Bathroom Monologue: LIVE from the Shoe

There was an old lady who lived in a shoe. She conceived what can only be considered an implausible number of children for a woman who lived in a cramped one-bedroom, but there they all were, living in abject poverty, thirteen people living where only five toes belonged. Yet this poverty did not last for long. Not in the age of Youtube.

One video was all it took for her soleful family to viral, and for CNN and Wired to herald her as an economic genius, making shoe-life work in a bad economy. Warren Buffett invited her to lunch, and she hosted the first-ever TED Talk from a Footlocker, on the wisdom of laces and how to expand your personal spaces. Before the end of the fiscal quarter, she was a real estate tycoon, able to flip any property into a spacious dream house.

She only started as an old lady who lived in a shoe. She was a visionary, and I believe she invented the Tardis.

26 Story Ideas - Part 3/3, The End!

We’re closing out our warehouse of story prompts today, running all the way up to 26, that sweet Heinlein number. There’s some Horror, SciFi, Fantasy, and even a sports story. See anything you like?

To see 1-9, click here.

To see 10-18, click here.

19. A teenaged girl stumbles upon a curious Youtube channel that seems to be chronicling another young woman’s life. The Youtube-Girl seems funny, adventurous, an addictively charming host, but as the videos proceed, we discover she’s also a werewolf, and the channel is documenting her coming to terms with her impulses. Our teen protagonist is smitten with the wolf-girl, and horrified when the latest videos reveal she’s being hunted by paranormal poachers. Soon our teen has to study the videos and internet records to find out where this werewolf is – if not to confess their starcrossed love, then to save her life.

20. Stop me if you’ve heard this one. Every full moon, she turns into a monstrous werewolf, stalking and eating innocent people. Worse, the morning after every full moon she finds videos her wolf-self has recorded, taunting her with what she’s done. She’s tried baptisms, locking herself in basements, even suicide, but nothing stops the monster from rising again in the full moon, and the next morning she awakes alive and free, and with a new video on her laptop. Unable to directly stop her other self, she has to become craftier. By creating fake ISPs and web accounts, she hopes to troll her other self in comments and video responses, derailing her from carnage. Can you manipulate a werewolf’s ego? She’ll have to, because if the videos are right, her family is going to get a visit soon.

21. A U.S. marine races with his detail to deactivate a bomb that will devastate a small Afghani town. His detail, including the two bomb disposal experts, are killed in an ambush by terrorists. Though the terrorists are also slain, there’s no way he can stop the explosion. He has less than an hour to convince the town, where no one speaks English and many are terrified of the foreigners who’ve brought bloodshed to their doorsteps, to evacuate and save their lives.

22. Due to flagging Pay Per View ratings, a boxer agrees to take on a professional wrestler in a real fight. The wrestler outweighs him by eighty pounds, but all analysts think the boxer is guaranteed to win, being a real fighter and all. They don’t know that the boxer’s entire career has been fixed – every fight he’s ever won was against an opponent paid to take a dive. The boxer panics when our wrestler refuses any bribes. Apparently he’s got something to prove.

23. Ten thousand years in the future, human beings return to the wasteland that was once Planet Earth. Its demise is shrouded in mystery. Every city is ashes, and not a single human corpse remains – on the surface, anyway. Off the coast of Europe, their scanners detect the ancient city of Atlantis, which seems almost pristine. Why is a city that was supposed to not exist the only relic of humanity that remains on earth? And is it uninhabited?

24. A meteor bigger than any our solar system has ever seen is on a crash course with our planet. There seems to be no way to stop it. Yet it also seems the meteor has an atmosphere, and though the front has terrifying weather, its western and southern hemispheres are more habitable than most of earth. A small family is divided in the same way that the population of earth is: half want to undertake the doomed mission to stop the meteor, where the other half want to undertake the doomed mission to hop aboard.

25. This is one I gave to Peter Newman last month: “I would very much appreciate a flash fiction about a unicorn that got itself stuck in a pencil sharpener and suffering panic attacks over how to dislodge the thing.”

26. This is one appeared on my blog last year: “Make me regret the death of a horrible person based on some relationship he/she had to a living character.

There’s my twenty-six. The last two came back to mind near the end, and so I included them last, but everything else was produced in about an hour on Monday. I’m not in a story-drought right now. Anyone who is, though, is welcome to use any of the above.

If you post the resulting story in a public forum, like your blog or selling it to a zine, please link me here so I can come read it. Go as far as you want – if one of these turns into a novel, it’s entirely yours, not mine. I’d love to know what anyone does with any of these.

And sorry about the lack of a hundred bucks.

Please Don’t Be This Artist

In 2010 I saw a great movie that went totally under most people’s radars. Even I barely watched it, but caught the trailer and was intrigued enough to put it on my Netflix list. Among the movie’s many strong points was its soundtrack, which mixed ambient sound, classical music and modern instruments, turning some scenes very cheeky and others downright disturbing. I was excited to hear it over and over, to write to it, and to promote it to others. This is how I respond when I like music.

I’ve spent the last two years trying and failing to buy this soundtrack.

I won’t name the movie or its distributor because I don’t want to single out its composer for derision, nor will I name that composer. The day after I saw the movie, I searched for the soundtrack through Google, Amazon, and eventually tried iTunes and Youtube. I couldn’t find it for sale or streaming anywhere. I even resorted to the forbidden areas of the internet, without luck.

Figuring it had limited distribution (if any), I tracked down the composer’s recording label. Their website was a post-modern mess, so minimalistic that it took me what felt like an hour to find a contact feature. They never messaged me back, but I did find the composer’s social networks. When I discovered his Twitter account, I was elated.

He didn’t respond to any of my tweets, and I found that he’d set his account to Private, so I couldn’t read anything he said. I sent him a request to follow him.

It was 2011 before he accepted my request. In 2011, I still hopped on the opportunity. I tweeted at him that I enjoyed the score very much, and was there a way to buy it?

There was no response that day, week or month. A month later, I tweeted at him again. I couldn’t DM him because he wasn’t following me, but I didn’t mind that. It was also then that I noticed his account only tweeted every few months, when his music showed up in something. At that point there would be a single tweet, telling his hundred followers to go watch this movie or show. Because his account was set to Private, no one except his hundred followers ever saw this. It couldn’t show up in any keyword searches or conversations. And never in his accounts history had he actually responded to anyone about anything. He was unilaterally marketing to almost no one.

Within the last month I entered the most desperate and stupid ploy. Seeing that he’d tweeted within the last three minutes, I sent him one more @ message asking if his work might become available eventually. He’s never replied to it. Good chance, he never will. And that's fine - it's clearly a lost cause, and I'll leave him alone.

Maybe he doesn’t know how Twitter works. Maybe he can’t get the rights to sell the soundtrack and is too frustrated about it to talk to potential consumers. Maybe he’s almost blind and can barely use screens, or maybe he’s in a cult, or maybe he’s secretly a dog. I don’t know and I don’t want to judge this individual, but to judge this public appearance.

Specifically, everyone: don’t do this.

Maybe you’re so busy that you can’t reply to every fan comment, or you can’t check into social networks daily. That happens. But come on, the least you can do is:

1)      Don’t hide your promotion.

2)      Don’t refuse to engage with people who need help buying your stuff.

Now ideally, there’d be a 3), and to me, 3) is the most important.

3)      Be courteous to the people who like your art.

But I understand that 3) is tough for a lot of people for a lot of reasons, and nobody can sustain that all of the time. Even the nicest people have raw days. You’ll have a lot more, though, if you do the above.

Bathroom Monologue: The Newcomer

Simon fell into the keyboard arrays, armored legs twisting as he sought orientation. He felt drunk, even though he hadn’t touched a bottle since last night. Montgomery stepped in to help, but Simon put up a robotic gauntlet to stop the approach. “Just keep briefing. Touch me and I’ll sue you for sexual harassment. I’ve got very good lawyers.”

“As you will.” Montgomery took two steps away from him, struggling to keep his eyes on the PDA rather than Simon’s busted suit. “His first appearance this morning was at 10:01. It’s conveniently time-stamped on an ATM camera. He stopped two men from mugging an elderly woman cashing her social security check. It’s on Youtube.”

“What a sweetheart.”

“At 10:05 he stopped a locomotive with his bare hands.”

“Bare hands?” Simon asked, pulling off his armored gauntlets. As soon as the servos disconnected, they snapped from the frame and thunked to the floor. He shook feeling into his fingers and found contusions all the way up his forearms.

“His bare hands,” Montgomery confirmed. “Three minutes later police saw him take those bare hands into a warehouse being held up by the Mastiff Brothers. They emptied five clips into his forehead and didn’t even disturb his spitcurl. The Mastiffs are in custody, though they already have three appeals filed.”

Simon stroked his chromium mask, searching around the hand-shaped dent over the faceplate for the release valves. “Shot in the bare forehead?”

“One would presume, sir. There may be video this afternoon.”

Simon lingered on that as steam spat out from the valves. He let the crumpled chromium mask drop to the floor, then wiped his brow. He didn’t think he was bleeding. “Did he do anything between getting shot at 10:08 and 10:21?”

“Well, you encountered him at 10:19. So he did at least one thing for two minutes.”

“If I hired you for your wit, you’re fired.”

“Fortunately I was hired because you don’t know how to make Youtube on your own. Do you want help with that?”

“Search engines were invented by rabid monkeys.” Simon braced one titanic boot on the control panel and leaned as far back as he could. The dents along his chest-chasse were so deep that neither of the hinges would come loose. He clawed at them for another impotent moment before shrugging at Montgomery. “You could get me a crowbar. Maybe a jaws-of-life?”

Loyal Montgomery traveled to the workbenches, one hand searching for the appropriate tool, while the other held up his PDA. “He was on the way to something big, possibly an earthquake in South America since that’s where he’s gone since, when 10:19 happened. It’s also on Youtube, if you’d like to see it again.”

“Not right now.” Simon pinched his eyes closed and groaned; he was only now getting feeling back in his ass. He’d never imagined how much he’d miss feeling down there.

Montgomery returned to him with a blowtorch tucked into his armpit and a crowbar in hand. He offered the tools, then stepped back, withholding them as he asked, “What are we going to do about him, sir?”

“Well, you are going to get my other suit. The Alexander Amosu with the pink tie and cufflinks.” He snatched the crowbar and dug it into his armor’s mechanized hip, grinning to himself. “Meanwhile, I’m going to see if he needs a best friend.”

Bathroom Monologue: Real News

“No news anchor has ever been off television for three years and returned. If you terminate me, you’re right that the three-year non-compete clause will kill my television career. You’re wrong that I won’t be able to hit back, though.

“I get paid enough to have lawyers who have parsed this clause, and there is nothing preventing me from going to Youtube and ripping you apart. More people watch a funny cat video than your leading sitcom. Now, this won’t hit with the internet-illiterate part of our audience, but it will poison the 18-25 demo your advertisers are terrified about. If you think I can’t get an audience, you’ve never seen a famous person go inflammatory online before.

“I can take my claims to the NY Times Op-Ed and The Huffington Post, and my exit will be the top story on every other network, but that’ll be a blip in a promotional tour. The book I write about you will sell more copies for every move you try to make to discredit it, and it will go digital-first, with links and social networks that will draw anyone with a Kindle or iPad to new media. Don’t be surprised if Facebook signs me as their first anchor for their first exclusive on-site programming, where I will get to cover any story I want. If that comes to pass, I sincerely hope that I get to cover your resignation from this network.”