Tag: Saturday Centus

I know, I know. A day late. Yesterday was a pretty busy one, though, so I didn’t get around to mulling over this week’s prompt until late, and I didn’t start writing until this morning. So here it is. I stuck with science fiction again. The best SF stories, for me, are still about what any good story is about: people. Anyway, here it is, with the prompt in bold.

“Your purpose on Mars?” asked Martian Entry Agent Miguel Martinez.

“Work,” James Nelson replied. “None on Earth. There is on Mars.”

“M-hm.” Agent Martinez finished searching the Nelsons’ baggage. James sighed with relief. “Any illegal contraband requires immediate force-return to Earth,” the sign said. Families had been sent back for the smallest things in their transpo-crates.

Emily, James’s daughter, squirmed in his wife Molly’s arms. “Shhh,” she said.

Now Martinez was scanning the Nelsons’ purple entry-and-work visa. Everything depended on this single card: one problem with their purple card, and it was back to Earth.

“Pass through,” Martinez said.

James exhaled. The Nelsons were immigrants now.

Share This Post

Wow, did I ever have a struggle with this week’s prompt. Seriously, this was hard — much harder than the awful dog photo of two weeks back.

I didn’t really set out to approach these in the general way that I have, but each time out I’ve tried to take an “off-kilter” interpretation of the prompt, and this was no different…but this week, no good alternative presented itself to me. I kept running through all kinds of possibilities, and no dice; I feared that I’d have to play this one straight. Heck, maybe that would be a good challenge for me on one of these, some time down the road: write using a normal interpretation of the prompt!

But this time, I thought of something. I honestly could have done with more words this time out, but I think it turned out OK. Here’s my entry, with the prompt in bold.

I shouldn’t have come to Jane’s party, Brenna thought.

She certainly shouldn’t have agreed to play ‘Answer-the-Monkey’, the new party game with the computerized monkey head that read your mind and asked personal questions based on a setting from 1 to 20, with 20 being your deepest-and-darkest secrets. It was ‘Truth-or-Dare’ run by a machine. After a lot of sangria, the ladies had turned it up all the way. The ATM machine began dispensing twenties.

“Brenna,” the monkey said, “who did you last sleep with?”

Brenna glanced at the picture on the wall of Jane’s husband.

ATM was an evil game.

I dunno. I’m kind of ‘meh’ on this one….

Share This Post

OK, we’ve got a more conducive prompt this week, thank God! Apparently Jenny Matlock selected a snippet from a song lyric. I didn’t bother listening to the song for inspiration, though — that’s what coffee is for! It’s inspiration in a cup.

But anyway, here’s my tale, which may well establish me as the science fiction geek of the Saturday Centus crowd. But I’m pretty much already a science fiction geek, so it’s fine by me!

Here’s my tale, with the prompt in bold.

James and William crouched on opposite sides of the open door to the control room of Mars’s mightiest battle cruiser. Alarms were still blaring; smoke choked the corridors. Martian troopers were searching for the intruders, to no avail. Two men, seconds away from winning the war for Earth.

“Before we do this,” James said, “I gotta say you’ve been a hell of a partner, man. I’d catch a grenade for ya.”

“OK,” William said as he tossed James a live grenade and ran away.

“Martian double-agent,” James said, stunned. “Son-of-a–”

Boom.

And Mars conquered Earth.

By the way, I’ve just figured out that Google Docs’s word count function somehow counts HTML tags as words! I always write them into my text, as is my habit for writing online, but I experimented a bit: I wrote the tale, checked the word count, then I went back and deleted the HTML tags (italics and bold, actually), and checked the word count again — which had gone down. Interesting.

Anyway, enjoy!

(And as always, or at least until I finish answering questions, Centus participants are invited to Ask Me Anything!)

Share This Post

It’s that time again!

One thing I didn’t realize, in my last few weeks’ entries, is that the word count limitation on this weekly micro-fiction bit of fun actually doesn’t include the writing prompt itself. Now, that may not seem like much — this week’s prompt is only seven words — but when such a strict word-count limitation is imposed, word choice becomes a premium. I’m really enjoying doing this thing every Saturday because it’s really good practice: it forces your hand, really, in choosing words for effect. You only have a hundred words to work with, and in the space of that hundred words, you have to establish a setting and your character(s) and tell an actual tale.

So anyway, here’s what I came up with. The prompt is in bold, within the tale.

Timmy and Tommy came bursting into the kitchen, tracking snow behind them.

“Mom! Mom! MOM!”

“Yes, boys?”

“We saw a SNOW MONSTER!” said Timmy.

“It was GREEN!” said Tommy.

“It ate a whole COW!” said Timmy.

“And it had wings!”

“And teeth THIS LONG!”

“It crushed a car with its fists!”

“And it was growing bigger by the minute!”

Mom nodded. “That’s nice, boys. Take off your things and I’ll make cocoa.”

Timmy looked at Tommy.

“Where do you think we lost her?” Timmy asked.

“‘Bigger by the minute’,” Tommy said.

“Marshmallows?” Mom asked.

“Yes, please,” said Timmy and Tommy.

Share This Post

I’m kinda late with this, but no matter. Here are the details, and the prompt appears in bold in the story. I went ahead and did SF again. Sue me!

Agent RO-9 shone her light around the cavernous space they’d just unearthed. “What is this place?”

“A storage facility,” Agent ZX-3 replied.

“For what?” She moved a pile of rugs and found an enormous box beneath, which she opened. “Look here!” She lifted the stack of letters from the ancient chest.

“Letters?”

“All twenty-six,” RO-9 said. “Numbers too.” She held up a giant numeral 7. “Weird, eh?”

ZX-3 only shrugged. He was looking at something green he’d found in a metal trash can.

“Grouchy,” RO-9 said, and began studying something that looked like a very yellow, big bird.

I hope this one’s not too obscure….

(Oh, by the way, the actor I was hearing in my mind last week? Dennis Franz.)

Share This Post

So this week we’re back to 100 words on Saturday Centus, and we’ve got a writing prompt that is, as readers will attest, right in my wheelhouse. We’re to write SF (which Ms. Matlock claims to hate; why, I don’t know — good SF is wonderful!), using the prompt Beam me up, Scotty. (She spelled Scotty with -ie on the end, but I corrected it. I still have Geek Cred to maintain, you know.)

Here’s my entry.

So I see dis green girl, sittin’ at de end of da bar, right? And she’s kinda cute, not ugly or nothin’, so I’m tinkin’ she might be da type, right? Get her buzzed, go to her place and, ya know, right? But when I go over, she rolls her eyes and says “Beam me up, Scotty.” And I’m tinkin’, I look like a Star Trek guy to you? I walk away and look for a Star Wars girl instead. Gotta do whatcha gotta do, ya know?

Hey baby, wanna see my lightsaber?

No?

Man, bars on Orion suck.

(Hey, and after you read this, if you heard the voice of a specific actor as you did, let me know who. Because I kept hearing a certain actor’s voice, and I’m wondering if anybody else hears it the same way.)

UPDATE: I find it kind of saddening to see that more than a few of the participants seem to hate SF on an almost a priori basis. Sigh….

Share This Post