50wordstories.ca

After more than a week without any stories, I’ve come to the conclusion that I wasn’t ready to come back to my previous schedule yet.  The holiday hiatus wasn’t enough to recharge my creative batteries.

My day job’s been draining my creativity, and coming up with new ideas for stories has become harder and harder over time, to the point where posting every day became a chore.

I still enjoy writing these stories, though, so I’m not closing this place down.  I just won’t be posting daily for a while.  If I come back to a regular schedule at some point, it probably won’t be daily, at least not until I’ve accumulated a backlog of stories that are ready for publication.

I still want to do a community site based around 50-word stories.  If you know a good CMS I could install and configure easily to build a community site with minimal hassle, please leave your suggestion in the comments to this post.  I’ve been looking into Joomla, but I find it overly complicated for what I want to do, and it makes it too hard for me to mould it into the site I’m trying to build.  Maybe I’m just being lazy.

Basically, I aim to build something like ficlets, but with the 50-word concept instead of a character limit, and with the idea that each story be complete (and not just a fragment of a story, like it was with ficlets) while still providing the possibility to write sequels and prequels.

That’s it for now.  I hope to post new stories sporadically until I can catch my breath again.

The miller’s son learned that the best starch to be obtained from grain was the starch that got compacted at the bottom.

That starch commanded a higher price.  A stiffer price.

Then, his stock of special starch was stolen.

Thus went the story of the Raiders of the Low Starch.

He had to make a name for himself.

He was strong, but not strong enough to be known for his strength.

Quick, but not quick enough either.

So he invented his signature move: ripping out his enemies’ throats until blood oozed everywhere.

That earned him his name:

The Carotid Kid.

“I hold, in my hand, the entire Internet!”

“What, in this tiny USB key?  Impossible.  The Internet is ever-changing.”

“This device holds not the data of the Internet, but the fractal algorithm which can iteratively generate all the content that will ever be on the Internet.”

“Cool.”

“I thought so.”

She’d been running all her life.

When she died, she was running.  Kept right on running, actually.

People would wonder how she could still be running (being dead and all) but instead of asking that, they would ask,

“Why won’t you stop running?”

“Because I can’t.”

“Why?”

“I’m running late.”

“I’m writing a novel.”

“What’s it about?”

“Everything!”

“Must be pretty long, then.”

“Not particularly, no.  Actually, it’s probably going to be very short.”

“Then why aren’t you done yet?”

“It’s hard.”

“Ha!  What’s so hard about writing a short novel?”

“Well, you try writing a short novel about Everything!”

“Quick, write something, anything!”

“But I’m tapped-out!  I don’t have one original word left in me.  My mind’s a total blank, and he knows it.”

“You can do it.  You have to.  He’s got only five pages left.  When he finishes the last page, we’re dead.”

“Better dead than derivative.”

“Ever stop to think that Mario might’ve deserved whatever Donkey Kong threw at him?”

Oh boy, another rant…

“Why?”

“Imagine DK hired Mario to fix his pipes.  Then the sewers backed up, and there’s shit everywhere.  So DK puts the shit into barrels, throws them at Mario, out of spite.”

This is another sequel to an early story of mine from back in july 2009:

The day after Google went down, civilization collapsed.  Even people who’d never heard of Google were affected.

Information stopped flowing.

People lost things and got lost themselves.

Finding things by yourself was just too big a chore.

In the end, people only needed to learn to find one thing:

Themselves.

This is a sequel to one of the first stories I posted on this blog.

He’d sawed off his leg to escape the zombies.  Fortunately, he still had his trusty chainsaw.

He locked himself inside an empty store and stopped to rest.

Suddenly, he felt a sharp pain in his left arm: an infected scratch.

Survival ended up costing him an arm and a leg.