Genre Prompts 2019

Everyone gets the same prompt to work on this week, but with a twist. Everyone will get a different genre to work in.

Prompt: There’s an old man sitting in a rickety wooden chair, fishing through a hole in the ice on a frozen lake. A loud cracking sound reverberates across the lake’s surface, and he feels the ice shift beneath him. He scurries, but the hole expands too quickly, and he goes into the icy water. What happens next?

Regular-Ass Genres for Noobs:

  • Mystery – fiction dealing with the solution of a crime or the revealing of secrets
  • Science fiction – story based on the impact of actual, imagined, or potential science, often set in the future or on other planets
  • Fantasy – fiction in a unreal setting that often includes magic, magical creatures, or the supernatural
  • Realistic fiction – story that is true to life
  • Horror – fiction in which events evoke a feeling of dread and sometimes fear in both the characters and the reader

Extreme Genres for Cool People:

  • Classic– fiction that has become part of an accepted literary canon, widely taught in schools
  • Crime/detective– fiction about a crime, how the criminal gets caught, and the repercussions of the crime
  • Fable– legendary, supernatural tale demonstrating a useful truth
  • Fairy tale– story about fairies or other magical creatures
  • Folktale– the songs, stories, myths, and proverbs of a people or “folk” as handed down by word of mouth
  • Historical fiction– story with fictional characters and events in an historical setting
  • Humor– usually a fiction full of fun, fancy, and excitement, meant to entertain and sometimes cause intended laughter; but can be contained in all genres
  • Magical realism– story where magical or unreal elements play a natural part in an otherwise realistic environment
  • Meta fiction(also known as romantic irony in the context of Romantic works of literature) – uses self-reference to draw attention to itself as a work of art while exposing the “truth” of a story
  • Mythology– legend or traditional narrative, often based in part on historical events, that reveals human behavior and natural phenomena by its symbolism; often pertaining to the actions of the gods
  • Mythopoeia– fiction in which characters from religious mythology, traditional myths, folklore and/or history are recast into a re-imagined realm created by the author
  • Suspense/thriller– fiction about harm about to befall a person or group and the attempts made to evade the harm
  • Swashbuckler– story based on a time of pirates and ships and other related ideas, usually full of action
  • Tall tale– humorous story with blatant exaggerations, such as swaggering heroes who do the impossible with nonchalance
  • Western– fiction set in the American Old West frontier and typically in the late eighteenth to late nineteenth century

 

Indescribable Emotions

Our prompt from the meeting on September 21, 2018: Integrate these indescribable emotions into your story.

Prompt by: Amelia Burke

 

sonder: the realization that each passerby has a life as vivid and complex as your own.

opia: the ambiguous intensity of looking someone in the eye, which can feel simultaneously invasive and vulnerable.

monachopsis: the subtle but persistent feeling of being out of place.

énouement: the bittersweetness of having arrived in the future, seeing how things turn out, but not being able to tell your past self.

vellichor: the strange wistfulness of used bookshops.

rubatosis: the unsettling awareness of your own heartbeat.

kenopsia: the eerie, forlorn atmosphere of a place that is usually bustling with people but is now abandoned and quiet.

mauerbauertraurigkeit: the inexplicable urge to push people away, even close friends who you really like.

jouska: a hypothetical conversation that you compulsively play out in your head.

chrysalism: the amniotic tranquility of being indoors during a thunderstorm.

vemödalen: the frustration of photographic something amazing when thousands of identical photos already exist.

anecdoche: a conversation in which everyone is talking, but nobody is listening

ellipsism: a sadness that you’ll never be able to know how history will turn out.

kuebiko: a state of exhaustion inspired by acts of senseless violence.

lachesism: the desire to be struck by disaster – to survive a plane crash, or to lose everything in a fire.

exulansis: the tendency to give up trying to talk about an experience because people are unable to relate to it.

adronitis: frustration with how long it takes to get to know someone.

rückkehrunruhe: the feeling of returning home after an immersive trip only to find it fading rapidly from your awareness.

nodus tollens: the realization that the plot of your life doesn’t make sense to you anymore.

onism: the frustration of being stuck in just one body, that inhabits only one place at a time.

liberosis: the desire to care less about things.

altschmerz: weariness with the same old issues that you’ve always had – the same boring flaws and anxieties that you’ve been gnawing on for years.

occhiolism: the awareness of the smallness of your perspective.

Scenery: Set the stage and fill some time

Hey y’all

This week we’re focusing in on setting. Unless your story takes place in a void space (and even then now that I think about of it), you will need to describe your setting. So we’re starting the meeting by spending 5-10 minutes just focusing in on knitty-gritty details of your environment before we do anything with plot affecting actions, dialogue, or anything in the case of the story. We are merely describing the setting, whether or not this is actually a part of your story or just for your own benefit.

Things to keep in mind:

  • Time of day, weather, ground?, walls?, things in the space, cultural significance of the place, topography, etc.
  • Use your senses. Not just your eyes and your memory, what does it smell like? Feel like? What’s the air like? What does it taste like? Why are you licking the ground?
  • Why are you here? How did you get here? Is this a restricted place or an open space? Are there extra non-significant characters around, why? Are there none? Why?
  • What would your character notice? What would they probably not think about that is important for your readers to know about anyway?
  • In what order would your character notice these things? Is there something that enwraps their attention? Are they moving in this space?
  • Is there something about this space that you want to keep secret for a reveal? It’s best not to leave these things in the ether for a deus ex machina reveal.

Start the year off on a bad foot.

We started our stories with a bad line this week:

 

“Cheryl’s mind turned like the vanes of a wind-powered turbine, chopping her sparrow-like thoughts into bloody pieces that fell onto a growing pile of forgotten memories.”

“As the dark and mysterious stranger approached, Angela bit her lip anxiously, hoping with every nerve, cell, and fiber of her being that this would be the one man who would understand – who would take her away from all this – and who would not just squeeze her boob and make a loud honking noise, as all the others had.”

“The fairies of Minglewood, which is near Dingly Pool, were having a grand revel with flower-cakes, and butterfly dances, looking ever so pretty, while Queen Bellaflora swept her wand o’er the waterfall’s foam, making it pop like the snot-bubbles on your baby sister’s face.”

“Betty had eyes that said come here, lips that said kiss me, arms and torso that said hold me all night long, but the rest of her body said, “Fillet me, cover me in cornmeal, and fry me in peanut oil”; romance wasn’t easy for a mermaid.”

“On reflection, Angela perceived that her relationship with Tom had always been rocky, not quite a roller-coaster ride but more like when the toilet-paper roll gets a little squashed so it hangs crooked and every time you pull some off you can hear the rest going bumpity-bumpity in its holder until you go nuts and push it back into shape, a degree of annoyance that Angela had now almost attained.”

“It was such a beautiful night; the bright moonlight illuminated the sky, the thick clouds floated leisurely by just above the silhouette of tall, majestic trees, and I was viewing it all from the front row seat of the bullet hole in my car trunk.”

“As the sun dropped below the horizon, the safari guide confirmed the approaching cape buffaloes were herbivores, which calmed everyone in the group, except for Herb, of course.”

““Hmm …” thought Abigail as she gazed languidly from the veranda past the bright white patio to the cerulean sea beyond, where dolphins played and seagulls sang, where splashing surf sounded like the tintinnabulation of a thousand tiny bells, where great gray whales bellowed and the sunlight sparkled off the myriad of sequins on the flyfish’s bow ties, “time to get my meds checked.””

“He swaggered into the room (in which he was now the “smartest guy”) with a certain Wikipedic insouciance, and without skipping a beat made a beeline towards Dorothy, busting right through her knot of admirers, and she threw her arms around him and gave him a passionate though slightly tickly kiss, moaning softly, “Oooohh, Scarecrow!””

“On their first date he’d asked how much she thought Edgar Allan Poe’s toe nails would sell for on eBay, and on their second he paid for subway fair with nickels he fished out of a fountain, but he was otherwise charming and she thought that they could have a perfectly tolerable life together.”

“Like a mechanic who forgets to wipe his hands on a shop rag and then goes home, hugs his wife, and gets a grease stain on her favorite sweater – love touches you, and marks you forever.”

“Leopold looked up at the arrow piercing the skin of the dirigible with a sort of wondrous dismay – the wheezy shriek was just the sort of sound he always imagined a baby moose being beaten with a pair of accordions might make.”

“The professor looked down at his new young lover, who rested fitfully, lashed as she was with duct tape to the side of his stolen hovercraft, her head lolling gently in the breeze, and as they soared over the buildings of downtown St. Paul to his secret lair he mused that she was much like a sweet ripe juicy peach, except for her not being a fuzzy three-inch sphere produced by a tree with pink blossoms and that she had internal organs and could talk.”

“As she slowly drove up the long, winding driveway, Lady Alicia peeked out the window of her shiny blue Mercedes and spied Rodrigo the new gardener standing on a grassy mound with his long black hair flowing in the wind, his brown eyes piercing into her very soul, and his white shirt open to the waist, revealing his beautifully rippling muscular chest, and she thought to herself, “I must tell that lazy idiot to trim the hedges by the gate.””

“Gerald began – but was interrupted by a piercing whistle which cost him ten percent of his hearing permanently, as it did everyone else in a ten-mile radius of the eruption, not that it mattered much because for them “permanently” meant the next ten minutes or so until buried by searing lava or suffocated by choking ash – to pee.”

“Colin grabbed the switchgear and slammed the spritely Vauxhall Vixen into a lower gear as he screamed through the roundabout heading toward the familiar pink rowhouse in Puking-On-The-Wold, his mind filled with the image of his comely Olive, dressed in some lacy underthing, waiting on the couch with only a smile and a cucumber sandwich, hoping that his lunch hour would provide sufficient time for both a naughty little romp and a digestive biscuit.”

“He was a dark and stormy knight, and this excited Gwendolyn, but admittedly not as much as last night when he was Antonio Banderas in drag, or the night before that when he was a French Legionnaire who blindfolded her and fed her pommes frites from his kepi.”

“Corinne considered the colors (palest green, gray and lavender) and texture (downy as the finest velvet) and wondered, “How long have these cold cuts been in my refrigerator?””

“Chain-smoking as he stood in the amber glow of the street lamp, he gazed up at the brownstone wherein resided Bunny Morgan, and thought how like a bunny Bunny was, though he had read somewhere that rabbits were coprophages, which meant that they ate their own feces, which was really disgusting now that he thought about it, and nothing like Bunny, at least he hoped not, so on second thought Bunny wasn’t like a bunny after all, but she still was pretty hot.”

“When Mr Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday, his children packed his bags and drove him to Golden Pastures retirement complex just off Interstate 95.”

“Before they met, his heart was a frozen block of ice, scarred by the skate blades of broken relationships, then she came along and like a beautiful Zamboni flooded his heart with warmth, scraped away the ugly slushy bits, and dumped them in the empty parking lot of his soul.”

“As I gardened, gazing towards the autumnal sky, I longed to run my finger through the trail of mucus left by a single speckled slug – innocuously thrusting past my rhododendrons – and in feeling that warm slime, be swept back to planet Alderon, back into the tentacles of the alien who loved me.”

“Joe would have been perfect for her if he wasn’t the worst.”

“I never did like the word spoon.”

“He wondered if someone had cut the brake line, but when he placed his foot down, the car stopped.”

“’Why are you wearing that hat?’ she asked, which prompted me to think, “’Why am I wearing this hat?’”

“The elven city of Losstii faced towering sea cliffs and abutted rolling hills that in the summer were covered with blankets of flowers and in the winter were covered with blankets, because the elves wanted to keep the flowers warm and didn’t know much at all about gardening. ”

“Franco’s wife, seen smiling in all those photos with the same big hat on, was actually the brains behind the dictatorship, the concentration camps, torture, the brutal suppression, and so forth, but she was a shy lady, except when she dressed up in the binding closet for Franco, who listened a-quiver to hear what a very bad boy he’d been.”

“As Lewiston Creol plummeted down the sheer icy cliff he pondered on the word plummet, which quickly lost its meaning if you said it too much (plummet plummet plummet), but his pondering was interrupted by the surface of the water, at which point he ceased to plummet and began to plunge.”

“As he lay dying on the smoke-wreathed battlefield, General Winthrop finally realized the terrible toll the war had taken, and he wondered if the bloodshed had all been for naught as he exhaled his last breath in a sort of “meoooooh,” actually very similar to the sound his cat Mister Jingles made when he wanted some food or was doing that thing with the drapes.”

“Detective Sam Steel stood at the crime scene staring puzzled at the chalk outline of Ms. Mulgrave’s body which was really just a stick figure with a dress, curly hair, boobs, and a smiley face because the police chalk guy had the day off.”

“The warehouse was completely empty except for the mutilated corpse wearing a tuxedo covered with bloodstains, and a Mortimer Snerd dummy lying nearby on the floor, and Detective McIntosh knew Snerd wouldn’t talk.”

“As hard-boiled detective Max Baxter ate his soft-boiled egg, he thought about the gorgeous dame he’d found last night lying in a pool of her own blood—it being inconvenient to lie in a pool of someone else’s blood—and wondered how she liked her eggs.”

“As a scientist, Throckmorton knew that if he were ever to break wind in the echo chamber he would never hear the end of it.”

“With a curvaceous figure that Venus would have envied, a tanned, unblemished oval face framed with lustrous thick brown hair, deep azure-blue eyes fringed with long black lashes, perfect teeth that vied for competition, and a small straight nose, Marilee had a beauty that defied description.”

“Andre, a simple peasant, had only one thing on his mind as he crept along the east wall: “Andre creep … Andre creep … Andre creep.”

“Stanley looked quite bored and somewhat detached, but then penguins often do.”

“Like an overripe beefsteak tomato rimmed with cottage cheese, the corpulent remains of Santa Claus lay dead on the hotel floor.”

“Mike Hardware was the kind of private eye who didn’t know the meaning of the word “fear,” a man who could laugh in the face of danger and spit in the eye of death — in short, a moron with suicidal tendencies.”

“The sun oozed over the horizon, shoved aside darkness, crept along the green sward, and, with sickly fingers, pushed through the castle window, revealing the pillaged princess, hand at throat, crown asunder, gaping in frenzied horror at the sated, sodden amphibian lying beside her, disbelieving the magnitude of the frog’s deception, screaming madly, “You lied!”

“It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents, except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.”

End of the Fall Semester

Hey, y’all. Happy Finals week. We have made it through our first semester of the year, and my first semester as president and I am overjoyed by those of you who have shown interest in the club even if you can’t make it every week. I have quite frankly heard some amazing work come out of our meetings and I have even written some of it in between horribly embarrassing lines such as, but not limited to “‘Ella? Snowball?’ Locke leaned back against the wall. His sculpted, bronze arms were filled to the brim with crinkly chip bags and semi-squished, pre-packaged deserts.” Honestly I look forward to meetings every week.

As for house keeping items, I have to come up with the schedule for the next semester so if anybody has any suggestions for meeting’s please do email me. My email is at the bottom of all of my emails, so please be courteous and use a separate email. I would also like to do something for April Camp NaNoWriMo because I know a lot of people participate in that. I want to make a private cabin like we did over the summer for the club so when we get around to that I will begin making those preparations, but I would also like to throw some sort of event in person so if anyone has ideas… email me. Also Common Grounds, another club which I am partial to, would love to have organizations such as ours. If there’s interest we could host a storytelling event or poetry reading. It wouldn’t even have to be your own work, if people would like to read short pieces that they love that would be fantastic as well.

Meetings will continue to be on Saturdays. I will continue to be ridiculous. And you will hopefully still be okay with that.

 

Please respond to this survey by next week for Club based activities:SURVEY

Personal Project Day (and more!)

Hey y’all. Just some updates about next week.

 

We are officially meeting at Common Grounds on Tuesdays for De-Stress Tuesdays from 8PM-10PM, if you don’t know where that is… look it up. This will be a chill, un-prompted event. All those attended are recommended to bring something to write with, moneys for snacks and milkshakes, and a calm quiet demeanor.

 

Our regular meeting will be on Saturday at 4PM in Kauke 141 (the door open to us will be the old main entrance under the arch), and we will be doing personal project day. Those attending are asked to bring a personal project to write or a printed copy of something short that they would like edited by other club members. We are suspending our usual quiet time for writing in order to allow discussion of pieces, so those choosing to write may want to bring HEADPHONES.

 

Anyway, see you there. I hope you are all having a lovely week.

Art Prompt Week!

Hey, y’all. This week we’re doing Art Prompts. If you can’t make it to our meeting, there’s a link to our art prompt presentation, and all of the art that I pick from is on our Tumblr (yes we have a Tumblr now), it’s updated daily (and there’s other prompts, writing advice, etc. there). I recommend selecting a number and seeing what’s on that slide to write on, but by all means take a look around and see what inspires you. We have examples of scenes, concepts, characters, and the like so remember inspiration doesn’t just come in the shape of story ideas. Prompts can help with characterization, concepts, setting, movement, etc.. I’m sorry if they’re mostly fantasy and sci-fi pictures (I write mostly fantasy so that’s what inspires me), but I tried to include a little of everything.

See you soon!

 

Worst First Line Prompt

Hey y’all today we had our second meeting of the year. Our prompt today was worst first lines, in which we started a story with one of these lines. In case you didn’t make it, or wanted to try it on your own, here’s a copy of our prompts from today. I challenge you to use one as the first line (completely unchanged).

  1. Cheryl’s mind turned like the vanes of a wind-powered turbine, chopping her sparrow-like thoughts into bloody pieces that fell onto a growing pile of forgotten memories.
  1. As the dark and mysterious stranger approached, Angela bit her lip anxiously, hoping with every nerve, cell, and fiber of her being that this would be the one man who would understand – who would take her away from all this – and who would not just squeeze her boob and make a loud honking noise, as all the others had.
  1. She strutted into my office wearing a dress that clung to her like Saran Wrap to a sloppily butchered pork knuckle, bone and sinew jutting and lurching asymmetrically beneath its folds, the tightness exaggerating the granularity of the suet and causing what little palatable meat there was to sweat, its transparency the thief of imagination.
  1. The fairies of Minglewood, which is near Dingly Pool, were having a grand revel with flower-cakes, and butterfly dances, looking ever so pretty, while Queen Bellaflora swept her wand o’er the waterfall’s foam, making it pop like the snot-bubbles on your baby sister’s face.
  1. For the first month of Ricardo and Felicity’s affair, they greeted one another at every stolen rendezvous with a kiss — a lengthy, ravenous kiss, Ricardo lapping and sucking at Felicity’s mouth as if she were a giant cage-mounted water bottle and he were the world’s thirstiest gerbil.
  1. Betty had eyes that said come here, lips that said kiss me, arms and torso that said hold me all night long, but the rest of her body said, “Fillet me, cover me in cornmeal, and fry me in peanut oil”; romance wasn’t easy for a mermaid.
  1. On reflection, Angela perceived that her relationship with Tom had always been rocky, not quite a roller-coaster ride but more like when the toilet-paper roll gets a little squashed so it hangs crooked and every time you pull some off you can hear the rest going bumpity-bumpity in its holder until you go nuts and push it back into shape, a degree of annoyance that Angela had now almost attained.
  1. As he told her that he loved her she gazed into his eyes, wondering, as she noted the infestation of eyelash mites, the tiny deodicids burrowing into his follicles to eat the greasy sebum therein, each female laying up to 25 eggs in a single follicle, causing inflammation, whether the eyes are truly the windows of the soul; and, if so, his soul needed regrouting.
  1. The Mushroom Men of Knarf were silently advancing on the unsuspecting earthlings, and their thin milky blood ran colder when they smelled spores from fungal toenail infections rising from many of the invaders’ feet, for to them it was a wondrous and shocking scent of kinship, homeland, and asexual reproduction.
  1. It was such a beautiful night; the bright moonlight illuminated the sky, the thick clouds floated leisurely by just above the silhouette of tall, majestic trees, and I was viewing it all from the front row seat of the bullet hole in my car trunk.
  1. As an ornithologist, George was fascinated by the fact that urine and feces mix in birds’ rectums to form a unified, homogeneous slurry that is expelled through defecation, although eying Greta’s face, and sensing the reaction of the congregation, he immediately realized he should have used a different analogy to describe their relationship in his wedding vows.
  1. As the sun dropped below the horizon, the safari guide confirmed the approaching cape buffaloes were herbivores, which calmed everyone in the group, except for Herb, of course.
  1. Sterben counted calcium bars in the storage chamber, wondering why women back on Earth paid him little attention, but up here they seem to adore him, in fact, six fraichemaidens had already shown him their blinka.
  1. “Hmm …” thought Abigail as she gazed languidly from the veranda past the bright white patio to the cerulean sea beyond, where dolphins played and seagulls sang, where splashing surf sounded like the tintinnabulation of a thousand tiny bells, where great gray whales bellowed and the sunlight sparkled off the myriad of sequins on the flyfish’s bow ties, “time to get my meds checked.”
  1. The notion that they would no longer be a couple dashed Helen’s hopes and scrambled her thoughts not unlike the time her sleeve caught the edge of the open egg carton and the contents hit the floor like fragile things hitting cold tiles, more pitiable because they were the expensive organic brown eggs from free-range chickens, and one of them clearly had double yolks entwined in one sac just the way Helen and Richard used to be.
  1. He swaggered into the room (in which he was now the “smartest guy”) with a certain Wikipedic insouciance, and without skipping a beat made a beeline towards Dorothy, busting right through her knot of admirers, and she threw her arms around him and gave him a passionate though slightly tickly kiss, moaning softly, “Oooohh, Scarecrow!”
  1. She sipped her latte gracefully, unaware of the milk foam droplets building on her mustache, which was not the peachy-fine baby fuzz that Nordic girls might have, but a really dense, dark, hirsute lip-lining row of fur common to southern Mediterranean ladies nearing menopause, and winked at the obviously charmed Spaniard at the next table.
  1. On their first date he’d asked how much she thought Edgar Allan Poe’s toe nails would sell for on eBay, and on their second he paid for subway fair with nickels he fished out of a fountain, but he was otherwise charming and she thought that they could have a perfectly tolerable life together.
  1. Like a mechanic who forgets to wipe his hands on a shop rag and then goes home, hugs his wife, and gets a grease stain on her favorite sweater – love touches you, and marks you forever.
  1. Leopold looked up at the arrow piercing the skin of the dirigible with a sort of wondrous dismay – the wheezy shriek was just the sort of sound he always imagined a baby moose being beaten with a pair of accordions might make.
  1. The professor looked down at his new young lover, who rested fitfully, lashed as she was with duct tape to the side of his stolen hovercraft, her head lolling gently in the breeze, and as they soared over the buildings of downtown St. Paul to his secret lair he mused that she was much like a sweet ripe juicy peach, except for her not being a fuzzy three-inch sphere produced by a tree with pink blossoms and that she had internal organs and could talk.
  1. As she slowly drove up the long, winding driveway, Lady Alicia peeked out the window of her shiny blue Mercedes and spied Rodrigo the new gardener standing on a grassy mound with his long black hair flowing in the wind, his brown eyes piercing into her very soul, and his white shirt open to the waist, revealing his beautifully rippling muscular chest, and she thought to herself, “I must tell that lazy idiot to trim the hedges by the gate.”
  1. Gerald began – but was interrupted by a piercing whistle which cost him ten percent of his hearing permanently, as it did everyone else in a ten-mile radius of the eruption, not that it mattered much because for them “permanently” meant the next ten minutes or so until buried by searing lava or suffocated by choking ash – to pee.
  1. Despite the vast differences it their ages, ethnicity, and religious upbringing, the sexual chemistry between Roberto and Heather was the most amazing he had ever experienced; and for the entirety of the Labor Day weekend they had sex like monkeys on espresso, not those monkeys in the zoo that fling their feces at you, but more like the monkeys in the wild that have those giant red butts, and access to an espresso machine.
  1. Colin grabbed the switchgear and slammed the spritely Vauxhall Vixen into a lower gear as he screamed through the roundabout heading toward the familiar pink rowhouse in Puking-On-The-Wold, his mind filled with the image of his comely Olive, dressed in some lacy underthing, waiting on the couch with only a smile and a cucumber sandwich, hoping that his lunch hour would provide sufficient time for both a naughty little romp and a digestive biscuit.
  1. He was a dark and stormy knight, and this excited Gwendolyn, but admittedly not as much as last night when he was Antonio Banderas in drag, or the night before that when he was a French Legionnaire who blindfolded her and fed her pommes frites from his kepi.
  1. Corinne considered the colors (palest green, gray and lavender) and texture (downy as the finest velvet) and wondered, “How long have these cold cuts been in my refrigerator?”
  1. Chain-smoking as he stood in the amber glow of the street lamp, he gazed up at the brownstone wherein resided Bunny Morgan, and thought how like a bunny Bunny was, though he had read somewhere that rabbits were coprophages, which meant that they ate their own feces, which was really disgusting now that he thought about it, and nothing like Bunny, at least he hoped not, so on second thought Bunny wasn’t like a bunny after all, but she still was pretty hot.
  1. Sex with Rachel after she turned fifty was like driving the last-place team on the last day of the Iditarod Dog Sled Race, the point no longer the ride but the finish, the difficulty not the speed but keeping all the parts moving in the right direction, not to mention all that irritating barking.
  1. “Bring a bottle of wine and wear something uncomplicated – I’m in no mood for a struggle tonight,” rolled from Jean-Pierre’s lips like a bowling ball shooting up the return ramp, only to slow itself abruptly at the top before ka-whonking! into the balls already lined up there like all the lines she had heard before, and Sylvia knew at last that all the good ones were not married, gay, or in Mexican prisons.
  1. When Mr Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday, his children packed his bags and drove him to Golden Pastures retirement complex just off Interstate 95.
  2. Before they met, his heart was a frozen block of ice, scarred by the skate blades of broken relationships, then she came along and like a beautiful Zamboni flooded his heart with warmth, scraped away the ugly slushy bits, and dumped them in the empty parking lot of his soul.
  1. As I gardened, gazing towards the autumnal sky, I longed to run my finger through the trail of mucus left by a single speckled slug – innocuously thrusting past my rhododendrons – and in feeling that warm slime, be swept back to planet Alderon, back into the tentacles of the alien who loved me.
  2. Joe would have been perfect for her if he wasn’t the worst.
  1. “I never did like the word spoon.”
  2. “He wondered if someone had cut the brake line, but when he placed his foot down, the car stopped.”
  3. “’Why are you wearing that hat?’ she asked, which prompted me to think, “’Why am I wearing this hat?’”
  4. The elven city of Losstii faced towering sea cliffs and abutted rolling hills that in the summer were covered with blankets of flowers and in the winter were covered with blankets, because the elves wanted to keep the flowers warm and didn’t know much at all about gardening.
  5. Kat Russo, Loveland, Colorado
  6. Francisco Franco’s wife, seen smiling in all those photos with the same big hat on, was actually the brains behind the dictatorship, the concentration camps, torture, the brutal suppression, and so forth, but she was a shy lady, except when she dressed up in the binding closet for Franco, who listened a-quiver to hear what a very bad boy he’d been.— John Holmes, St. Petersburg, Florida
  7. As Lewiston Creol plummeted down the sheer icy cliff he pondered on the word plummet, which quickly lost its meaning if you said it too much (plummet plummet plummet), but his pondering was interrupted by the surface of the water, at which point he ceased to plummet and began to plunge. — Jason Chandler, Saratoga Springs, New York
  8. As he lay dying on the smoke-wreathed battlefield, General Winthrop finally realized the terrible toll the war had taken, and he wondered if the bloodshed had all been for naught as he exhaled his last breath in a sort of “meoooooh,” actually very similar to the sound his cat Mister Jingles made when he wanted some food or was doing that thing with the drapes. — Mike Christensen, Washington, DC
  9. Detective Sam Steel stood at the crime scene staring puzzled at the chalk outline of Ms. Mulgrave’s body which was really just a stick figure with a dress, curly hair, boobs, and a smiley face because the police chalk guy had the day off. — Doug Self, Brunswick, Maine.
  10. The warehouse was completely empty except for the mutilated corpse wearing a tuxedo covered with bloodstains, and a Mortimer Snerd dummy lying nearby on the floor, and Detective McIntosh knew Snerd wouldn’t talk. — Doug Purdy, Roseville, California
  11. As hard-boiled detective Max Baxter ate his soft-boiled egg, he thought about the gorgeous dame he’d found last night lying in a pool of her own blood—it being inconvenient to lie in a pool of someone else’s blood—and wondered how she liked her eggs.— Pam Tallman, Huntington Beach, California
Are Your Hands Wet?