lingering scent of lost revenue. Almost as maddening as the way the thousands of people currently crowding his space just went around mindlessly having fun all the time in their elaborate costumes of Jedis and Klingons and Browncoats and whatever the hell those big square brown things were with all the teeth. How could anyone enjoy this if they weren't paid to do so?

Despite the best efforts of dedicated fans, convention halls simply were not conducive to the creation of magical science-fantasy worlds. From where Morton stood he could see sad-looking paper-mache emulations of planets and rocket ships, a Mark I Viper made of slightly sagging cardboard, lots of poly-vinyl banners strung from the ceiling, and rows and rows of PVC-and-blue-cloth dividers divvying up the dealers' tables and artist alley booths. It might have helped if the con people could have controlled the environment and only let you you see what they wanted you to see, like a JayCees' haunted house or something, but none of the decorations rose higher than about 10 feet and above that the bland, institutional yellow of the walls stretched for another 20 more before the ductwork and pipes of the ceiling added the capping, fantasy-killing touch. Guests of the con, actors from popular science fiction shows and movies both past and present – the only reason to show up, as far as Morton was concerned – sat against a wall behind a long row of folding tables that were covered in butcher paper so the fans couldn't see the stars' impatient foot-tapping, stashed alcohol, missing underwear, or hidden Blackberrying. Behind each star was a piece of posterboard with their name and credits, in case you weren't sure why you wanted to meet them or couldxn't quite remember where'd you'd seen their face before, especially if it had been covered in makeup and latex tentacles at the time. And you needed to be sure; autograph lines of hundreds of people stretched and curved across the floor, doubling back on themselves to create some sort of intricate, organically changing knot that was broken and reformed repeatedly every time someone dressed as General Grievous or an eight-foot Pac-Man needed to come through. Read the rest of this entry »