Category: Connections

I’m stealing the idea of the photo-caption story.

July 1, 2005 /

I found Roy Peter Clark’s Fifty Writing Tools via Leonard’s del.icio.us, originally, and had them recommended to me again by Catherine Frostflake. I’ve been reading and digesting a few every day, and today I hit Polish Your Jewels, which reads like a manifesto for microfiction:

“The shorter the story form, the more precious is each word…

My friend Peter Meinke, a brilliant poet, taught me that short writing forms have three peculiar strengths. Their brevity can give them a focused power; it creates opportunity for wit; and it inspires the writer to polish, to reveal the luster of the language.”

All of the essays (so far) are solid, interesting, unpretentious and broadly applicable.

I’ve been thinking for a while of putting together a similar set of microfiction-writing tools, to be released around the time we hit anacrusis #500 (August 16). I’m not a pro like Mr. Clark, so this would involve some significant hubris, which is why I started mocking myself for the idea with Story Hacks. After a while I realized that all the useful word-cutting advice I’ve got could be applied to itself, which leaves me with

  1. Contractions!
  2. Cut out the first paragraph.
    • And probably the second.

June 30, 2005 /

Should I even talk about Six Feet Under? It’s one of those things where I’ve known forever that it would be great, and everybody in the world got into it and said it was great, and then two years later I finally watch it and guess what! There is no indie cred in late adoption.

Six Feet Under is incredible.

June 27, 2005 /

Grokster comes down tomorrow morning. Today morning, actually.

Not that this is the end any which way. But there are a whole lot of breaths holding, tonight, out here in the electric dark.

June 24, 2005 /

Wow, Henry McEuen exists!

Henry McEuen never wore shoes, at least in college. The year after he graduated, I noticed that all the other departmental awards were named for somebody, and suggested that we change our own from the Computer Science Prize to the Henry McEuen Memorial Bonanza. And he wasn’t dead.

Then I won the prize that year, which was kind of weird, but enabled me to at least give that name to my own copy of it (which was pretty much just a check, I think).

June 21, 2005 /

This was too good to leave to the mercies of Livejournal’s feed-comment expiration. It’s derived, by Will, from Jax.

Nina’s talk with the old Japanese man is quick, quiet and furious, but when they’re done they both look happy.

“Essence of what?” asks Jax, back on the street.

“Goth,” Nina giggles, and sprinkles a few drops from the bottle on her shirt. It turns black as pitch.

Jax is awed. “Let me try!” He sprinkles his arms, sprouting shredded fishnet arm-stockings. He tries his shirt and it turns dried blood red.

“You don’t need much–” Nina says, but Jax is drinking it, now. His face pales considerably.

“lets write about this on our livejournals,” Jax whispers. Nina shrugs assent.