I don't think, except in very rare cases, that you ever need to explain what you were trying to do. You need to find out what you DID do.

Yes, this. Nodding madly with Deb. Robin explained it all much better than I did.

Not only that, they're all Regency writers. Cool, eh?

Oh, very cool. Should be a good group.

My last group was LAME. And not in a Biblical sense...that was the one before. They always thought my stuff was nasty, too(and that was pre-Buffista. I think I could kill them now.)

Drabble:

Half a lemon, slightly shriveled, with patches of green and white starting to fuzz one side, lurks on one side of the refrigerator next to two-and-a-half beers and a Mountain Dew. Three boxes of leftover Chinese takeout slowly leak drops of sauce onto the dented top of a pizza box on the shelf below, spotting it brown and red. A wedge of cheese, loosely wrapped in plastic, weighs down a paper plate on top of an old bowl of chili.

An open box of baking soda sits forlornly in the back corner, inadequate to the task.

The Book, Pg. 14,969,478

James, Harriet (cont.)

10:31am 21-May-1944

She: turned the corner by the bookstore::walked down Reed to the train station::stopped at the intersection and waited for the bus.

10:42am 21-May-1944

At the: coffee shop she met her current fling::train station got on the #12::corner, the buss’s brakes failed.

10:50am 21-May-1944

Her: lover pulled out a gun::brother met her at the station.

10:58am 21-May-1944

She: sprawled on the sidewalk, bleeding::screamed as the grill of the truck headed straight toward them.

11:05am 21-May-1944

The body was prepared for viewing at the county morgue.

Impassively, he closed the book on that particular destiny listed therein.

edit: made it fit the 100 words. Hah.

Tricky.

How about some extra formatting to help demarcate the threads?

etd irrelevant comment

What kind of formatting are you thinking of? What is unclear?

I made some changes. Is it more understandable now?

Maybe it's just me, but the slashes read like alternate word pairs instead of thread separators. How about:

She:
turned the corner by the bookstore.
walked down Reed to the train station.
stopped at the intersection and waited for the bus.

No, that looks like sequential actions instead of alternate paths. Maybe a font distinction too?

edited to play with fonts

I tried alternating regular with italic phrases. Does that set it off enough?

Maybe replace the slashes with something that isn't a punctuation mark that could logically go there -- something like :: or something.

Once I figured out what was going on, reading it made me shiver.

Think I'm going to go with alternating fonts and :: separators. I want everything on one line to give the effect of destinies flickering in and out of possibility. Things are fairly amorphous and not set in stone. It should look fairly confusing, because any one or a combination of destinies are happening at the same time. It's not necessarily a choice of one of three or one of two, it's all of them intertwined. Hard to do in print.