All posts by Tim

MICHAEL A. KECHULA: Head Bumps

Amusing, Submissions, , , , , ,

“Help me, Doctor!” yelled Harry.

“What’s the problem?”

“I can’t write 50-word stories.”

“I’ll check your head bumps. A-hah! Your Inflated Prose, Trivial Detail, and Superfluous Description bumps are too high. I’ll lower them for $300 cash.”

Harry paid.

“Brace yourself. This is going to hurt. Nurse, hand me that sledgehammer.”

Michael A. Kechula’s flash fiction and microfiction has been published in 132 magazines and 42 anthologies. His four books of flash fiction are available from BooksForABuck.com.

Kyle Farnsworth: Buffalo Keeper

Amusing, Touching, , , , , , ,

He was a subculture within a subculture. Cowboys called him “bisonboy,” which wasn’t technically accurate, but it had a better ring to it than “buffaloboy.” He listened to country southern music and wore a 9-gallon hat.

But when he was sad, his tears made mud puddles, just like everybody else’s.

This story was based on a title suggested by @metcarfre.

So Long, and Thanks For All the Rides

Amusing, , , , , , , ,

It was late. Mintred and Neldred were on their way home from Neldred’s retirement party from Municipal Dolphin Transport.

Suddenly, they heard a shout and a splash. Hardly thinking, Neldred dove and kicked, arriving just in time to save the man’s life.

Thus began a series of new aquatic adventures.

This story is based on a series of tweets in which I asked people to guess what form of transport I was riding.

 

The Red Barren

Amusing, , , , , ,

It was Mars-ish. (Mars-like? Hmm. Red and dusty, anyways.) Regardless, it was his backyard, and he was proud of it.

Land ownership was one of the purest forms of power, and it felt good. He knew his great-great-great-great grandfather Karl would agree.

Now all he was missing were some factories.

This story is based on a title suggested by King Kool.

Order Online Now

Amusing, , , , , , , ,

“Didja see that new offer on the television set?”

“Yeah, I seen it.”

“Sez we can get internets fer only a coupla bucks a month!”

“I said I seen it.”

“So, d’ya wanna?”

“Heck, alright. How’d we go ’bout it?”

“Offer sez order online.”

“What’s ‘online’?”

“Heck if I know.”

This story is based on a title suggested by @klancashire.

NEWS: Story Ratings Broken

News, , , , , ,

I hope site issues don’t come in threes, because if they do, we may be in for another one before long.

Having recently solved the “slow site” problem, I’m now trying to figure out why story ratings aren’t working. You can mouse-over the stars, but they don’t register a click.

I still have hope that there will be a way to solve this. So far reinstalling the GD Star Rating plugin from scratch (after backing up all of the ratings and settings) hasn’t worked, nor has reverting to an earlier version of the plugin. If I’m not able to find a way to get ratings going again, I’ll have to find some form of alternative, preferably one that allows me to keep the history of past ratings.

I’ll keep you updated. Until this gets resolved, you can always express your opinions about stories by leaving a comment, instead, or by sharing the ones you like using the buttons underneath each post.

MIKE JACKSON: Please Don’t Make Me Go In There

Amusing, Submissions, Touching, , , ,

He really didn’t want to go in.

He’d heard stories about this place, and they weren’t good. The person in charge was mean and scary.

He knew that once he was in, there was no way back: he would be trapped – at least until his mum collected him at three.

Mike Jackson is a retired primary school head teacher who is enjoying having time and freedom to write. You can read more of his writing here.

GARETH WILSON: The Gatekeepers

Artistic, Submissions, Touching, , , , , , ,

The gatekeepers see all, never blinking, no matter what the time.

Those who seek the angels don’t see them for they hide in plain sight.

With one foot in each world your fate is decided with the yowl of annoyance or the purr of contentment.

Those wonderful misaligned felines.

Gareth Wilson would call himself a serial reader, slayer of titles, leaving a woody (and shortly electron) swathe in his wake. Currently he is improving his writing skills by cutting his teeth on short pieces to work up to his own full-length title. He reviews general fiction here and YA and children’s books here.

NEWS: Site Speed Improvements

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You’ve probably noticed that the site has been really slow over the past few weeks. After trying a handful of different strategies for dealing with this (including hiding under the covers and hoping it would just go away), I finally opened a support ticket with my web host (JaguarPC.com, which has always been very good to me), and they pointed out an old, forgotten forum on an old, forgotten site of mine that was monopolizing the server’s CPU. The forum had gotten infested with bots and spam, so I went in, wiped it, disabled it for the future, and will be deleting it for good later today.

Now the site is loading at normal speeds again! Hooray! To celebrate, I’m going to post two guest stories this Monday.

Fixed-Term Residential Plan

Amusing, Odd, , , , ,

He lived inside his phone, drifting from app to app and nesting in the dim recesses of the End Call button.

He’d been there since the rotary days. The passing years had drastically reduced his living space.

He had no idea how he’d fit his mattress into a Bluetooth headset.