Today, we are going to start out with the flash fiction I am writing for today’s Flash Fiction panel :

1.Eugh, what’s that smell? It’s like someone left yogurt out in the sun for a week then poured it onto someone’s army boot! It’s like someone threw up after a heavy meal of ice cream and sweaty socks! It’s like my nose is being dragged through the locker room of an abandoned dairy plant!

And for God’s sake, WHY IS IT MAKING ME HUNGRY?

(Yay, they laughed!)

2. Hey kids! Guess what? Tanya the Tiger’s spaceship has landed in Tommy the Tarsier’s back yard for another semester of fun! With the power of their special kind of love, as well as the fun games that the kindly old wizard Hotpants taught them to play, and the help their friends Harry the Hotblooded Hare and Frankie the Friendly Fox, Tommy and Tanya will battle to save their home, the magical land of Nopantsia, from the evil forces of Icelegs, the Wizard of Cold! So join us as the Fun Time gang explores life, love, and each other on… Sun Shine Lovers All Stars Adventures!

(They laughed again!)

3. Okay, I guess I should explain why the cops are here…it’s really just a silly misunderstanding. See, I was just innocently, um… BORROWING our neighbour’s 70 inch television when I guess I tripped some kind of silent alarm and the next thing I know, the cops show up and just ASSUME I was stealing it just because I was putting it in tge back of a windowless black panel van while my um… Friend Vinnie happened to be handing me the 500 dollars he owes me. And the fact that my pockets were stuffed with jewely and silverware was a total coincidence!

(Not much laughs but they enjoyed it)

(–)

Flash fiction is fun! But I am always left with the lingering feeling of wanting to back and finish the pieces, or edit them, or something.

I am back home, and sigh, back to reality. Struggling with the feeling I should have gone to more panels and done more of the other stuff too, like going to the video game room sooner than I did. I only got there a couple hours before it closed for the year, and everyone was playing this excellent game from the makers of You Don’t Know Jack called Quiplash…. except me, because my mobile device (aka my tablet) is too damned slow.

You see, in order to play, you have to point your mobile device’s web browser to the game’s website, and I couldn’t get mine to do that fast enough to join a game before all the slots filled up.

This was very frustrating, as the game was made for someone like me. Basically, people are given comedy prompts, like “worst time to be wearing stilts” or “best thing you can do in your car”, and then the players vote on what answer they like most.

So basically, it’s a comedy competition. And I wanted to play so badly!

This experience, and other times when my slow fucking tablet has proved to be a social liability, has solidified my resolve to use some of the rest of my education fund on a new tablet. One that is fast, modern, sleek, and reliable.

I might also get a smartphone. Or maybe just the smartphone. I am not sure. Maybe what I should do is get the smartphone and use it for a while, then see if I still feel like I need a tablet.

But I dunno. Smartphones are so small compared to my tablet, and I am a big guy with big hands and big fingers so I really appreciate the extra room. Plus I am an old man with eyes growing weaker all the time, so having a bigger text display area is also a good thing.

Then again, I would look pretty silly holding a tablet to my ear. Maybe I will get both.

Plus I still need a new wallet. All my important cards (ID, credit, Compass) keep falling out into my pocket, and I am terrified that one of these times I am going to lose something important. I know that it will be hard for me to choose a wallet, which is part of why I keep putting it off. Option paralysis and all that. But things are getting dire.

I had fun at the con. Got to talk to Marzi, aka Stuart Royan, for hours n’ hours. I only ever seen him at conventions, which is a shame, because we get each other on a level that runs very deep. We can talk for hours and not get bored. And we can pick up exactly where we left off after not seeing each other for half a year.

Laughed like hell doing Eye of Argon again. Having that and another version of the Turkey Readings twice a year makes me feel embarrassingly blessed. I quite like the alternate Turkey Readings (the Furkey Readings). In the original, at Vcons, people bid to start or stop the reading and that’s it.

But Tony Greyfox added the idea of being able to bid to make him read the bad fiction in whatever silly voice or under whatever weird rules we want, and that produces a much different kind of hilarity. We had so much fun making him read in falsetto, in a Scottish accent, as fast as possible, etc.

But it was the rules that were the most fun, like making him replace one noun in each sentence with “pants” (aka one of the funniest words in the English language) or making him treat all punctuation as periods, which made for a lot of very short, punchy sentence fragments.

I did two : read everything as if it is very naughty (lots of bizarre innuendo from that one) and “you’re very pissed off and everything you read is pissing you off”.

I admittedly stole both of those from improv classes.

Well that’s it for me for now, fuzzies.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.