It’s a new year! If you use that whole Gregorian Calendar thing. Plus there’s a whole extra Monday at the end of next month.
This calls for something special, so I’ve decided that I’m going to run a series of micro-fiction pieces every Monday this year (except the first one, because I was too busy being indecisive).
All these little storylets will adhere to the following rules:
- They will be no more than 5 words long
- Their titles will be no more than 37 words long (this one explain the first rule)
- Each will present the “last words” of a person or other being (or thing)
This is something I’m doing for fun, although I’d certainly prefer if other people find them amusing as well. Because they’re very, very short, I’ll likely also include a little bit of chatter about each week’s story or related notes of interest.
So to start us off, here’s one inspired by my love of tall tales, lies, and (more directly) by Alliteration Ink’s call for stories for their “No Shit” anthology, which ended a few days back and to which Matt Dovey and I submitted a co-written story.
I was (no shit) going to submit this there, but (alas!) they had a minimum wordcount of 2000 words.
The Last Words of Baron Münchhausen
by Stewart C Baker
No shit, there I was…
Baron Münchhausen, for those not familiar, was a fictitious German nobleman based on a real one (of a different name) who had a penchant for telling egregiously ridiculous stories about his travels to Russia, the bottom of the ocean, and the moon (among other places). He’s made a brief appearance at the very end of one of my other stories, Selections from the Aarne-Thompson Index for After the End of Things, which you can also read for free online, courtesy of the wonderful folks at The Sockdolager. (This story may or may not present the same Münchhausen.)
In other news, I’ll have a guest post up this Wednesday, by the inimitable Daniel M. Bensen. So if you want to learn how dinosaurs can fix your need for speed, be sure to keep an eye out for that.