Story of the Week

Hanging With the Cool Kid

Curtis Johnson was the cool kid in school—the one other kids followed. His smug grin tipped off alert parents who somehow knew that bad things would happen to kids who hung around Curtis.

He was always extremely polite around the neighborhood parents, but his act didn’t fool them. “If Curtis jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge,” parents asked their kids, “would you jump too?”

When Curtis did jump from the Golden Gate, parents asked themselves, “Did our question about jumping off the bridge cause this?”

“Our hypothetical question wasn’t responsible,” one father said. But my shove was, he thought, satisfied.

Prompt: Under the influence

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Next Up: FAST FICTION (vol. 2)

Last week I promised I’d share my latest plans for the sequel to vol. 1, so here’s what I’m excited to tell you about. The next collection of 101-word tales will be called FAST FICTION, Vol. 2: Man vs. Machine

I plan to tap into the A.I. craze that is all the rage. I thought it would be fun to see how my stories (written by a human–allegedly) would stack up against stories generated by one of the popular artificial intelligence sites, so…I’m taking 50 of my latest stories and I’ll be feeding the same prompts into the machine to see what it comes up with. I’m thinking that my readers–and I know you’re both out there–will enjoy comparing my work against the machine’s. One amusing thing that I’ve already learned is that the site I’m going to use (ChatGPT) does not have a word count built in. So much for superior intelligence. Even though I specifically asked the machine to give me a 101-word story using the prompt I provided, it couldn’t exactly match the word count–and I tried it twice.

I’m currently going through my inventory of more than 500 stories, looking for 50 new ones for Man vs. Machine. I’m also thinking I might have some fun by posting some of my stories of the week, along with the A.I. version of the story. I won’t let you know which one I wrote. I’ll let you figure it out. Anyone who’s read even a few of my stories will probably guess right every time, but I still think it could be fun.

OK. That’s it for this edition. As always, feel free to keep those prompts coming.

Thanks for listening!

Scotty out