Archive for September 2nd, 2010

An ode to simpler times
Thursday, September 02nd, 2010 | Author: kevin

The following short story was submitted to a very interesting project. What was originally called 48 hours magazine, but after receiving a cease and desist letter form 48 hours, the TV show, was changed to LongShot Magazine. The concept was to complete a magazine from start to finish in 48 hours. A pretty impressive goal, but they’ve now repeated the process twice. I missed the deadline for the second one, even though I had an intersting idea. On the first one, I’m not sure if I missed it too, but the bottom line is I’ll have to add this to my rejection pile. As an aspiring author, I know that I have to be patient, persistenet, and keep chugging away.

Anyway, each of the issues of LongShot magazine is based on a one word theme. The first theme was hustle, and this was my original short story, entitled “An ode to simpler times:”

At first, when they introduced the Hyper Usability Synaptic Trance Linking Equipment, it was the promise of easing the laborious process of physical communication. For thousands of years, man had struggled with the flawed effects of common speech. But H.U.S.T.L.E was going to finally eliminate the errors wrought from poor habits of speech. No longer would teams fail because of misunderstandings, mumbling, and mistakes.

H.U.S.T.L.E was going to help leaders to hold teams together by broadcasting messages directly into employee’s minds. It would replace the old fashion sweat equity necessary to overcome poor managerial communication.

What we discovered, too late for the early adopters, was that once a company deployed H.U.S.T.L.E, moral begin to drop. Psychosis begin to erupt among the leaders of each of the H.U.S.T.L.E teams.

What the forensic scientists discovered, was that while H.U.S.T.L.E was completely successful in transferring thoughts into each team member installed with H.U.S.T.L.E, there was abnormally high levels of emotional feedback.

For the managers it meant an overload of powerful emotions. For the employees, it drained their lives of any emotion, leaving them empty shells.

In the end, they had to shelf the H.U.S.T.L.E project, yet another attempt of man which came too close to the providence of God.

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Tips for writing a column
Thursday, September 02nd, 2010 | Author: kevin

1. Create an outline of what material you’d like to cover
2. Work your way through the outline filling in each outline item.
3. If you need more source materila, don’t hesitate to search for a specific terms to get more detailed information.
4. Stay focused! keep your butt in front of your editor and keep writing.
5. Repeat step 4.
6. Once you’ve completed a first draft, take a break. Grab some lunch, get a cup of coffee, go make some copies, whatever. Give your brain a break and take some time to relax.
7. Come back to the article and do your proof reading.
8. Submit the column and go back to surfing the web.
9. Tweet up the article as well as post it in the appropriate groups.

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Tips for researching a column
Thursday, September 02nd, 2010 | Author: kevin

1. Sign up for all the feeds that you can supporting the topics, remember information overload is a good thing. Just remember, it’s better to have it, not need it, then delete it, then not have it in the first place.
2. Use Google News to search for breaking news on the topic.
3. Then while you’re on the Google News results page, go ahead and scroll to the bottom and setup an alert to receive the results on a daily basis.

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