Thursday, August 27, 2009

Her Own Dictionary

20090827 typecast
Needs New Ribbon

5 comments:

James Watterson said...

Great job Mike, look at that thing purr. It types beautifully!

James Watterson said...

Oh hey Mike, what's the score with the typewriter brigade. We're maxed at 500 and locked out. What should the new one be called. Any ideas?

Strikethru said...

I can't help but thinking that this dictionary is actually the Word Verification Almanac. Which one of us still needs to write...

Nice story. Where did she go? Do you know?

Mike Speegle said...

The end of that thing seriously choked me up. Romantic. Depressing. And who hasn't been swept along in a girl's orbit?

Half a roll of dimes. Damn.

mpclemens said...

[peeks out from under rock]

Nothing negative yet?

[rubs security blankie]

OK, good.

@James: According to the Powers That Be, topics of more that 500 folks will be wiping the forums clean all too soon. I'd like to see how many locked threads we can get this year. :-) Links to both topics and ongoing discussion are available from the main page of the Brigade's flickr group, which anyone can read. If you have a Yahoo account, signing up for flickr is easy (and if you don't, it's still easy.) All are encouraged to join up there as well, since it's a safe haven while the NaNo site goes through it's annual purge-and-binge.

@Strikethru and @Speegle: as is often the case, these lunch-break typing projects are bounded by time, and typecasts by space: this took about an hour to write, and almost a whole page, considering that I was double-spacing according to some very specific mandates for this model. The ending I had in my head was even more maudlin: I expected that she just upped and went to Paris, and the parcel he gets in the mail years later are her personal effects, along with a letter in French from a hospital, which he can't bear to have translated. Substitute francs for dimes. There was a whole setup about them writing midnight poetry on the beach and tossing them into the small fire at their feet, words keeping them warm, which I'd carry over to him burning her dictionary (unread?).

Oh, it would have gotten soppy for sure.