Bionic Punchline

Introduction

You are reading a book.

>KEEP READING

No, you don’t understand. You don’t have to type stuff in like a text adventure—I’m not even sure how you managed to do that just now—you simply read whatever’s there. This bit is the introduction. It’s how you find out more about the book.

>EXAMINE BOOK

It’s a book. And not one of those books that asks you to hop to certain parts to make decisions: you simply read it front to back. Though since it’s a collection of almost entirely unrelated stories I suppose you could probably go ahead and read them in any order you like. I do recommend reading each story front to back, however, otherwise things might get confusing.

>WHY STORIES UNRELATED?

I do speak English, you know. You don’t need to type like you’re talking to a chimp. Anyway, the stories tend to be unrelated because I wrote them for Flash Fiction Month: a month-long event held every July during which participants write one piece of flash fiction every single day. Those kinds of conditions aren’t exactly conducive to the production of lovingly assembled anthologies exploring one particular setting or theme.

>WHAT FLASH FICTION?

Flash fiction simply means very short stories. For this particular event each story must be between fifty-five and one thousand words in length, though some days specify a more specific word limit as part of a challenge.

>WHAT CHALLENGE?

Three times a week, during Flash Fiction Month, participants are challenged to complete their story for the day with additional criteria in mind: where this is the case, the day’s challenge appears just before the story in this book. If you read the stories in order, you will notice that the requirements become gradually more complex. As described above, challenges may require stories to be a specific number of words in length or be written to a tighter word limit. However, challenges can also take many other forms: they might require the story to feature a multi-headed entity, for example, or to avoid using any first person pronouns.

>WHAT PRONOUNS?

What do you think this is? Wikipedia?

>SORRY

That’s alright. I think the only thing left that the introduction really needs to cover is that this book includes an analysis of not only this event, but how the results compare to my writing from the previous two events (which can be found collected as OCR is Not the Only Font and Red Herring respectively). So unless there’s anything else you wanted to know, I think this is probably a good time for you to go ahead and read on.

>READ ON

Excellent! Now we’re getting somewhere...