Tra-La, It's May! - notes
posted to MA 13 May 2003


I'll tell you -- sometimes I perplex even myself.

What happened was this: at least last May, or possibly the May before that, our resident gauntlet-hurler, the lovely Emu, suggested a prompt for Merry Month fics, that being the opening line "Are you masturbating?" Either the challenge was issued on irc, or we were talking about it on irc a bit afterward, because I had (but, alas, I have no longer) bits of chatlogs in which someone -- it may even have been me -- suggested that someone write a fic following this prompt for each day of the month. Whoever was responsible for creating this idea, I jumped at it, and within moments had written four such fics. They were short -- okay, they were very short -- but they amused me, and it looked like I was on to something.

Then I saved the file and didn't touch it again for at least a year. Maybe two.

Anyway, just this evening, I was thinking, "Hmm, I haven't had anything to do for four days, and I don't have anything on my schedule for another two days, and I'm getting awfully cabin-feverish, here ... I wonder what I have on my hard drive that I could polish up, fic-wise?" Well, I have this Sentinel thing that's been languishing for at least a year, which I keep meaning to come back to and which got a shot in the arm not long ago from the enthusiasm of someone reading it for the first time. And I have this Due South thing that seems to be spinning its wheels. And I have these two Harry Potter things, each of which is going to require me to open a vein. Oh, and I have MD part 11, which is sitting there half done and has to be finished before I can even think of moving on to part 12. "I know!" I said to myself. "Instead of working on any one of these more serious projects, I'll write twenty-seven more short-shorts and finish the MMOM thing."

So I did. Here they are. They owe a smidgin of a debt, I suppose, to Mr. David Ives, whose short play "Sure Thing" deals with the same conversation happening over and over again and rarely making any forward progress (this, in its turn, bearing a superficial resemblance to the movie "Groundhog Day"). I was going to rearrange them into some related order, but I decided instead to present them in the order in which they were written. Except for going back and taking out the names of the irc chat-room participants, I haven't changed a thing.
Tra-La, It's May!