I love text adventures! Thank you, Fred.

And I liked Ben's chat room—sitting together writing notes on paper. When I was very little, my mom and I used to pass notes under my door; I always thought that was cool, quickly getting over whatever I was mad about.

I wonder what mom will get to know about me from my writing...

Thanks for letting me join. I'm looking forward to loosening up my creative side. I also like the idea of a sense of community as I get to know each of you through your writing.

Two penguins are sitting in the bathtub. One of them drops the bar of soap, and the other one says...

"For a minute there, I thought you were a typewriter!"

(It is not, in fact, a long story, but it really ruins the joke to tell it.)

I think I have made up my mind to continue using the Pro service from Blogger. The order of posts is rather significant on 600 seconds, so I'd like to keep the timestamp-editing ability. Also, spell-check is nice. Lastly, I feel guilty for the amount of traffic I'm responsible for, so I should pony up some cash. I'll look into setting up a PayPal merchant account, to allow contributors (and visitors!) to chip in, should they so wish. I suppose I'll have to start giving budget reports; I wouldn't want to make a profit on this.

In case you are wondering, Mom asked if she could join. My intuition tells me that, at some point, the guest list will get unweildy, but I do not believe that it has yet. When it does, we can start a sister site. It's all good.

I like what is happening here, so I want to share it as much as I can. Assembled here, I think we have some of the finest Writers Who Never Write—and now they're writing. That makes me intensely happy. Mom is a writer who never writes; I'd just forgotten that until she asked.

The only challenge that I see with a growing guest list is that more time is inserted between the topic-giving days of people who post nearly daily. To mitigate this, feel free to plan ahead and future-date your topic posts, to put them on the right days.

I am not saying I told you so; I am just saying. Remi, see rule #6. Sorry to hear that you lost a post; that can make you nuts. I actually write in a text editor and then paste into Blogger.

Fred allows 19 minutes to elapse before he protests that this isn't the only thing he does all day. Mm-hmm.

I like days that get lots of responses better than ones that don't, but it's not a thing I can force in other people. Writing is like a soap bubble: if you are rough with it, you will ruin it. In Toastmasters, on the other hand, I'm gonna bust some heads.

Metaphorically.

*grumble*

Not my only outlet, thank you very much. But it's true, there's not a lot to do here with the boss man still in Japan for another three or four days (I say three or four because he gets in late Thursday night but might be jetlagged enough that he sleeps late and goes directly, only, to the lab on Friday). An opportunity to write -- and I got twenty minutes out of this today -- is always welcome.

And yeah, I do prefer writing on topics provided by others, if only because it gives me less temptation to cheat by having an idea already bouncing around my head. I'd be perfectly happy to let you take tomorrow's topic, Remi. It's not as if I have one already set to go. Most likely, I'd just have picked one at random from this list.

Resolved the issue of the beauty post by adding another one, back-dating it, deleting the original, and republishing the archives. If both posts were present, both would show on the page. If I removed the new post, the old one disappeared, too. Adding it back and then deleting the original worked. The next time someone publishes 600s, it may wipe that post out of the archives again. I dunno, my usual thought on these things applies:

"Even in the future, nothing works."

Oh. If I'd known it would make you frown, Remi, I wouldn't have taken your topic. But Fred is really bored—we are his only outlet, his only respite—and he likes to write on topics provided by others, so I thought I'd jump in there before he did. He might be happy to let you take tomorrow's topic. Fred?

Fred, cool thought, compelling to explore.

Man, I am having no end of grief with Blogger lately. The "beauty" topic post won't show up in the published archive (because it's in the middle of the night?), and some archive pages are ordered chronologically, and some reverse-chronologically. Can anyone detect a pattern? I give Ev a lot of credit, but still, argh.

I also think some folks haven't received their invites. I know Jon didn't. Since some people did, I didn't want to follow up with more invites right away, for fear of seeming pushy. (Hence, tazing when a topic is missed. Um...)

re: secret lovers on the moon

It's hard to know exactly what I had in mind -- with just ten minutes I try, sometimes unsuccessfully, to write more and think less -- but no, I hadn't envisioned it as a time machine story. I don't think it really matters whether or not she and the future he travels to are real, so long as they're real to him. The Keats line (from Endymion), which rattles around my brain pretty much every time I hear the word beauty, is what did it for me. For ever... What if you fell in love with someone from the future?

re: beautiful Fred

Is it a time travel story? Based on your comment, Fred, in your mind, I guess it is. From what's written, it doesn't have to be. I think I have a secret lover on the moon.

By popular demand, my ten-minute friends, I give you: A discussion space! So come on in, take your shoes off, put your feet up on the furniture.

To easily refer to posts on 600 seconds, you can include in your post a link to a particular entry. This blog supports the same feature, if you'd like to refer to something someone said earlier. To find the address of a post, locate the post on the published blog (not in the Blogger edit window), and click on its timestamp. The permanent address of the archived post will appear in the address bar of your browser. To link to it, highlight the url, press Ctrl+C to copy it, return to the Blogger edit window, and press Ctrl+V to paste it into your anchor tag.

The first topic I am interested in discussing is Dave's theories on threading online discussions.