Weekly Short Stories Contest and Company! discussion

OMG! That is SOOOO funny you two! What a RotFL delightful sequence. Thank you for adding levity to my working man's lunch. Still laughing.

There must be a fun way to come up with a novel, the way we come up with these haiku.

Have a great afternoon, Alex!

Bye Al, have fun at the shower. I'm a guy, so have no idea what to buy for those things. Bathing cap, maybe?

Al & M, I wonder about the collaborative novel thing - or maybe a short play. So much creative oportunity! And here I am at work.

And again, M, that is SO funny!

Thanks, Guy!

If I were an organizing person, I’d probably love devising novels. As it is, I make myself content with putting little flashes of inspiration (if you can call them that) into words. I think that’s why I enjoy these little verses.

Did your shower go out? I always hate it when that happens.

Al, I hope the shower and road trip was fun.

Here's my anemic effort:

The naïve intern
Cuts to skip the chase, lays down
amongst the cast off.

From her underwear
She picks out the cut film bits
Waiting for her star.

M wrote: "The captain in our
version of the show will bold-
ly tell what’s in store:

“To explore new moons,
shamelessly go where few men
have not gone before.”

This is very very clever amongst this very clever and very funny sequence!

Thank you, Guy! I’m not sure how to follow yours. I’ll take a wild shot.


Captain Pike, who has
been snoozin’ in frames the cut-
ter left lying there,

leaps up and cries, “Don’t
dump me, Susan! Put me back
in your underwear!”

“I’m sorry, baby,
to be so snappy--” she flicks
him against the wall--

“but no man can make
me happy who’s just sixteen
millimeters tall.”

Slipping on her slink-
y dress, she quickly leaves the
cutting room, annoyed.

“We’ll always have Ri-
gel, the fortress!” he shouts from
the dim celluloid.

How was your trip?

It isn’t daylight here yet, so I can’t tell what the weather is like.

If the weather is good, we may spend the weekend at the camper.

I haven’t come up with an idea for a story yet. I’ve been trying to figure out how to write stories in little bits and pieces, the way I write those silly pseudo-haiku. I love writing those!

Thanks! I’d better go iron clothes. I mustn’t go camping in wrinkled khakis!

Yes, Al, that was sad.

M, again very clever.

'It's not the size, it's
the prize, that counts!' the captain
barked his frustration.

He looked at the floor.
'Too short, too short,' he bemoaned
with small man envy.

To live a clipped life
Is to perceive in microns
Be seen in inches.

Guy, this is excellent! It has that philosophical touch. It should be a challenge to come up with a reply. I ended up staying home instead of going camping, so I’m playing online.

Thanks, M. I didn't really like it that much -- it felt flat following yours.

Stayed home because of the weather? I'm sitting on our balcony looking at the river under cloud filtered sun while the next rain front slowly moves in. Soon will be doing some minor deck gardening at the behest of my wife.

What to do with a
captain too small to brandish
a thermometer?

They gave Pike a com-
mand outlandish: the U. S.
S. Micrometer,

off to patrol the
punyverse, to track an ob-
ject of odium

out to infect the
universe: M’s space harem,
the Plasmodium,

where M relaxed in
the captain’s chair and watched the
screen and munched hors d’oeuvres,

fingered the new girl’s
flaxen hair, and sipped sour
mash to calm his nerves.

“Something odd,” exclaimed
Margo, slim, headphoned: “It’s not
from the supply post.”

Pike’s voice roared on the
radio: “Say your prayers, M.
Your spaceship is toast!”

“I don’t see a thing,”
drawled the navigator, a
brunette named Jeanie

(no man yet could sate
her). “Whatever is out there
is teeny-weeny.”

M, I was very curious to follow up on your query regarding Franz or Whitmont regarding people not being either to let go or proceed. I was getting ready to garden when I read your message, and have been puzzling over it ever since - but you've deleted it. Now I am really curious what prompted it. If you would like my opinion send a GR e.mail.

M, I am still laughing!
...
M's space harem
the Plasmodium!?!

Now how do you expect some poor hack to follow that?! Still laughing!

I didn’t mean to keep you from gardening! I thought I’d better let that Jungian query go. I’ve added a couple of verses.

Great additions! I was just finishing my response to your un-emended post, when notice of your edit popped up. I'll post my efforts anyway.


It was Outlandish
The ship the captain leapt to,
His half pike half cocked.

At night he would dream
In small screen black and white
Of being a king —

The one and true king
Wearing see through pyjamas
two sizes too small.

Hi Al! Me too! How was the trip?

Actually, I got the idea for the Plasmodium years ago, but never wrote it up. This is fun!

“I heard that!” bellowed
Captain Pike, in his Cardin
see-through pajamas.

Over the speakers
came old music like the Pa-
pa’s and the Mama’s.

RotFL!

Okay this is really lame, but I'm off to make some chicken burgers.


Every other day
was his Monday, Monday, a
California dream.

Oh Al, I actually posted something in my blog! Oh frabjous day, callooh, callay! Anyway, I'm gone for a while.

Chicken burgers are DELICIOUS! Add a little seasoning, and then when we serve them, homemade guacamole and bacon and you have something approaching ecstasy. Catch you later.

A yeoman whose green
eyes flickered brought Pike a tall
stem of Beringer.

“If that were a gun,”
she glanced and snickered, “it would
be a derringer.”

Pike, enraged, grabbed her
by the collar. “How would you
like to go with them?

I’ll send you, if you
think I’m smaller, and you can
join the girls of M.”

It’s late and I’m getting slow. (I’m usually slow, but I’m getting slower.)

She rushed to the
transporter room “Oh,
what’s a girl to do?”

she sighed, then saw, lined
up to the little room, the
women of the crew!

Smiling, she could hard-
ly blame them. They, too had heard
the legends of M.

I can’t believe I wrote that! It was way past my bedtime.

The head of Star Fleet,
fury in his face, glared down
from the podium:

“We must capture M’s
crew, wipe out every trace of
the Plasmodium!”

An icy glimmer
came into his eye. He rasped
malevolently:

“Though they must be tried
and all must die, save the straw-
berry blonde for me.”

-----------

“A cloud of cosmic
corndog smoke,” M pushed a black
key, “should slow them down.

Unpack the invi-
sibility cloak that had
been Queen Mebh’s nightgown.”

Pike held his nose dis-
gustedly, and to the nav-
igator turning,

“Ensign,” said he, “is
it just me, or is some-
one’s corndog burning?”

Soon putrid fumes filled
all the staterooms, and Captain
Pike’s smoke-ometer

flashed. “Chr-- sakes!” he slammed
on the brakes of the U. S.
S. Micrometer.

A silky voice spoke
in M’s ear: “We’ve got the queen’s
old nightgown unpacked

and are ready with
the fastening gear.” M smiled.
How Mebh had been stacked!

Pike rubbed his eyes, then
gasped as he peered through the smoke
at the viewing screen

as the space harem
disappeared, the strangest way
he had ever seen.

“They’ve wrapped it in some-
thing!” he shook his fist, then fell
forward with a crash.

M yawned, signed the new
yeoman’s checklist, and took a
sip of sour mash.

Thanks, Alex!

Bravo, M!! Bravo!! Standing ovation encore! Bravo.

I'm going to see a reading of King Lear, so will be away for a while.

Good for your aunt!

I'm sort of back. I just received Jessica's okay to post some of her Haiku on my blog. Thank you, Jessica!

To see how it looks, visit

egajd.blogspot.ca.

I'll visit Pens and Erasers anon. Your Aunt sounds interesting.

Guy, I followed your link. Beautiful job! I haven’t figured out how to comment on blogs yet. They seem to want some sort of profile profile for reference that I’ve never set up.

Alex, I enjoyed the Star Trek haiku on Pens and Erasers! It’s always fun to see oneself in print (so to speak).

M Ragland

What am I supposed to do in order to be able to post comments on P&E? Do I have to set up some sort of profile?

When I want to comment, I’ll start and “Pens and Erasers” thread in the W.S.S.’s blogs folder.

In one of the other groups I’m in, there’s a lot of talk about the problems people are encountering with Goodreads. Apparently, on April 12 (probably to commemorate the sinking of the Titanic), GR made some big changes to the way it’s programmed, and there are a lot of glitches.

Good mornining, Al & M. As to commenting on the blog, I remember also Google allowing anonymous comments. It may be a setting within the blog itself.

....
I just checked, and in the blog's settings there is an edit to allow anonymous posts.

M, glad you enjoyed my post, but it was Jessica's poetry that makes it, of course. Did you try to post anonymously on mine?


And the lack of notification has been happening off and on with me, too.

Now, off to work I go. Have a great day and Al I hope your weekend of travel and visiting was a fun one.

Al, M was able to make an anonymous post, so not sure what happened with you.

I'm hoping to be able to rise to M's challenging Haiku in the next couple of days. (I was hoping one of the newer guys would jump in!) Very challenging, M.

I just clicked the option for anonymous, then there was some security sphinx that came up and asked me to solve a riddle, then my post was up!

For me, there’s a puzzle-like challenge to putting images, thoughts, feelings, into patterned verse, and I can find it addicting if the challenges are small enough. There’s a noticeable difference (for me, at least) between the difficulty in writing a pseudo-haiku (a pair of iambic tetrameter lines that’s off by a syllable) and in writing a limerick.

It has occurred to me that it might be interesting for us to develop a story. We would need to plot it first, at least roughly. Then we could write it in rounds according to a list of who goes after whom. Or it might be interesting to take a story somebody has posted and doesn't mind if we use, and rewrite it, assigning each of us a scene or section.

I’m with your dad. Pike’s my favorite too. There were some good actors in Star Trek, but most of the regular cast wasn’t among them. Roddenberry tried to get Jeffrey Hunter to take the part William Shatner played for the rest of the series, but Hunter wouldn’t do it.

I was just about to ask how you did that.

Still no arrow!

M, I've had a similar idea - novel/story/play idea. I've been hesitant to fully broach it because already I'm struggling to keep up. But the idea is very appealing me. So... some thoughts.

How about this? Follow the old 'comedy' idea - story begins with a death, ends with a marriage? Assign each contributor to do a section/chapter of 1500-2500 words or so? And each contributor to write 2 or 3 sections, with each contributor writing in sequence one after the other. Collect a few writers willing to contribute, and then with some kind of random method, assign them letters.

So, for example, writers A-B-C-D-E / A-B-C-D-E / A-B-C-D-E.

Or something like that.

Do-able? Worth Doing? (I like the idea of a play and dialog.)

As if it isn't obvious, you can count me in for this.

You watched it! I hoped you would. Now you can see why that line sticks out for me. What do you think of Susan Oliver (Vina)?

I’m supposed to be in bed and sound asleep. Just pretend I’m not here.

Well, it is no M. but here goes:

The yeoman pitched mash
to sing Pike's guard, falsetto,
in the parsec choir.

Mebh's stiletto
punctured through the sour funk
with a sharp click clack.

M was more than drunk
enough to see, through the haze,
tall shoes and long legs

and the thought of days
when her fishnets could transport
him past his warp drive.

The girls of M's court
found themselves Beamed up by Jack
and queens of nothing.