Greetings!
If youโre new here then you can find out all about this project of mine here:
But in a nutshell itโs this: Iโve been taking a short and very bland story and rewriting it in different styles. This time Iโve chosen to do it in the form of a liponym. Whatโs that? All will be revealed after this, which is the short story Iโve been working with:
A bang on the head (template)
In the middle of the night, I woke up (if you can call being semi-conscious being awake), walked purposefully towards the door to go to the bathroom โ and almost knocked myself out.
The reason was that in the twin states of entire darkness and semi-somnambulance I was facing in a different direction from the one I thought I was facing. As a result, instead of walking through the door, I tried to walk through the wall.
The next few days brought nausea and headaches. After much prevarication I went to Accident and Emergency, where I waited petrified among people for whom โsocial distancingโ means not quite touching you, and who wore their masks as a chin-warmer.
An hour and a half later I emerged into the twilight, secure in the knowledge that I had nothing more serious than mild concussion. I failed to do much writing, but I was pleased to have read a further 17% of my book.
Liponym version
Something has gone wrong. For some reason, my word processor stopped allowing me to type a certain word. As a consequence, Iโve had to rewrite the above story in order to avoid that word altogether without fundamentally changing the story or making it difficult to read.
As you may have gathered, this is now in the form of a liponym, a text in which a particular word is missing. Itโs a cousin to the lipogram, which is a text that excludes a certain letter.
Can you work out what word my computer is refusing to let me type?
Ouch!
I woke up sometime between midnight and dawn, although truth be told I was only half awake. Why? Because I needed to empty my bladder if you must know. Next thing I knew, I had almost knocked myself out.
โHow did that happen?โ, you ask. Well, it was pitch black and I was half asleep, and so I thought I was facing one direction but was really facing a different one. Consequently, I tried to walk through a wall. A wall just isnโt exactly an open door!
For a few days after that I experienced nausea and headaches. After much prevarication I went to Accident and Emergency, where I waited petrified among people for whom โsocial distancingโ means not quite touching you, and who wore their masks as a chin-warmer.
I left an hour and a half later, having been reassured that I had nothing more serious than mild concussion. I failed to do much writing, but I was pleased to have read a further 17% of my book.
Check out the other experiments with styles here: Index.
My Tuesday post, for paid subscribers, will contain an extra โexperimentโ and โbehind the scenesโ information about how I approach these experiments and the challenges they present.
Oh for five centsโฆ read not hoโoponopono. Thanks spellcheck. Youโre grrrrreat.
Hmm, Terry. Thought this seemed easy enough and I jumped to semi-conscious. When I saw the test results, apparently I was only semi-conscious when I read this test!