Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Monthly Archives: October 2008
Time to vote for your favorite 75er!
Entries are here.
Folks who are eligible to vote: microsoar, tambo, Pat J, Graham Powell, Chris, Dean, and Shaina.
Email me your vote: azureus at harborside dot com.
Indicate your choice for first, second, and third place. Vote for the story, not for the author — thus, there will be a tambo1, a tambo2, and a tambo3.
Once all votes are in, I’ll tally the score and announce the winner.
Questions?
D.
PS: oh, and I’ll try to send off emails prompting y’all to vote. Later.
Last call for your freedom of speech
Bonus points to the first person who recognizes the title of this post . . . no fair googling.
This is the last call for the 75er Contest. Needless to say, I’ve been lazy and I haven’t checked to see if each and every story is 75 words. You’re all on the honor system.
This time tomorrow, I’ll close the contest and begin soliciting votes. Hope y’all have had as much fun with it as I have!
***
We voted today. Check your counties, folks, because many of ’em offer early voting, and this year the lines will be tremendous. You think turnout was crazy in ’06? You ain’t seen nothing yet.
D.
The Pee Post
A probing, prodigiously particularized post penned by your perennially puerile protagonist, um . . . Pwalnut.
This idea came to me in the wee hours of the morning. If my muse has found a topic which interests her, I’m not about to argue, even if the inspiration was painfully obvious.
Before we proceed, I have one administrative detail for you. Yes, the contest is still open. Scroll down, check it out. It’s fun! It’s easy! How can you not participate?
Onward to the Pee Thirteen . . .
The 75er Entry Thread
Post your 75-word stories in reply to this post, folks.
Have fun. Try not to bloody each other’s noses . . . we’re all friends here.
D.
*CONTEST* Dean’s and Dan’s Fiction Challenge *CONTEST*
Dean and Dan planted the idea; and then I remembered the 69er and thought, why not do something similar?
So let’s split the difference between 50 and 100 and make it a 75er.
The prize:
. . . a $20 gift certificate to the online gift certificate-giver of your choice. Yes, $75 would be more appropriate. Yes, I’m too cheap right now to offer a $75 prize. Deal with it 😉 Look at it this way: the vast majority of ezines offer a good deal less than $20 as payment for much longer stories. On a per-word basis, you’re doing pretty damn well.
The rules:
* The story has to be EXACTLY 75 words. I’ll be using Microsoft Word to do the word count, and if you’re over or under, I’ll give you a chance to edit.
* We’ll let this one run until interest peters out.
* We’ll judge it by the old Writers BBS system. Once I close for entries, I’ll ask each of you to vote for the first, second, and third place winners NOT including your own entry. You don’t get to vote for yourself, in other words. I’ll ask you to email me with your vote so that we can avoid the whole ugly voting thread scene (you Writers BBS veterans will remember what I mean).
* You have to play to vote.
* Multiple entries are fine. When folks vote, though, they’ll be voting for a story, not for a writer.
*Post your QUESTIONS in response to this announcement. Tomorrow, I’ll post a submissions thread. Save your stories until then. (Because I know some of y’all could whip one out tonight.)
Oh . . . here’s the best I could do for a one-sentence story:
Rick and Tina had fun with their new kitten the night before, although it was hell getting cat fur off Tina’s negligee.
Told you my muse was on holiday . . .
D.
The art of the micro
My home-schooled son only ever has one question for me: “Are you going to make me write tomorrow?” The kid has a major phobia. The annoying thing is, he’s good at it. He has my talent, I think, but he doesn’t have my love of writing.
Not that I love writing much lately. Remember that Twilight Zone episode where the comedian gets his wish to be funny, not realizing it’s a pain when folks laugh at everything he says? I feel like I’m living in the mirror image universe. Nothing I write is funny anymore.
(I’m not striking out completely, though. My audiologist showed her husband my spaghetti string camisole video. She says they were both cracking up over it, and for the rest of the day, one or the other of them would say, “I’m speaking Japanese!” and they’d start laughing again. Hmmm. Maybe I should go find more videos to poke fun at.)
Back to writing. I want to break my son’s aversion. It occurred to me that he might enjoy constructing one sentence stories; since I thought he’d appreciate examples, I googled “one sentence story,” and found — duh! — One Sentence Stories.
Seems like the highest rated stories are the jokes (When I asked my son how hitting his brother in the eye could be “an accident,” he replied, “I was trying to hit him in the nose.”) which, in my opinion, isn’t fair. These are supposed to be STORIES, not JOKES. Better was youloveme’s “Friends don’t give friends seven orgasms.” That really does speak volumes. Not that I expect my son to come up with something like that.
I wonder if I could manage a one-sentence story. (Exactly how dry is my muse?) The key, I think, is to have a much bigger story in mind, and then distill it to its essence.
I’m going to sleep on it.
D.
A belated apology to Dan
In replying to this old post about spouses who need to grow a spine, dcr posted a link to this video, which is freaking hilarious.
I’m not sure why I was so dismissive in my comments. Perhaps I was turned off by this young lady’s commenters, many of whom are overwhelmed with hate — and who, like me, (at least temporarily) are lacking in a sense of humor.
Jake found this old post last night. (He thinks I’ll rehydrate my muse by reading some of my old & funny entries.) When I watched the video, I thought, What great satire! Then I looked back at my response to Dan and thought, Is that me? Was I really that clueless?
Apparently so. Well, Dan, here’s a belated apology. And thanks for the laugh last night.
D.
Fire!
We visited my sister-in-law and her family this weekend. They live in Kensington, a beautiful town in the hills above Berkeley overlooking San Francisco Bay. It’s a city of winding streets and dead ends, where locals whip around hairpin turns and visitors crawl at 10 mph. It’s a city where every home has a killer view.
Last night, this was the view.
Angel Island caught fire. We went out for dinner at 6:30 PM, got back by 8, and noticed the blaze soon thereafter. It was hard to miss. Initial news reports were laughable (ten acres? You call that ten acres?) The SFGate story seems much more credible (400 acres).
I’ve been to Angel Island. It was back in ’83, when my lab went on a picnic. We took a ferry there and explored the ruins. These days, Angel Island is primarily a campground (fortunately, all of the campers were evacuated without injury last night), but it has served in the past as a cattle ranch, quarantine facility, discharge depot for troops returning from the Spanish-American War, and Japanese/German POW camp during WWII. Briefly, the island hosted a Nike missile base.
By morning, firefighters had done their job and we needed binoculars to see the smoke. I drove down Grizzly Peak Blvd., something I had never done in all my years at Berkeley (not having any wheels might have had something to do with that). What spectacular views! The East Bay was an expanse of evergreens and homes leading out to the Bay; both bridges were in full view; the City’s skyline was crisp against a cloudless blue sky. Without binoculars, you couldn’t even tell there had been drama the night before.
D.
