Tuesday, October 03, 2006

throw some birds in there

When you read your websites on Bloglines, there's always the chance that as the posts begin to pile up for a particular feed, you'll procrastinate reading them even longer, putting it off until a day arrives during which you can fully devote your attention. This happened to me recently with my McSweeney's feed, and as a result, I've been missing the winners of the Thirteen Writing Prompts contest. Dan Wiencek posted the prompts, including:

4. Write a story that ends with the following sentence: Debra brushed the sand from her blouse, took a last, wistful look at the now putrefying horse, and stepped into the hot-air balloon.

8. A husband and wife are meeting in a restaurant to finalize the terms of their impending divorce. Write the scene from the point of view of a busboy snorting cocaine in the restroom.

12. Your main character finds a box of scorched human hair. Whose is it? How did it get there?

The winners are being posted here, and it's a study in how different one human mind is from another.