Today at the checkout in Whole Foods, the checkout girl, or young woman, I guess, scanned my fancy ginger ale and said, “Making a Ginger Ale Mojito?” “Err, no. Not a … Mojito. I will be making a Buck.” “A … Buck?” “Yes. It is an old cocktail, well not truly a cocktail since there are no bitters, but nobody really pays attention to that. It’s a descendant of the Sling, which is an even older mixture, a portable Punch. Grog fits in there, too. A Buck is ginger ale, rye, and the juice of half a lime, over ice, in [Read More]
short fiction
See the Orange Write the Orange
It’s poetry month at the writing academy and I want the students to practice describing things accurately. From a suggestion in Robert Wallace’s Writing Poems, I’ve decided to use the first springtime oranges as objects to describe. We read a few haikus, first, to get an idea about how an accurate description of a thing can say something about the poet (or more). I like to keep things simple at the writing academy. I cut an orange in half, then I cut one of the halves into four pieces and arrange everything onto a translucent plastic plate. The plate is yellowish, the [Read More]
Shannon O’Shannon
There’s a self-consciously Irish pub on the north side of Broadway a couple of doors east of the intersection of Broadway and Redondo. The pub is tucked between the Clever Gift Shop that sells clever greeting cards and clever pewter candlesticks and the Narrow Hardware Store that has a wide selection of light bulbs and screws and spackling paste and not much else. The food is good at the pub, as is the beer (the pub doesn’t sell liquor) and there are plenty of TVs tuned in to sports for entertainment. The place is called O’Shannon and it’s a mystery [Read More]
Goodnight Stalin
Twine is a tool for making little interactive fictions (think Choose Your Own Adventure). We haven’t used it here at Storyweek, but it looks like fun. (via MetaFilter)
The Monkey Trials
Harrison doesn’t understand what he’s seeing at first. He’s trying to drive his car into the garage, but it’s blocked by some kind of mess strewn across the floor, so he parks in the alley and walks inside, flipping on the extra light as he comes in. It turns out that it’s not a mess, and, in fact, it’s pretty well organized. Stanley has arranged most of his stuffed animals in a semicircle facing the back wall, and there seems to be a logic to the seating as well. The monkeys sit up front, ten of them in all, followed [Read More]
Zero to a Hundred-Fifty: Send Us Your Short Fiction
Think you can write a story in 150 words or fewer? We think you can — and we think you should! All a story really needs is an exposition, a character with a motivation, a complication or two, and a resolution. Surely all that can be crammed into 150 words? Try it and then send us the results. We’ll collect them, collate them, sort them, and eventually publish them, with your byline. A lucky few will even receive a recycled book from my own personal library. You could win a college linguistics textbook, an Alton Brown cookbook, or maybe even [Read More]
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