Meta

Avatar Author: Scott K I'm a meteorologist who now acts as the unofficial weatherman for my current employer (and my wife's). I'm also a wannabe writer working on getting my first novel published. Read Bio

“Impossible.”

Blunt as usual. “Bruce, nothing is impossible for an author of your caliber.”

“I write fantasy! How you can possibly expect me to write something with only 1024 words?”

“Characters,” I amend.

“Exactly. You can’t write a good character with only 1024 words. I used that many words describe Lona il’Nasi’s hair in my last book.”

Don’t I know it, I think. “No, it’s 1024 characters.”

His eyes narrow into slits. I’d say lasers shot from them but that would be crossing genres. He’s no scifi writer, no matter what he said.

“That better mean the story has 1024 living characters in it.”

I offer the same sour lemon smile I used when one of his “short” stories didn’t make the cut in Omni because it was too damn long.

“Some of the characters could be dead,” he offers.

“Could you try? There’s some serious coin in this.”

“It’d have to be a lot of coin.”

I pass him the spreadsheet. I’d say his eyes popped out of his head, but that’s another genre too. His face split with a greedy grin.

“I’m in.”

View this story's details

Prequels

Oh no! This story doesn't have a prequel. Want to fill in the blanks and write one?

Write a Prequel

Comments (10 so far!)

Average Reader Rating

  1. Avatar LaraLustre

    Oh, this is well done.

  2. Avatar Sam Ervin

    Ahhh, great!

  3. Avatar bluefish

    Really? There’s coin in it? How does one get access to said coin?

    greedy grin

  4. Avatar Action Jay

    Oh now that is meta. The character limit definitely presents a challenge for wordy hoity toity mcgee, but not for you. No sir! Good work!

  5. Avatar Passionsocks

    Hopefully that spreadsheet wasn’t limited to a thousand characters too.

    I enjoyed it.

  6. Avatar The Note Writer

    Hehe. Lol. You earned these pencils.

  7. Avatar PJ (Jae) [[LoA]]

    Oh wow. I love it. Had the same reaction at the start :)

  8. Avatar smdasilva

    @Passionsocks – if all the characters were 9’s that would be a pretty good payday :)

    I loved the way the characters seem totally real, even with only 1024 chars.

  9. Avatar bluefish

    Congrats on getting featured! :D

  10. Avatar ElshaHawk (LoA)

    ficly wins over the pompous writer! victory at last! Though, the plunder is ours, and we have the pencils to wield like sabres, so he’ll have to fight us for the treasure.

This story's tags are