Beep! Boop! Welcome to The Story Machine. The current theme of The Story Machine is “Game Night Gone Wrong.”

The Story Machine is pleased to offer a wide variety of tasty bite-sized stories. Please choose from the following selections:

A story involving:

1. American Football
   
2. Roleplaying
   
3. Board games
   
4. Card games
   
5. A silly internet writing contest

Posted ( Read more... )

It’s time for the Annual Games again, time to choose a new Narrator for the Ship of Stories. The Archetypes are all out of their halls and mingling here in the lobby, waiting for the stages to be set in the different story rooms, the choices to be made. You know your task: to earn as many points by the end of your story arc as possible while ( Read more... )

Every day after Michael left for work, Eve went about the business of taking herself apart. She did it in the basement, so the mess would be easier to clean up. Sitting at her workbench, she had a system for where everything should go. There was a magnetized strip for all the little tiny screws, and labeled mason jars for transistors and servo ( Read more... )

I attended WisCon this year, and participated in their first ever Spontaneous Writing Contest. The idea was pretty simple - you show up at a certain place at a certain time and receive a thumb drive with a snippet of dialogue on it. Incorporating that dialogue, you write a story, and then return it on the thumb drive within an hour. There were (I ( Read more... )

The following email archive was found on an encrypted thumb drive attached to the collar of a very suspicious and possibly cybernetic pygmy marmoset in my backyard. After much research and several top secret meetings, it came to light that the other half of the conversation was in the hands of porn_this_way, who found it dangling from a weather balloon near ( Read more... )

There was a date written in the upper left corner of the whiteboard in Carla Pressman’s office, boxed off in green marker. That date was 5.11.2012 10:33 a.m. EDT. She didn’t need it written down, of course. It was the most significant moment in her life - and perhaps everyone else’s too. But she wrote it down just in case, on the white board, on ( Read more... )

Jesse “Snake” Barrett, so named for the snake tattoo across the knuckles of his right hand, was in a pretty tight spot. He sat in the stolen car, slurping noisily from an oversized fountain drink and tapping his fingers on the steering wheel as the rain tapped down on the windshield, trying to figure a way out. He needed money, and he needed it ( Read more... )

It was the day of Drace’s sixteenth birthday that the doom came to his village. He’d had an argument with his father - a terrible shouting match, because he wanted Drace to marry one of the local girls, but Drace wanted to make his own way in the world. He’d run out of the village, crying, up into the hills. It was then that the dark cloud came to ( Read more... )

Jennifer was drifting in a sleepy haze when she thought she heard her phone buzz. She’d turned off the ringer, but had she set it so it wouldn’t vibrate? She couldn’t remember. She fumbled around on her nightstand, eyes still closed, until her hand found the familiar shape. “Hello ( Read more... )

from: "Doug D." dogsbody4eva@gmail.com
to: "Manda M." mandaminion@gmail.com ( Read more... )