Brief Encounters--[UPDATED]

Tonight was a later evening than I'd expected or intended, so I've just got a quick entry this time. It's appropriate that I don't have much time, because this post is all about brevity. Take a look at Wired this month for a collection of short fiction. Ernest Hemingway reportedly claimed his best work was a short story consisting of six words: "For sale: baby shoes, never worn." In the spirit of that conciseness, Wired has collected stories just as short from thirty-three writers (and five designers). They discovered that some writers just couldn't be brief enough--Arthur C. Clarke's entry for a six-word story came in at ten. The included writers range from Margaret Atwood and Gregory Maguire to Stan Lee, Alan Moore, and Frank Miller, to William Shatner. Don't read anything about my personal life into this, but my favorite (at least on the first read through) was Margaret Atwood's. I'm not going to repeat any of them here, because at just six words, it doesn't take too many letters before you cross over into copyright infringement territory. Just click the link, and you can read the stories to your heart's content--it'll take at least a couple minutes to burn your way through.

UPDATE--I was moving so quickly last night that, although I noted that there were five designers involved in the project, I hadn't looked around enough to actually find their contributions. It turns out that they're in the Wired blogs.