100 Words a Day 26

"That hit was huge," he exclaimed to the brunette beside him.

“Yeah,” she agreed.

“How does a Chicago fan end up watching Derby in a bar in Denver?” he asked.

“I could ask you a similar question about how a guy wearing a fancy shirt and a tie ended up in a bar watching Derby.”

“I asked you first.”

“I came out here for college, got a job and stayed. What’s your story?”

“When I was poor I’d go to the bouts because I’d get in free if I volunteered and I kept going after I could afford to pay.”

100 Words a Day 25

This one's for Gramps:

The hat was a tired, army green with a short, dusty bill and drooping ear flaps. The underside of the bill and the inside of the hat had a fuzzy lining that kept out most of the chill. The World War II hat had arrived at the present battered and unfashionable, but still warm as ever. There was a tag on the inside with words he could read but information he didn’t understand, except for the name. It was his grandfather’s last name and first initial. It was all he had left of the man who had raised his mother. 

100 Words a Day 24

“Nobody’s chains are shinier than mine,” he thought to himself, “and with my brushed teeth, that gold cap is just as bright.”

He ran a comb through his hair, ensuring it was slicked back to irresistible perfection, before running the comb through his mustache, ensuring it too was bringing it’s A game to the evening. He opened is linen shirt in the front, because only he was baller enough to let all that chest hair show for the ladies, and they would know it. He looked in the mirror and, being pleased with his appearance, Chad Baggett hit the clubs.

Activity vs. Productivity from a Book POV

Anyone who has ever done 2 through 100 Even knows the difference between Activity and Productivity. Unfortunately, the distinction seems to have been lost on a segment of the book buying population, who have begun to do price comparisons for books the way they do sugar, by the pound, assuming more writing is better writing.

A friend of mine posted an article on her Facebook page some time ago where the author said books were getting longer. One of the comments extolled the virtues of this tendency, because they felt they were getting more value for their money.

If you pay eight dollars for a four hundred page book (400/800) that comes out to .5 pages per cent. If you buy a six hundred page book for eight dollars (600/800) that comes out to .75 pages per cent. Congrats, you optimized your book buying 50% by purchasing the six hundred page book.

Books should be as short as they possibly can be. Even I, who is so rarely accused of being stingy when it comes to length in the written medium, must agree. Let's look at some examples of some popular books:

Don Quijote
Moby Dick
War and Peace

These books are all furiously long and have a reputation for being a slog.

The Giver
Of Mice and Men
Captain Blood

In contrast, these books are considerably shorter and have much more favorable reputations.

Now, take Don Quijote and just read the first sally, which is the first five or six chapters. You'll find it is much more enjoyable than the bulk of the remaining text, except the parts about enemas and when he bad mouths the guy who wrote the False Quijote and maybe when Sancho gets the island.

After that, take Of Mice and Men and put in pages of descriptions of the repetitive happenings that occur while Lenny and George are at the farm, throw in some horticulture discussions, and pad the book out to about double its current length and see how much fun it is to read.

Examples of books decried for their length are not limited to ones written by people who are dead; there are plenty of contemporary examples. Plenty will argue that large chunks of the Game of Thrones series could have been excised for example.

Still one of those people who feels the longer and cheaper a book the better cost to value? I give you Antoine de Saint-Exupery, assuming my Google search was correct:

 "Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."

One might also note, according to Google, he was a writer.

100 Words a Day 23

Growing up, he had always read about prophets having visions dance before their eyes. That was bullshit, his visions didn’t dance for shit. They hung in front of his eyes, foreboding, threatening, like the sword of Damocles, ready to fall on him at any moment. Those fakers he read about always talked in images and riddles. His visions were clear, and they were terrible, much more like that guy’s dream in the movie Black Robe, except they were always bad, never vague. At first he had tried to avoid them. That worked about as well as it did in literature. 

100 Words a Day 22

Eyes were staring at them out of the night. The children could see them through the floor to ceiling windows of their house that looked out into the darkness. The house lights were on; the eyes could look in and see everything through those same windows. The two children had convinced each other that they were being watched by some sort of otherworldly being, ready to eat them if given the chance. They wanted to turn off the lights and flee the room, but didn’t dare take their eyes off those glowing orbs. Through the night they continued to stare.

100 Words a Day 21

He sat by the phone, waiting for her call. They had Math class together, not algebra or geometry, Math. He wasn’t good at math and apparently she wasn’t either. At first he’d been embarrassed that he got put in Math class, rather than Algebra One, he forgot all of that when he saw her sitting next to the last open seat. And when he talked to her, he hadn’t gotten tongue tied! Every other time he’d tried to talk to a cute girl he’d tripped over his words and just ended up feeling dumb.

 His phone buzzed: it was her!