It Is Quite a Challenge!

I'll begin by saying that I had a quite a time deciding the genre or category to submit this. I think by the time you read to the end, you'll understand why.

There's been a "challenge" circulating for a while that was inspired by Lit's rule that entries must be at least 750 words. The challenge was submitting stories that aren't at least 750 words, but are exactly 750 words. I can't quite recall off the top of my head where it originated.

Back in my day (says this old man) word count was the number of letters, numbers, spaces, or punctuation marks typed, divided by five. Well, I suppose that was more common when certain job postings even listed minimum words per minute which I don't think is much of a thing anymore.

Nowadays, the number of words is typically any group of alphanumeric characters separated by white-space or punctuation. Most word processors, such as LibreOffice, display the current word and character count in the status bar making it easy to keep track as one writes. Hyphenated words such as cul-de-sac are counted as one in Libre as well as Microsoft Office. Others may vary. So, if you cut and paste this document into your word processor and you see a higher number, it's probably because yours counts hyphenated words as multiple words. I'm only scoring myself based on LibreOffice Writer.

Now, let me make sure I am absolutely clear about something. I'm not making fun of any of the 750-word stories the authors published. It is, indeed, a fun challenge, requiring significant skill to convey a full story in such a small space and land on an exact spot. I've read at least a dozen, and many of them were outstanding and earned a five star rating from me.

Sure, the spot could have been any arbitrary number. It could as well have been set at, say, 1,234, but it was clever to set it as the minimum allowable by Lit.

Now, anyone that's read Devo or my works knows we can both be somewhat loquacious if not downright circumlocutious. As a result, the number of our additions to the spell-check dictionary is approaching 400 words. They're real words, they simply weren't in the standard dictionary. 'Circumlocutious' was just added to it when I typed it a few words ago. Same thing with 'cul-de-sac' a few paragraphs ago. Yeah, Libre's dictionary is kinda lousy, but we're dealing with it.

The idea of writing a complete work of exactly 750 words appealed to me. So I tried. And I failed. So I tried again, failed thrice more, and shelved it. Based on the timestamps of the files, I think it's been almost a year since I last tried it out.

As of this writing, our longest submission is It Only Took Twenty Years at almost 90,000 words while our smallest, A Rose Can Be Too Sweet, is 8,500 words. Writing something less than a tenth of that size just seemed impossible.

But it never quite left the back of my mind.

A couple of days ago, I started another tale, but unfortunately, I couldn't stop it. It's still quite a short one by our standards at 1,800 words, but still way past 750. I'll be publishing that one in the next few days when I'm done noodling with it and giving it a good edit and proofread plus the "Devo Blessing." (Yeah, it's a solo work).

I'm sure there are a bunch of authors who've had a similar experience. The idea for this whole thing woke me up with a start. It came as a flash.

So, with all that said, here's my submission in the form of a limerick and two haiku.

You know I'm the author named Will,
well, Devo stopped taking "the pill."
She took off her frock
and mounted my cock,
Baby-food shelf we'll now need to fill.

That hardly is true.
Menopause is permanent.
We are adopting.

Come on. I'm fibbing!
We've raised many already.
Empty nest? Yes, please!

Yep, that's it! The difference between my submission and all the others I checked is that my word-count includes the fore- and afterword. Please don't shoot me! This was only intended as a good-natured ribbing to the great authors that have played the game. Other readers/writers: I strongly recommend you try yourself just to see how stiff the challenge truly is.

So here you go. A 750 word essay on writing a 750 word submission.