(And if you're not, hoo-boy, are _you_ on the wrong website :-) 

Until, late last year, I bumped into alt.torture. Newsgroups!! What glorious fun if you can't keep your trap shut. The posts range from the banal to the stupid to the wonderful to the profound, and right back again (and that was only last Thursday night). Yea, verily, I was hooked.

I quickly noticed two things. First, there were _stories_ posted to alt.torture, many of them quite good (if you're into this sort of thing :-). Here was an outlet for  my occasionally bloodsoaked imagination. 

Second, I noticed that if I wanted to get anything _else_ written, I'd better find a way to keep things short. When you're online, the keyboard can just run away with the fingers. Ditto with e-mail.

Then at one point, I tossed a brief, torturous aside into a reply post. It got replies. I did it again; more replies. Hmmmm... Was I on to something?

Oh yah. It was only a small stretch from those clever quips to a special type of story known as the short-short. Simply put, tell a story using as _few_ words as possible. If it's over a page, it's too long. Plot, character, setting; rip 'em to the bone with a chainsaw. Or abandon even those and just sketch out a vignette, a bare fragment of a scene. The reader will fill in the rest. But whatever you do, make it schmeck. Make sure it clicks. Your piece must have bite, like the punchline of a good joke, enough to make the reader go "Whuff." Or guffaw. A short-short story isn't literature so much as it's a firecracker in words.

Which is what I've been cranking out each week since the start of this year, and now archived here; over three hundred as of this writing (June 1997). It started out as a How-many-of-these-puppies-can-I-come-up-with? exercise, and has since turned into a weekly romp into torment and mayhem that's a heckuva lot more fun than beating my head bloody on the keyboard trying to write a 'normal' story. And when I'm fed up to the eyeballs with the main project (the SF novel), I turn to the short-shorts for a little R&R (Rapine and Ruination :-).

Lastly, there's a neat twist of karma to all this. The SF world is chock-a-block with short-shorts, which is how I'm familiar with the form. What's more, a most prominent writer by the name of (wait for it) Frederick Brown used to be SF's premiere practioner of the short-short craft; wrote _bucket's_ of 'em. He died in 1971 and I didn't, but I'll be damned if I'm going to get through this intro without a tip 'o the chapeau to Da' One True Master.

Dunno what he'd make of mine, though; likely run screaming from the room as -- and I mean this in the nicest way -- I hope they do to you :-> Enjoy.
Fred.    fwbrown@nbnet.nb.ca    Woodstock, NB, Canada.

 "Catapultam habeo 
Nisi pecuniam omnem mihi dabis 
ad caput tuum saxum immane 
mittam"