Explanation

It's not always going to be like this, sometimes I'll put in something different, but the cornerstone of Read Planet is the Sentence Exercise.

The origin of the S.E. is varied and murky, I'll explore them later on, but the concept is pretty simple. Give me a sentence. Any sentence. I will take it and write a story or a teaser or a couple paragraphs that utilizes that sentence exactly as written.

That's it, really. So send me a sentence. Doesn't have to be specific, doesn't have to be in any kind of context.

So. Where did this come from? Couple three ways.

First, I grew up in L.A. On Sundays (after the good Saturday cartoons were fading memories and vague impulses to buy He-man action figures) a guy named Tom Hatton hosted a Popeye cartoon show. In between cartoons he'd do a segment where he'd take a squiggle that some kid had sent him (or some PA had whipped up) and he'd turn it into a picture. Didn't matter what mess of black spaghetti he was handed, Tom could turn it into a finished cartoon. You couldn't even tell where the scribble had been.

Secondly, I read about Harlan Ellison doing a stunt at A Change of Hobbit in L.A. to help bring in customers. It was a book store (Another Change of Hobbit still exists in Berkeley and they have a basement that would make a genre bibliophile wet themselves) devoted to sci-fi/fantasy. As a child I went there several times with my parents. A clerk explained to me why the bumper sticker that simply read "He's Dead Jim" was funny. Anyway, Ellison apparently spent a week in the big display window of A Change of Hobbit. Every day he sat at a table with a typewriter and wrote a short story. At the end of each day he sent the story of the day off to a magazine for publishing. Seven days, seven stories.

Thirdly, I once said with confidence that I could write anything. Sadly, I didn't add that it would always be good.