Cnstrn'd Writing

Extraterrestrials made contact….  Inappropriate sexual contact.

Pixel liked books.  Sometimes he would pick up a book from his library, open it to a random page, and read.

Okay, he never actually did that, but he thought of himself as the kind of guy that would.  Which was what he thought when he saw his friend Bre had a lot of books she didn’t want.

“I get them for free, but if you want them, I’ll give them to you: I never use them,”  Bre said.

So Pixel got some brand new text books for free.  He was happy.

Months went by and he never so much as touched them again. Which was on his mind when his friend Lola saw how many books he had in his library and asked him why he didn’t sell them.

“I sold this exact book last week for $50!”  Lola said.

Pixel realized something: “I got them for free, but if the Internet wants them, I’ll give them to you to sell.  After all, I’ll never use them.”

Something about his words sounded familiar, but he shrugged the feeling off.

The next day, Lola came up to Pixel as he was printing an assignment.  “You made $200!”  she said.  Pixel was happy.  Just then, Bre came in, wondering what was with the commotion.

“Pixel made $200 off these books that he mysteriously has.  But he won’t say where they came from!”  Lola blabbed.
Pixel grinned stupidly from ear to ear.  He had just suffered a crippling stroke.

Vexing

absolution—

loneliness

emotion;

noticing

today

indeed

not

even

silence’ll

discover

another

yesterday

• When I was in high school and college,
  I used to write stories in bullet form.
• The story goes like this:
  I used to write brilliant prose and not-so-brilliant lists.
• People would only read my dim lists and skim my bright prose.
• So I tried to think of a way to trick people into reading prose without realizing that
  that was what they were doing.
• Suddenly, it occurred to me that there was a feature I never seemed to use in Word: bullets.
• There’s very nearly no place for bulleted lists in humorous or even fictional writing.
• Think about it.
• So why couldn’t I co-opt it to serve my own nefarious purposes?
• And co-opt it I did.  I would write silly stories with no aim in mind,
  but once I put them into the format of “Bullets”
• people would be drawn to them, thinking they were a quick read.
• and the people would stay because they were at least an interesting read.
• The bullets were brilliant!
• They even made me seem less dim.