1. Feedburner reports a surprising number of people subscribe to this blog.
2. I’ve been reading fiction, which motivates me to write the same.
The result? A voter-dictated variant on choose your own adventure. Each Friday I’ll post the letter corresponding to the prior week’s winning plot direction, will elaborate the story in that direction, and will offer three new paragraph-sized directions, any one of which the story may take off in. Tonight marking the first entry in this experimental series, I’ll start with the three beginnings which follow. You’ll notice that each has a title; this, despite the predicament of not knowing even vaguely where the story will ultimately go. I figured that reaching out into the fog with ambiguous titles would be worth a laugh.
A) Corporate Wilderness
Even though a Boy Scout of five years, Peter had never learned how to sharpen his camping knife on the razor’s edge of a mountain ridge. His blade, therefore, was always too dull to cut through a tomato for sandwich making. Chewing dryly on a tomato-less sandwich was, to Peter, like sprinting across the Sahara desert with nothing to drink but one’s own sweat.
Three minus two morning, as the sun pulled moisture from fresh bear scat and put it back into the atmosphere, a swollen, grey cloud 1,000 miles away in some direction pissed raindrops and kidney stones, which were hail; returning moisture to the ground. This was called a manifestation of Yin and Yang. But Peter wasn’t of that culture.
B) The Township That Struck Ashore
The drone of muffled rain accompanied their silent understanding typical of a couple long married. They thought together of this and that, of the weeds which kept the ground from crumbling to pieces, of barnacles having preference for wooden ship hulls over evolution-standard rocks. They continued this way, sitting across from one another, with the fire burning contently, exerting its influence on the cabin’s illuminance, temperature, and aural ambiance as ever.
His leather tobacco pouch lay on the table with its opening pulled wide, offering the quantity of its contents to be diminished a pinch.
C) Meanders of a First Person Present Tense
Form won a landslide victory over function with regard to the dimensions of the front counter, I think to myself as I stand in line at the Faux Philanthropist Pie Throw fair booth. With hand in pocket I count coins and conclude I can afford two attempts at hurling lemon meringue into the face of a false donor with enough left over to watch burlesque under the big tent.
Presently, a short, pudgy character with sandwich billboards and fistfuls of Monopoly money approaches, arms raised. He is beaming. He shouts exuberantly to everyone within earshot,
– These rainbows of buying power are absolutely the most current currency on the market!
I gather he hopes to sell the small, colored paper rectangles for the out-of-date currency everyone else has. What a steal!
That’s it. Now vote.