When I was a kid I got bored a lot (and whined about it, I’m sure). Presumably to shut me up, my parents kept a box of “activities” for me—little creative projects for kids, torn out of magazines or jotted down on scraps of paper. I specifically remember being 4 or 5, sitting at the top of the stairs at our house in Dartmouth (UK, not MA), and yelling something like “Can I do an activity?!”

I hope this isn’t a window into my childhood that I’ll later regret publishing.

Anyway, I can’t remember what the activities were now, but I still have that insatiable urge to make things. Combined with a really short attention span, this urge sometimes draws me to useless little projects, so I’ve started creating a list when I hear such projects mentioned. In essence, I’m making my own box of activities. Can’t rely on Mom and Dad’s ideas forever, y’know.

So far I’ve mentioned two such activities on Semantic Argument: …Read More…

Although I’d planned on entering, I narrowly missed the deadline (oops) for 2009 submissions to New Times’ 55 Fiction competition, which calls on readers to submit 55-word fictional stories. So I was excited to hear the announcement of NPR’s Three-Minute Fiction Contest, requiring authors to write stories that can easily be read out loud within three minutes (under 600 words, according to them, but shorter is fine).

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Every year New Times of San Luis Obispo hosts a unique writing competition. The goal is to write an entire fictional story in 55 words. Submissions are not due until mid-June, but are accepted all year. As the website states, keeping a tale under 55 words—fewer than are in this paragraph—is “not as easy as it seems.” But it’s a pretty interesting experiment to see how much story you can squeeze into a few sentences, so I’m planning on giving it a go again this year.

In about 2002 I was working in insurance and desperately seeking some way of releasing creative energy in between performing financial analyses and filling out rate sheets in Excel. When I accompanied some friends to Cal Poly one weekend, I happened to pick up a New Times and read about the competition. I decided to write down a few ideas over the following year, and somehow managed to stay organized and submit them before the deadline. I think I entered about 16 stories, and the following story was chosen as one of many winners: …Read More…