The Cell Phone: Unsuccessful Short Story Entry #2
Wednesday, September 22nd, 2010“During your weekly housecleaning you find and unfamiliar cell phone in the cushions of your couch—but can’t recall having had any recent visitors. It rings.”
That was the Writer’s Digest short story contest prompt that I tackled this month. I had to wait a full two weeks to experience the head shake that followed the manic clicks through the the semi-finalist list. Out of 670+ entries, I ended up in the bottom 666. It was statistically interesting, but not quite the professional validation I was looking for.
I read through all of the chosen entries to see what they had that I didn’t, and then spent a little time wondering if an electronic glitch had diverted my entry before it arrived, gleaming, in the Writer’s Digest inbox. That devolved into me staring out the window and contemplating what level of illegal it would be to naturally brine my computer. I eventually leaned back in my squeaky office chair, my fingers interlaced on my forehead as if trying to trap any remaining confidence from evaporating into the salty sea air.
I unlaced my fingers, scratched my hair more than I needed to, and went back to reread my contest entry. Of course, it wasn’t nearly as good as I remembered. I wanted to rearrange and tighten up a lot of what I thought was already arranged and tight, but working on it further felt like searching for the perfect rebuttal while lying in bed alone.
Below is my submission. Comments, suggestions, and cleverly combined swear words are welcome.
I never meant to hurt anyone when I started this blog so many years ago, but by now a lot of you have probably heard in vicious detail from other sites who the personality behind this site really is. I feel the need to explain myself here so that my life can get back to normal.
At a time when my feedreader is choking on the bones of abandoned blogs that are being voraciously devoured 140 characters at a time, my blog is turning eight years old. That’s a long time for something to exist on the web without a viable business model. I think I know how the dinosaurs felt.
I’ve developed a few WordPress plugins and I love to hack WordPress, so there are times when I need to write and test PHP within the WordPress framework. Because
Every web guru will tell you that having a list of your best posts readily available for new visitors is important to attracting new readers. Unfortunately, creating and updating that list can be very time consuming. Best Foot Forward is a WordPress plugin that I wrote to take some of the grunt work out of creating those lists and get you back to writing.
I’ve written about Stumbleupon in the past because it has driven so much traffic back to this site, but I mainly use my Stumbleupon page as an overflow for all of the funny stuff that I can’t seem to work into my blog. It’s so easy to use that it has become one of my most frequently used social networks. Back in August, StumbleUpon announced that they’d be making changes to the way their friend system works, and it looks like the new system is finally in place. Curious about some of the changes? Well, let’s check them out.
When you use Firefox’s built in search bar, the default behavior is for the search results to be returned in your current tab. This is fine for most people, but for bloggers, it can mean that the search results overwrite something long and unsaved that the back button can’t salvage.
I was talking with
Do you let your WordPress blogroll go stale because importing and recategorizing hundreds of your current reads is too much of a chore? I do. Although WordPress will import an OPML file of all my feeds, the importer is only capable of importing my links into a single category. If you’ve ever used this function to import a large number of links spread over several categories, you know that having to manually move each individual link to the correct category is enough of a chore that it’s easier to let your links go stale.


If you’ve spent any amount of time around me, you know that even though I can understand the needs and inner workings of applications, understanding the subtlety and cues of people has never been my strong suit. It’s actually been said that women who flirt with me should start the conversations off by lifting their shirts to give me a 60% chance of figuring out that I was being flirted with.