Hokay. Time for this week's 500 Words Sentence.
Skip the next part if you already know the rules.
The Rules:
- Write 500 words - no more and no less - based on and including the sentence I will set each week.
Exactly 500 words … discipline is fun, people.
- The given sentence should be included in the 500 words unless I specifically say otherwise (like the second week where it was extremely long so I gave you the option), though the title - if any - should not be counted.
- I'll set the sentence on a Friday to give you the weekend to think about it.
Stories should be posted ready for inclusion in the following Thursday's Story Post.
Latecomers will be added at the bottom of the post and you can at any time go back and write a story based on an earlier sentence should you feel inspired to do so, which will then be added to that week's post.
- I am the law. No arguing.
500 Words is brought to you by Robyn and Lynn. They were gracious enough to appoint me Official (Officious?) Sentence Setter due to my megalomaniac tendencies and my love of spanking (try not to hand your work in late).
Previous stories can be found here and are a wonderful way of spending a coffee break:
Week I - From Robyn and Lynn's random books;
Week II - From Nabokov's Lolita;
Week III - From Paul Auster's City Of Glass;
Week IV - From Mario Vargas Llosa's Aunt Julia And The Scriptwriter.
Those are the rules; those are the stories so far.
Here we go with this week's sentence, which is taken from James Joyce's "Ulysses" and is:
At this intelligence, in which he seemingly evinced little interest, Mr. Bloom gazed abstractedly for the space of a half a second or so in the direction of a bucketdredger, rejoicing in the farfamed name of Eblana, moored alongside Customhouse quay and quite possibly out of repair, whereupon he observed evasively:
"Everybody gets their own ration of luck, they say."
It's another long one at sixty words, but should be included in your word count, leaving you with a mere four-hundred and forty words to write.
Sharpen your pencils and have fun!
17 comments:
Dive....WTF? MAN!
I am such a simpleton and now I have go do and look up some of those words in order to know what that freakin sentence even means. geeze! What a pal!!
Fine. You've made me have to luck up "bucket dredger" in the dictionary. It wanted to spell it as two words.
Oh how fun! And I am just now blogging on vocab building.
Shhh...a secret between all of us: I might turn on my comments function again. If the a-holes return, I might have to turn it off again, as it is bad for my mental health to read their crap every day. But I shall give it a try.
Hee hee hee!
Prudence and Robyn: be grateful that I actually chose one of the few sentences in Ulysses with real words in it.
You can spell bucket dredger however you like. Joyce tended to join words to make new ones.
Katherine: Yay! I do hope the hatemongers stay away as being unable to comment on your blog sucked.
Thanks, Dive. Keeping my fingers crossed.
You DO know Ulysses is an incredibly difficult book to read, of course? You really are challenging us. This is like a free writing course! Yippee!!
"A bucket dredger is a dredger equipped with a bucket dredge, which is a device that picks up sediment by mechanical means, often with many circulating buckets attached to a wheel or chain."
Ulysses is an absolute pleasure to read, Katherine! Great fun.
And yup; bucket dredgers are those things that clear the shipping lanes in harbours. It doesn't have to form part of the story (it doesn't in my own story) but it helps set the scene.
I love the challenge but have no effing idea what to do with it. But then again, you could go in almost any direction with Ulysses. My dad is a Bloomsday participant, so perhaps he will help?
Well, I came back so I could read your scene! Where is it? You aren't going to make me wait an entire week, are you (pout)?
Dive dearest - I just read most of the stories from last week - loved all of them but couldn't read Prudence because her web page caused my computer to become "unresponsive" (Mac's word, not mine).
I do so love reading all these stories. I can't join in because I can't write fiction; alas.
U-FREAKIN'-lysses??? Perhaps you'd best not hope for a Baltimore layover. OK, I learned a couple of things today, like where Eblana is, what a bucketdredger looks like and a brief history of the Customshouse Quay. But still, are you freakin' kidding??
BTW I heard that Les Paul died. Are you going to have a requiem or something?
Neetzy: I've done a few Bloomsdays myself with Michael (a huge fan).
Great fun!
And of course your story doesn't have to be Joycean at all; all the sentence calls for is a story featuring a Mr. Bloom who has just been told something and happens to be standing in the docks.
Katherine and I have both finished ours so we've got it easy.
Katherine: I'll email it to you.
Mme: What a shame you can't get Prudence's blog at the moment. I hope whatever the problem is clears up.
I can't write fiction either (or at least I'd never tried until now), but there's nothing in the rules to say it can't be non-fiction. Hee hee.
Lulu: Wow!@ You've done serious research!
Check my reply to Neetzy for some reassurance.
Mme: My old Gibson Les Paul and I spent some time playing along with the great records he made with Mary Ford. We had our own little requiem.
Katherine...instead of turning off comments, why don't you moderate your comments as I do? I have a blog stalker who loved to make hateful comments until I started moderating my comments and simply rejected all her comments. Now, she no longer gets the titillation of seeing her hate in print and I get the joy of hitting that reject button over and over again.
I haven't had the time or the discipline to join in the writing fun, but I am having a blast reading them....
That's what I did, Maria, so feel free to saunter over! : )
'love of spanking' lol Pah! Why do you think I'm late? he he...
Probably be another week before I've penned in anything. Eek. There are reasons.
Thank Dive! I can conjure up images of Mr. Bloom and plenty of docks, even bucketdredgers. This might be the last I can participate in for a while as school is starting next week!
Post a Comment