Prose That Blows 500 has attracted 13 entries.

You can view the contest details here.

Vote for your favorites here. Voting closes on July 10.

Here's the full list of submitted stories. Authors will remain anonymous until the voting is concluded.

The Biggest Breath

Cindy learns a life lesson in less than 500 words

Click

Compromised

Drink Me

Inpractical Magic

The Meadow Encounter

One Night Stan

Pet Balloon

Rachel the Accidental Cream Puff

Room 12

Surfer's Cove

Trapped

It's an awesome turnout. I want to thank everyone who contributed. And I especially want to thank Carnatic for coming up with the idea. Pure brilliance.

For the past couple of days, a bunch of you were getting an error at login telling you that you needed to enable cookies. I messed up a setting in one of the server updates I applied last week, and that was causing the problem. Everything should be fixed now. If any of you continue to have problems logging in, email me.

Something for you 3D folks out there.

In the words of its creators, The purpose of MakeHuman is "to provide a versatile, professional and extremely specialized application for parametrical modeling of three-dimensional humanoid characters." Project MakeHuman recently released a new demo of the version of the software in development. Why should you care?

1) The software allows for some rather fascinating and bizarre deformations of the figures.

2) It's free.

Check it out.

An IM session with Champagne Moon about a story she'd read as a child resulted in some inspiration. She suggested that the tale, The Rubber Circus, could be rewritten as an inflation tale with a slightly different theme. I've found that sometimes the pieces of a story come together so easily and fit so well that the story pretty much writes itself. That happened with this story, and the result is a poem I've titled The Ringmaster. You can find it in the Story Archive. Enjoy.

The Story Archive is a homegrown creation. It's my first attempt at a CPGNuke module. It's probably buggy, but it'll do for now. There are still some improvements planned.

If you have any suggestions or run into any problems, either email me or post to the Tech Support Forum.