It's probably not the first thing I thought of, but when I saw Glen's topic, I thought of 24.

I don't watch the show anymore. I stopped sometime early last season when I realized I just didn't care anymore. I enjoyed the first season, and I think the second is even better, but last year I realized I could be doing so many other, more interesting things with my time. So I stopped watching. But, still, that's what I thought of when I saw the topic: 24 fan fiction.

Specifically, about Kim and that gorram cougar. But I wasn't actually prepared to write that. So I wrote this instead. I doubt it's any better.

Which goes a long way to explaining absolutely nothing, except maybe why "24 hours" got me thinking about fan fiction.

They can't all be diamonds, people.

Did I really mispell -potamus? Oops.

Hmph.

I'll be indisposed next week, so I posted a topic for my day, future-dating it to Monday. Since I published it, it shows up on the site. If I set it as a draft, none of the rest of you has the privs to publish it. So. Monday's up.

And whoever's left standing after the carnage, that's the new regional vice president!

Thanks. Nothin' brilliant, but it made me smile, too. Wrote it on the train ride home.

"Bring Your Semi-Automatic and Pent-Up Frustration to Work Day" Now that's a holiday I could get behind. Your sandpaper post made me laugh, Fred.

Just added a post for Sandpaper, you bastard! This is going far too well...

Thanks. I'm glad you both liked it. :-)

Sharon, the only e-mail I got was the short one to which I responded:

< blockquote class="topic" >testing#8230;< /blockquote >

I didn't, for instance, get Glen's post, and I don't know how to post by e-mail.

Addendum: I just got my post by e-mail, so at least something's working. :)

Addendum 2: Wow. Yeah, Glen, that was definitely cool.

Fred, let me know how that worked. I set the blog to email you when it published, and I also set up the alias for mail-to-blogger. In the latter, it converted my html into escaped characters, but in general, it worked. I'm curious what it mailed out to you.

Woah. Hi, Glen. That was cool.

Sharon, if it's not any trouble, then yes, I definitely would like that.

You know, it's not that I think my actions are being closely monitored at work, or that I'd be fired if I visited here on my lunch break for a minute (or ten). But I am relatively new to the company, and my first day did include the whole "the computers are only for work" spiel. So better safe than sorry, right?

Webmail seems to be okay. (Nobody from IT or Human Resources has come to have a talkin' with me yet.) So as long as I don't start handing out my CRC Press e-mail address, I should be okay.

Thanks!

Fred (and others), checking into some solutions for the two problems you'd mentioned: finding out the topic without visiting the site, and writing while on the train.

I can set the blog to send an email with, I presume, content, whenever the site is published. Fred, do you want me to set it to your unreality address? If others are interested, I'll find a non-spammy listserv manager, and set it to mail to that.

Likewise, it's possible to set up an address that you can email back to the blog with. username.secretcode@blogger.com. I can set that, and then email the address to each of you, if you like.

Two new folks have contacted me about joining, so I'll be setting them up in the next few days.

And I'm sure you weren't suggesting that this is Joe Nobody's website.

How about Asimov's? Maybe scifi.com, since they seem to encourage new ideas from not-yet-famous people.

Hmm. Does anyone know of a good market for science fiction short-shorts? A good bit of what I've written here qualifies and doesn't necessarily lend itself to expansion. I'm not looking for paying markets (of which I doubt there are many, for short-shorts), but something a little more respectable and noticeable than Joe Nobody's website.

Not that I have anything against Joe Nobody, mind you. The Nobodies are good people.

600+ is a good place to share writing market resources.

For instance, I've got a violent, unsettling, 5,000-word story that, after some polishing, I'll be ready to shop around. Where might I go with that? I'm thinking Maxim, as a start. Maybe some of the other men's magazines publish that kind of fiction? I'm not sure. Tips?

--Ooh, I just remembered one brainwave I'd had: Check my Joe Lansdale collection to see where he'd first published those stories.