🎉 Coming Attractions ✍️
Among other things, we're planning a “Flash Fiction” feature, which may occur roughly weekly or monthly. Anyone who's a Guest Contributor to The Fuller Zone is welcome to submit their flash fiction for consideration. The guidelines for submissions are that they must be works of fiction between about 600-1000 words, and written within a relatively short amount of time, probably not more than about a day or two, including any editing. Initially, the premise of the story will be specified by the author, and included with the flash fiction submission. We may also occasionally throw out a story premise that's been submitted by anyone via this website's “Contact us” form, and invite any and all Guest Contributors to submit their own take on the story premise (as flash fiction, of course). In such cases, there will be a (completely unbiased) vote among the participants as to whose story is in some sense most compelling, and the results will of course be posted on The Fuller Zone.
Humor is of greatest importance, as you know, in these dire times, if only to get us through any given day. My intent, at least on occasion, has been to inject a modicum of humor here and there, peppered through these pages at random, just to keep your spirits up. But we may introduce a formal (formal!?) “Humor” feature in the very near future just to say we were able to cross it off on our very lengthy bucket list. My own personal bailiwick in this arena is something I refer to as “My Swypewriter said...”; it's about the gaffes and “malapropisms” and hilariously funny things that come up when I'm swyping, or attempting to swype, something that I'm thinking. Sometimes the Swypewriter knows more than it lets on—and maybe even more than you yourself think you know.
And then there's this idea I've got in the back of my mind about a “Conversations” feature, which would entail two or more of our Guest Contributors (or just one of them, talking to themselves) weighing in on a particular topic or even talking about nothing in particular.
I'd personally like to get some real conversations going with regard to policy, governance, and what the heck we sentient human beings really want human society to look like—along with ideas of how to arrive at those visions. These conversations, from my current perspective, would necessarily have to involve a complete analysis and resythesis of the nuts and bolts of this system we supposedly live under, the one that we call “democracy”; and just as crucial, a similar critical look at the Constitution that we (in the US, as well as quite a few other nations) live under.
In my assessment, both what we call “democracy” and what we refer to as a “Constitution” are in similar ways pretty much fundamentally flawed, as they currently exist. I'm not going to fully open that most sacred can of worms we call “free speech” at this moment, but that's integral to the whole conversation or conversations. Likewise, I'm not going to write a book-length essay on this topic right now, but you can rest assured that these ideas have been germinating in my brainpan for quite some time, and they're just about ready to bloom.
I personally am looking for collaborators, critical thinkers, who can help me, and others, formulate the groundwork, including the nitty-gritty (Devil's in the) details of how to create a fair system that works for all human beings, and which recognizes, embraces, and actively encourages the best abilities of all human beings. It should be abundantly clear to just about anyone that the systems and rules and so forth that we currently have in place just aren't cutting it; it's clear as a bell that they're broken, and that these systems don't work all that well for most of humanity!
On a lighter note, one of my favorite ways to pursue writing—especially of the “prose poem” variety—is to utilize the set of words within an existing text as the vocabulary set with which to create a new text. So there may be a new feature in the near future that reflects this idea, possibly even in the spirit of the “Flash Fiction” feature that's already been described.
January 8, 2024