Random thought: I’m the perfect Jewish criminal—I’m great at picking lox

This latest Story of the Week was based on a prompt that was sitting on my prompt shelf for more than two years. Sorry for the delay, Mimi Neeson, but I finally cracked the code on your proverb. Thanks for the contribution.

           Cleansing the Palette

“Our graffiti artist struck again,” Captain Simpson lectured. “He’s becoming increasingly offensive.”

The cops yawned.

“He’s gone from ‘Loose lips sink shit,’ to, ‘Don’t let the cat out of the douchebag,’ to, ‘Easy come, easy ‘ho.”

Everyone chuckled.

“Not funny. Puns are the worst. They make us dumber. Let’s bust him before he infects everyone.”

“You act like he’s contagious, Captain. He’s not exactly public enema number one.”

Thunderous laughter.

“Silence!”

“Sorry, Captain. Didn’t mean to rain on your grenade.”

“Everyone out—now! Like I always say, ‘The early bird gets the sperm.’”

His jaw dropped. “Shit. Now I’ve been infected!”

Prompt: Can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear

NOVEL NEWS & NOTES…

In our last episode, I discussed the latest draft of my novel and how it is now in the hands of a small group of readers—otherwise responsible human beings who naively volunteered to expose themselves to my writing. I asked them to take up to a month to digest and report back to me. I’m now halfway through the process and about half have weighed in. The good news is that nobody has suggested I permanently step away from the keyboard. The bad news is that…well, actually, there is no bad news. People have all taken the assignment seriously, and I’ve gotten lots of good notes. They’ve caught things I’ve missed, asked good questions, told me about things they don’t think work—mostly character stuff. All of it’s eminently fixable.

One of the interesting things is that most of the notes received thus far have come from other writers. Those who are primarily readers have not weighed in yet. Can’t wait to see what that group has to say. You’ll hear about it next time.

In other writing news, the short film I recently directed was just accepted into the Carmel International Film Festival. Based on my short story “Unfortunately, Not Everybody’s a Baseball Fan,” this epic three-minute movie, now called “The Nightcap” will screen at the festival in October. It’s the first of what I hope will be many public appearances.

That’ll do it for this episode of Scotty’s so-called life.

Stay tuned.

I know I will.

Scotty out

PS: Want to catch up on all the stories you missed? Here’s the link:

Click me!