Even Shorter

This morning I was reading about this guy, Sean Hill, who writes bite-sized short stories on his Twitter page, average length 140 characters, or less.  Not words mind you, but characters.  He has a huge following, but as I'm not a Twit, this was all news to me.  I read some of his little bites--they were funny, weird and cool.  He has recently published a book of 300 of these tiny stories.  Here's an example:

I handed Tom his birthday present.  Awkward pause. "Didn't you get ME anything?" I asked. "I forgot." We're not the closest of twins.

One of many that made me laugh.  Follow this link to the Huffington Post article where you can read several more, if you're interested.

So.  I thought 100 Words was difficult.  How hard would it be to write only 140 characters..??  I tried a few different approaches--delete, delete, delete.  It's hard to draw a scene with such few words, at least it is for me. 

As I was sipping my coffee, pondering the task, watching the rain stream down the windows, this came to me.  It isn't funny, like most of Sean's, but I did manage to write it with only--counting spaces--128 characters.

"Your coffee always tastes better than mine," he grumbled. "Secret ingredient," she smiled.  Raised brow, waiting. "Italian DNA."


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And speaking of rain.  It's a regular monsoon today in precip-parched Roseburg.  Howling winds, lashing rain.  Love it, love it.  Though I can't say the same for the boys.  Even with the crap weather, I still tried to take them to the park, figuring once we got there, they would ignore the storm.  Come on.  They're dogs.  But no.  The buggers wouldn't even get out of the car.  I'm standing in the pouring rain, trying to coax them out of the back seat, and they actually turned their heads away from me like they were embarrassed I could be so stupid.

Fine.  See if I care.



Though, once we got home, I made them stay in the backyard until they actually acted like dogs instead of nancy boys, then we all trooped upstairs to get dried off. 

I'm really happy we're having such a storm, but equally happy I'm no longer living in Seattle where they are buried under snows they haven't experienced in nearly 30 years.





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"Left us in the rain." "Yeah." "Called us nancy boys." Ponder. "What's that mean?" "Must mean we're brave, we got treats when we came in."        (139 characters, with spaces).