| Today is July 29, 2010 |
Michael Becker escaped alive after three years as a beat reporter for the Bozeman Daily Chronicle and wound up, somehow, writing about engineering for Montana State University.
Write to Michael.
Yes, you can read the entire text of the 2009 edition of Bozeman’s favorite chain-writing exercise, and you can read that text RIGHT HERE on the Consortium of the Creative Nudge. Just visit the Foolish Words 2009 page at http://foolish.creativenudge.org and start reading.
I’ll give a prize to anyone who can untangle all the plot lines that got thrown into the story this year. And that prize will be $1 million imaginary dollars that will be instantly transferred from my imaginary Swiss bank account to your imaginary Swiss bank account by imaginary Swiss bankers at imaginary computers wearing imaginary European-style suits and drinking imaginary cappuccinos.
The comments on this site are now interconnected with Facebook. That means you can use your Facebook profile to log in to the Consortium’s comment system, and — as long as you are thus logged in — any comments you leave here will be posted to your Facebook profile as well. Neat, huh?
You can, of course, log right back out of Facebook Connect if you want and leave an old-fashioned comment just on this site. That’s a choice I leave to you.
Food was a big deal for me growing up, whether it was the home-cooked fare that my grandmother provided when I visited her house on the weekends or the mostly box dinners that my working mom prepared. Read more
Bozeman writer Ray Sikorski, the current organizer of the venerable Foolish Words writing event, has given his permission to repost the 2009 story here on the Consortium of the Creative Nudge.
For those of you who don’t know, Foolish Words is a chain writing event. One person starts the story, writes 200 to 400 words, and then passes it on to the next writer. These writers are affectionately known as the Fools, and this year there are more than 30 of them. The event culminates on April 1 when the Fools gather at the Leaf & Bean in downtown Bozeman to read the story aloud.
You can read more at the official Foolish Words site, run by Ray, and you can read the finished product both there and at the consortium’s newest project site: http://foolish.creativenudge.org.
I made an offer a while ago to let any Consortium member have their own blogs on the site. That offer still stands, but with a little twist. Now, you can have your own blog at the address http://blogs.creativenudge.org/BLOGNAME. It’s free. It’s easy. You can have a blog today if you want to. Just let me know if you’re interested.
There may come a time when you want to post an entry to the Creative Nudge that is already saved as Word document (or some other odd format, like OpenOffice or Pages). The problem with this is that, sometimes, when you paste from these other programs, weird formatting comes through with the text, making it look all funky when it’s displayed on the Nudge site. This post will tell you how to avoid that. Read more
I hate losing. I don’t hate it so much as I used to, but then again, I don’t lose often now, so it’s hard to say whether my reaction to losing has softened over the years or whether I just enjoy the novelty of losing from time to time. Read more
The site has undergone a minor facelift to make the important things more visible and to make it more useful to those of you reading it. Also, we’ve started a Twitter feed, so you can follow the Consortium on Twitter. At the very least, we post a tweet about each new post to the site, so it’s kind of like having a little Creative Nudge beeper to keep you in the loop.
Just as a site news note: In response to several spammer registrations on this site of late, I have added reCAPTCHA protection to the registration process. This means that any new user will have to type in a couple of distorted-looking words that they see in a box at the bottom of the registration screen. The hope is that spambots and other non-humans will not be able to discern those words and, therefore, won’t be able to register.
University finals have taken their toll, delaying our beloved monthly nudge. There will be more nudges, rest assured. You’ll just have to wait a little while for them. More news to come!