Day: December 26, 2017

FFfAW — Second Sight

Fandango22 Comments

563B2A58-3AC2-497E-A375-82CC63C636F3Malcolm approached the door to the shop and checked the address on the card his optometrist had given him.

He walked into the small shop and saw that it was empty. Just four white walls. “Hello?” he said. Getting no response, he started to leave the empty shop.

“Malcolm, your new glasses are ready.”

Startled, Malcolm turned around to see a man holding a translucent glass bust, a pair of wire-framed spectacles mounted on the bridge of its nose. “Try them on,” he said. Reaching for the glasses, Malcolm noticed that the face on the bust resembled his own.

Malcolm removed the glasses from the bust and put them on. The fit was perfect and his vision was perfectly corrected. But most remarkable was that the room was no longer empty. There were paintings on the walls, a few small, round tables and chairs like those one might find in a café, with people sitting around them drinking coffee and quietly talking.

“I don’t understand,” Malcolm said, but the man with the bust was gone.

(175 words)

Written for this week’s Flash Fiction for Aspiring Writers from Priceless Joy. Photo credit: ENISA.

Quality and Quantity

Fandango15 Comments

76351817-81EE-409D-975E-FF584641CCD6Proclivity is a tendency to choose or do something regularly; an inclination or predisposition toward a particular thing.

Apparently I have a proclivity for blogging. It’s something I choose to do regularly. I am inclined to post to my blog every day. Sometimes two, three, or even four times a day.

But a proclivity for something should not be confused with proficiency at that something. Proficiency is a high degree of competence or skill, an expertise, a mastery.

I sometimes worry that my proclivity for blogging focuses too much on quantity at the expense of quality. If I cut back to just one post a day, or even one every other day, would my less frequent posts be more engaging, interesting, informative, and/or provocative?

But then I realized that, in today’s world of Twitter and Facebook and the myriad talking heads on all of the cable news networks, it’s not what you say, but how often you say it that counts.

Thank you, Donald Trump, for teaching me that.

Written for today’s one-word prompt, “proclivity.”

Twittering Tales — The Pocket Watch

Fandango5 Comments

EBED2568-A891-4DDB-95F3-827674A6FD95I never liked wearing a watch on my wrist. I’m an active person and I tend to scratch or crack the crystal on wristwatches. And I find the straps or bands to be uncomfortable. So I was thrilled when I inherited my grandfather’s old pocket watch. Too bad it doesn’t keep good time.

(280 characters)

Written for this week’s Twittering Tales prompt from Kat Myrman.

Who’s Counting?

Fandango6 Comments

1B4C7C56-6B0F-49A1-A5E3-9FDC2F3723F8I respond to a lot of flash fiction prompts that impose word count limitations. So when I heard about a new word processing/text editing app available for free at the App Store on my iPhone, I downloaded it. The app’s name is “Eddie.”

According to Eddie, “You will always know how many words and characters you have written with Eddie’s Live Counter, which updates as you type.”

I figured I could use Eddie to help me track my word count for prompts where word count matters. I’d use Eddie on my iPhone to compose the post and then cut and paste it into the WordPress app.

I decided to try Eddie out with a 100-word prompt. Using Eddie to compose my post, I diligently edited my draft to get it to be precisely 100 words. At least that was what Eddie told me the word count was. Imagine my surprise when, after copying my Eddie-certified 100-word block of text into the WordPress text editor, it showed 123 words.

What? My reputation as a flash fiction blogger would be destroyed if I were to be caught trying to pass off a 123-word story for a 100-word challenge. I ended up practically rewriting the whole damn post to get it down to 100 words. According to WordPress, anyway.

So I decided to run a test using the following paragraph.

I wrote this paragraph as a test. I participate in a lot of flash fiction prompts that impose word limits. Some require a post to be 100 or fewer words. Others permit up to 175 or 200. Some are micro fiction prompts that allow even fewer words. And one prompt I participate in allows only up to 280 total characters, like Twitter.

The WordPress editor pegged the above paragraph as having 57 words. Microsoft Word tallied 62 words. Same with Pages, an Apple writing app I have on my iPhone — 62 words. But according Eddie, that paragraph had only 45 words!

So what is it really? 45 words? 62 words? 57 words? When I’m participating in a word-limited prompt, should I be conservative and go by the highest count from Microsoft and Apple, the WordPress editor count, or the Eddie count, which shows the lowest word count?

I suppose, since my blog is on WordPress, I should use that app’s word count. Yes?

For what it’s worth, WordPress says this post has 410 words. According to Apple’s Pages app, it has 435 words. Microsoft Word comes in at 429 words. And Eddie tells me this post has 230 words.

But who’s counting?