My piece for the next Art Garden (Drabble)

[capri0mni]

(The Art Garden is set up like a literary magazine, with the editor notifying the authors of the theme. Then each writer creates something with that theme, and sends it back to the editor, who then arranges the order of each piece so that the theme is developed coherently. There's one big difference, though: instead of having everything printed in a booklet and mailed out, the writers meet at a small theater and read their works aloud before a live, paying audience.)

The next Art Garden is April 30, and the theme is "Computers"

[Edit: 'Sbeen tweaked a bit, but it's still:]

100 WORDS. EXACTLY (not including this title).

Computer chips are as large as planets, to electrons. Following my commands at near the speed of light, electrons race across those worlds, tracing patterns I recognize, and sending them through my phone line.

Somewhere else, someone else is commanding them, too. His words appear on my screen; my words appear on his.

Outside my window, it's a spring afternoon. Outside his window, it's an autumn morning. Others are here, too: some on lunch break, at supper, or restless, in the middle of the night. Yet we are together, in this moment - in a room defined by our imaginations.

Wow.

Comments

[lizziebelle.livejournal.com]

Is the 100 words thing a rule, or did you decide to do it that way?

[capriuni.livejournal.com]

Both, actually. There's a story form that I first came across in alt.drwho.creative called a "Drabble" -- after a Google search, it seems to be a form invented in the fan fiction community -- and I found this page: Drabbleology (http://home.earthlink.net/~sef1029/DrabbleWorlds.htm). I would have put "drabble" in the title, somewhere, if I thought that most of the audience knew what a drabble was.

I was orginally going to go the traditional essay route, with this thing -- about the first time I saw PC, and couldn't have imagined how it would change my life, yadda-yadda. But the immediacy and intimacy of that one shared moment in imagined space couldn't have more impact with more words, and in a traditional essay, that one line would have been lost in the build-up.

And since the Internet introduced me to the drabble, it seemed a perfect form for talking about the Internet.