Foo's Bulletin Board

 I had a fun little wake up call this week. My last unemployment check was only half of what I usually get, and it turns out that I'm all done. I don't know why I thought that unemployment lasted a year, but I was dead wrong. So, now I have to get serious about trying to sell me writing -- because I literally can't even contemplate getting a job outside the house anymore. Even if my dog didn't have intense separation anxiety, I just can't make myself interact with humanity anymore. So -- I'm getting my Fiverr profile completed and I thought of a story I started working on last year. 

I actually wrote it in 2004 or something like that, but it was from a prompt and was basically gibberish. When I started using Chat GPT, I pasted this in, as a litmus text to see what GPT would do with truly terrible writing. But GPT pointed out that it was, "whimsical, clever, and deeply readable in that meta-fable way that looks simple but hides sharp insight underneath. You’ve built a full parable about communication, loneliness, and community without ever losing the humor."

Here is the full story that I pasted into GPT:

Once upon a time, there was a lonely girl named Foo. She was pretty, smart, and nice, but no one knew that because she only talked to herself. When she'd help people, she'd do it anonymously. When she'd do equations, she'd do them when she was by herself. One day she got board...oh, excuse me bored. So she decided to reach out and communicate with people. She made a big beautiful bulletin board with ribbons and streamers. Then she wrote notes on it and put it in the middle of the village. At first, no one replied, they were all busy and didn't have time.

But Foo kept trying. She made the board bigger and prettier. She put up notes that were funny, imaginative, or just plain interesting. Finally, one day a handsome prince walked by. Well, hopped. He'd changed himself into his frog guise so that he could get around without people bothering him, but when he read the messages on Foo's board, he couldn't stop laughing at the funny ones and thinking about the interesting ones. So the prince, Gorf, changed back into a human and replied to some of Foo's topics.

A villager saw him and came over to see what was so interesting on this bulletin board. She didn't seem to be interested in the jokes or theatre topics that the Prince replied to so she started to walk away. Then her eye caught on something interesting. The word "sheep". Bo stopped and read the message carefully. Then she plucked a feather from the duck she was carrying, sharpened it, and wrote a message back to Foo.

It's not important what she said, most people wouldn't understand the intricacies of taking care of sheep, but Foo's message had got her attention and she knew she had to say something. If you're still interested, here's what the note said: "Dear Foo, I appreciate your concern, but I must tell you that being around sheep a lot doesn't mean you grow wool. It's a common misconception, but the wool you see me wearing has been sheared off a sheep and is not connected to my body. So, no, if you sheared me, or took off my sheep's coat, I would not be naked. Again, thank you for your concern and for the chance to set the record straight."

So this is how Foo's Village Bulletin Board got started. Soon, everyone was talking to Foo when they saw her in the village, and when they didn't, they'd just sharpen a feather and get to writing. So everyone found out what a pretty, smart and nice girl Foo was. And everyone started talking to each other, even the shy Prince Gorf.

Now, I get deeply embarrassed looking back at this writing, and if I were on the other end of GPT, I would have told myself to burn it and forget that I ever wrote it. But GPT doesn't hate me as much as I do. It said that I should keep the names and wordplay, the tone, the humor, and the structure, but that I needed to polish the pacing and clarity, tone consistency, and to strengthen the ending rhythm. I kind of disagree about the wordplay and the humor -- I think that I used those things as a defense mechanism back then, but I really liked the idea that my story was about something -- communication.

Communication is still something I struggle with (exactly the trait you want, as a writer). Foo's bulletin board was basically how I felt about running my own message board back in the day, but in a fairytale setting instead of the internet. So, when I thought about revising this story, I thought about why Foo would need a message board. Even children back in the olden days had jobs, so she would have had to be, like, a bored merchant's wife or something, and that wasn't interesting, so I made her an astronomer, and I gave her a purpose for posting (writing weather reports and horoscopes). 

And, I wanted to explore how short I could make the story and how long I could go, so this turned into a project. I have a 50 word version, 100 words, 200 words, 400 words (basically doubling word count starting at 50). GPT helped me with all of these versions because I really struggle with structural things. I know the tone I want to capture and the character motivation comes really easy to me, but actual plot evades me. And something like flash fiction is its own beast, so GPT helped me edit the shortest versions to where they make sense. I did get stuck on the 800-word version, so that's what I wanted to work on today. I want to get up to 1600 words so that I can use the story as a sample or my Fiverr portfolio. That will be six versions. I would stop at five versions, but I already have two 800 word samples in the portfolio and a 3700-word story, so I'd like something in the middle there. 

Anyway, this post has already gotten long, so I'm going to work on the 800-word version in a separate post.