WRITE OR DIE! WRITE OR DIE!
Today Sj went to a site called Write Or Die, which she found via a link posted on Twitter. Write or Die is good. You write, and if you stop for too long, it plays a very disturbing noise (like babies, but wronger), or an irritating noise (banaphone song! Joys!), or - in Kamikaze Mode - starts deleting what you’ve already written, one word at a time.
I put my setting at 500 words in 10 minutes. I didn’t quite make the word limit in the time, so it was fortunate that I had discovered the “electrocution mode” button was unclickable (it must be a mac compatibility thing). I was still writing after 10 minutes, so it chose not to punish me. Anyway, this is the story I wrote in 37 minutes…
Toby The Little Red Dog
Once upon a time there was a little dog called Toby, and Toby was red.
It’s unusual for a dog to be red, and in a way it was a bit unfair, because it’s easy to see a red dog and think it’s covered in paint, or even blood.
Toby had had a lot of baths.
Toby had also been seized on a catchpole by frightened dog wardens quite a few times, too.
But the misunderstanding was usually quite quickly cleared up, and everyone laughed about it afterwards, and then said things like “Fancy that, a red dog!” and “I thought he was just covered in paint - that’s why I washed him!” and “I thought he was covered in blood! That’s why I ran away and locked the door and called the man to come and shoot him with a tranquilizer dart. Poor poppet.”
Some people, when they realised Toby just happened to be red - especially small children and parents of small children (and occasionally adults who didn’t have any children but watched children’s TV anyway, for their own reasons) - would say “But he’s not even very big…”
They’d be thinking, of course, of the cartoon, Clifford The Big Red Dog. They’d often sound a little bit disappointed as they said it, too.
Fortunately, Toby was quite a happy and garrulous little dog, and so wouldn’t notice the slightly sad tone of voice, which was good because he probably would have felt quite upset about that.
Of course, this was a silly thing to be disappointed about, because Clifford The Big Red Dog is just a cartoon. Red dogs come in every size that normal dogs come in. They are just much rarer.
Since Toby had started wearing a special vest that said “I AM A LITTLE RED DOG. NOT A DIRTY DOG OR A KILLING DOG”, the confusions had happened considerably less, which made Toby pleased, because he didn’t like the tranquilizer darts, as he’d often get itchy reactions around the needle-pricks on his bottom.
One day, though, Toby was running in the woods when he saw a pheasant. He was VERY excited, and chased the pheasant through the hedge. Then the got stuck. Then he got unstuck by pulling extra hard until his vest tore off. He was glad not to be in the hedge anymore, but the pheasant had run away and he didn’t know where he was.
After a while of wandering along farm lanes and through fields he didn’t know, he came across a farmer’s house. He was very pleased, because he’d been out ALL day and was quite, quite worn out.
When the farmer saw him through the kitchen window, trotting across his yard, all red and wobbly-legged, he leapt out of his chair, nearly knocking over the lovely cup of strong tea that the farmer’s wife had just made and put on the table in front of him.
“My lord!” cried the farmer in his endearingly regional burr as he ran to the front door, fetching his big farmer’s gun on the way.
Toby didn’t have his vest on anymore! How was the farmer to know that he was just a red dog & not a BAD dog?
The farmer stood in the doorway and sighted down his gun, squinting, with his itchy finger on the gun’s itchy trigger (not itchy like Toby got from tranquilizer dart needles, but itchy in a jumpy, tense way. Which, incidentally, was a bit like Toby’s back legs felt when he woke up from the tranquilizer darts). His wife joined him at the door, looking nervously over his shoulder. She was worried. Partly because the kitchen table had just been revarnished recently and she hoped she’d mopped the tea up quickly enough to keep it from making a mark; but also because a little dog covered in blood, whilst quite adorable, was always a very bad sign on a farm that relied on revenue made by produce from animals that nearly ALL dogs found delicious.
It was lucky for Toby that the farmer’s wife had joined him, because the farmer was concentrating so hard on trying to get Toby in his sights (he wasn’t very good at reloading the shotgun & had used up one of the shells shooting into the air at new year’s. Shooting up in the air is an irresponsible thing to do, as bullets falling down out of the air kill people just as surely as bullets shot right at them. But the farmer was very good at breeding cows and sheep, and not so good at being responsible when he was a bit tiddly) that he didn’t notice the flutter of white dog-vest over by the gate.
The farmer’s wife, however, DID spot it. She spotted it especially quickly, because she had never seen a pheasant wearing a vest before, and was thinking that she’d expect the first vest-wearing pheasant she ever saw to at least be wearing a vest that fitted it properly & wasn’t all tattered. Also, was it perhaps an ironic fashion statement that its vest proclaimed it to be a dog? Pheasants are quite orangey in colour, but don’t look at all like dogs. Dogs frequently chase pheasants and, indeed, some dogs are trained specially to go and pick up dead pheasants when they’ve been shot by aristocrats.
Why, thought the farmer’s wife, would the pheasant wear a vest saying it was a dog? Pheasants aren’t known for their natural sense of irony, or even for being particularly sarcastic (a surprising number of birds are. Especially finches, which comes as a surprise to most people).
Suddenly, the farmer realised that the vest the pheasant was wearing was LITTLE DOG SIZED! Also, it was tattered because it had been torn off its previous owner, which - the T-shirt quite clearly stated - was A LITTLE RED DOG!
That’s a funny coincidence, isn’t it? What with a little red dog, trotting towards the farmer and his gun, and everything…
The gun went BANG!
But the gun went bang up in the air, because the farmer’s wife’s lateral thinking kicked in just in time to put together all the odd things she was seeing in front of her at that moment (she would later realise that the answer to the dead man in the room with the puddle riddle that the farmer read out to her from the paper earlier, was that he was killed by a block of ice!) and realise that the vest wasn’t the pheasant’s but TOBY’s. He wasn’t a bad dog at all! She shoved the farmer’s arm, causing him to miss and fire harmlessly into a cloud (luckily the bullet didn’t fall on anyone either, and clouds really don’t mind being shot because they are just made of water).
Toby was so startled by the bang that he turned round & ran all the way home without even thinking about it. On the way back, he leapt over a log and rolled and rolled in a stream. It was very lucky, he thought, that the farmer had shot in the air, because Toby had been quite lost in his thoughts and not even noticed the farmer OR his house until the loud crack of the shotgun.
Toby leapt out of the stream, and shook from his nose to his tail, before he barelled off through the woods, following the unmistakable smell of his street and his house that was suddenly so clear.
It was very lucky, Toby was thinking, that the farmer had shot in the air like that, because otherwise Toby would have walked right into him.
And if he had walked right into the farmer, thought Toby, the farmer would almost certainly have noticed that, as well as being naturally red, Toby was all covered in blood from all the sheep he had just killed and eaten.
