Johnny blamed the milkman.
“Why would the milkman steal the last jug of milk out of our fridge?” said mom. “He has so much of his own in his truck!”
“He’s greedy. He wants it all for himself.”
“Honey, that’s–”
“GIVE ME ALL YOUR MILK!!” cried the Malevolent Milkman. “NOW!!”
Mark your calendar; it’s finally time!
The first new fifty-word story since February 22 is scheduled to go live this Monday, July 5, and there will be a new story every weekday after that. My goal is to complete another year of stories.
In the first year of fifty-word stories, I posted a story every day of the week. This time I’m going to restrict the stories to Monday to Friday. The reason for this is that I found myself burning out a bit as the months went on, and a couple of days each week to recharge my creative juices will help me avoid that.
The site has undergone a couple of changes, as well. The most notable changes are the addition of the ability to share and comment on stories via Facebook and Twitter as well as a new navigation bar to make different parts of the site easier to access. I’m also adjusting the way stories are classified and categorized, so that you can find what you want to read without having to read through the entire archive.
Finally, the FiftyWordStories.com book continues to move forward. I have to finalize the cover, make a few changes to the order of the stories and the way they’re divided into chapters, and take a look at a proof copy, but I’m reasonably confident that the book will be ready for ordering by the end of the month.
Let me know what you think of the changes! I’m excited about the new stories, and I hope you are, too.
FiftyWordStories.com is diving further into Web 2.0!
I’ve added some new functionality to the site, so that readers can now post comments using their Facebook or Twitter accounts, and can “Like” posts using their Facebook profiles, as well. Hopefully this will make it easier for people to get involved with the site and share it with friends.
Let me know what you think of the new features and functions in a comment.
A fifty-word stories book is on its way!
After taking a few months away from this site (a little longer than I had planned or expected, actually), I’m finally buckling down and assembling my favourite stories into a book. I plan to make the book available in a variety of ways, both in print and digitally.
I don’t have pricing details yet, or a date, or even a final title, but I’m working on figuring out that information, and I’ll share it as soon as I know.
I do know that there will be close to 150 stories in the book, and I’m looking at ways of including bonus content in various forms to make it worthwhile for people who have been reading my stories since the site started.
If you have any questions about the book, or any thoughts or suggestions, please leave a comment!
A reader sent me this, and I thought it was too clever not to share. Thanks, Hugh3s!
Hi Tim,
I found your site, “Fifty Word Stories,” and found it interesting. With a few weeks of no updates, I was depressed to find that you were on hiatus.
So I decided to write a fifty-word story instead. I sat down at my computer and came up with nothing…
In case you don’t know what I found so great about it, count the words (as if you should have to do that with anything on this site).
You may not realize it, but today, February 22, 2010, marks one year since I started updating this site with a new fifty-word story every single day!
The very first “regular update” story I posted on the site was called “CPR”. If you look a little further back in the archives, you’ll see a handful of other stories which I had written before I started the site. I put those up to give people an idea of what I was going to be going for.
So at this point there are over 350 fifty-word stories on this episode, the majority of which I wrote, though many have been contributed by some great guest writers. There are also quite a few “nanofiction” stories, which are stories told in less than 140 characters so that they can be posted on Twitter.
Unfortunately, there are a few gaps in the post calendar over the past year. There have been occasional days when I haven’t gotten around to posting a story, especially recently. (In fact, yesterday and Saturday both went story-less, as you may have noticed.) Some of that has been due to busyness with other aspects of my life, and some of it has been due to a bit of waning creativity, I think. In short, I feel like I’ve been burning out very slowly…
So I’m taking a break from new daily updates. Sorry!
My first task, at this point, is going to be going back and filling in all the gaps in the calendar. If you’re following the site on Twitter (@50wordstories), the new stories should still show up there, so you’ll know as they go up. I’m going to try to keep track of the new ones as I write them, too, and then maybe make a news post with links to all the gap-fillers once I’m done.
After that, I have some ideas for maybe compiling the stories into a book, or doing something else interesting with them. I’m going to explore some options. Any feedback along these lines would be greatly appreciated.
Hmm. That was a bit of a dense newsbomb. Time for some more frivolous behaviour: YAYAYAYAYA ONE YEAR WHEEEE!!
He had just suffered the most devastating defeat of his entire career, maybe even his entire life.
“That’s it,” he muttered. “I’m quitting. This is no good.”
An ethereal meerkat blinked into existence in front of him. “You can’t quit!” it said. “I’m a meerkat!”
“Why not?” he protested.
“Meeeeerkaaaat!”
Fleeing my prison, driven by the hunger, I found my victim. I struck. His blood flowed. The hunger was satiated, but then: panic.
The body was stuck on my tusks, and my flippers were too short to remove it.
The zookeepers apprehended me, ending the reign of Chumley, Vampire Walrus.
Josh Anderson is an amateur filmmaker and writer from Lubbock, Texas.
This was it.
He knew the odds. They were forty-to-one. But he didn’t care about the odds. This was destiny.
“I don’t care about the odds,” he said aloud. “Screw the odds.”
“You should probably care about the odds,” said the hatchet-faced man holding the bag full of coloured balls.
I see you smile at the gift he sent you.
It’s dead, you know.
Smile, as you care tenderly for it. All the care you lavish on his tribute won’t make it last. Won’t stop the smooth, slippery red from drying to a lusterless, coppery brown. Smile for your rose.
Katie is a young woman in college.