February 20, 2025

Random thought: How many paranoids does it take to change a lightbulb? I dunno–who’s asking?

Welcome back to Thursdays with Scotty. It’s just like Tuesdays With Morrie except it’s not Tuesday and I’m not Morrie. Other than that, it’s exactly the same.

This week’s story is from my first book. I’m sharing it this week, not only because I had a lost week in Vegas (ask me about it later) but also because it’s very relevant to what I’ll be doing this weekend. If you only know me from writing these 101-word stories, you may not know that I wrote and produced movies (mostly shorts) before writing fiction. An actor friend who wants to make her own movies asked if I’d consider letting her use one of my short stories to make a movie. I said yes, and then I also said yes to directing it. So despite my commitment to focus on fiction and not let movie making distract me, I’m returning to the set this weekend to shoot one of my favorite 101-word tales. I’ll let you know how it comes out when we’re done. In the meantime, if you’d like to see any of my film work, here’s a link to some of it. https://www.scottycornfield.com Either scroll down the page and click on the movie posters or click on the Movies tab.

And now here’s the Story of the Week—soon to be a minor motion picture.

Unfortunately, Not Everybody’s a Baseball Fan

Holding hands and clearly in love, Dirk and Jessica strolled the deserted downtown street.

Jessica playfully kissed his ear as she removed the .22 semi-auto from her purse.

Two apartments ahead, a man in a Phillies ball cap exited and strode past.

Jessica whipped around and fired a bullet into the man’s brain.

“What’re you doing?” Dirk barked.

“Orders were to take out the dude in the Pirates hat,” she explained.

“Right, but he’s wearing a Phillies hat!”

“It had a ‘P’ on it,” Jessica protested.

“They’re not even in the same division,” Dirk scowled.

“Like I’m supposed to know that?”

Prompt: Execution of an innocent person

Novel News & Notes:

On the Questionable Characters front, I feel like I’m getting better at losing non-essential parts of the story. The word count is definitely falling, and if I want to meet my goal of getting down to 90,000 words (or less) by the end of the month, it’s going to take a major push, with a lot more hours in front of the computer, I’m determined to get there. So if you’re out and about, frequenting coffee shops, libraries, or my writing cave, watch for falling paragraphs.

As always, thanks for listening.

Scotty out