I've been subscribed to @sfshorts on Twitter, which is not about short pants worn in San Fransisco. No, it's a micro-fiction publication run by my friend ElizabethN and her friend (and someone I know online) preinheimer, wherein they publish a full science fiction story within the space of 1 or 2 tweets -- that's a full sci-fi story within 280 characters.

Micro-fiction seems like a great medium for people that aren't as invested in the whole effort of writing, but it offers some challenges of its own. Stylistically, one of the rules seems to be no txt-speak; You can't abbreviate every little thing to make your stories longer. And still, it has to make sense.

The stories I like best are the ones that feel complete or caress a trope. For example, if I can discern the components of a complete story from just the 140 characters, then that makes me happy. I also like it if, after all that, there's also a subtle twist in the story, perhaps something that turns it from something mundane into something purposefully sci-fi.

Here's just one example of the type of micro-story I like:

but why detective? Why save the spoon, with those cred chips and dpads around? Think Rook. A hand-made wooden spoon: An heirloom from earth

It's a mystery. Sure, we don't get the details of the case, but there's only a tweet's worth of text here. Still, you get the idea of a conversation between two investigators, one who can't understand why the standard valuables would be left behind for a spoon. And then you realize that maybe Earth is gone. It packs a lot into the 140 characters, which is why I like it.

And that's just one of many stories I've enjoyed daily from sfshorts.

Anyway, I became inclined recently to see what the effort was for creating a story in this format. It didn't take much but imagination and some editing skill. Probably more of the latter than the former. Here are a handful of stories that I wrote under the 140 character limit. I'm not sure if any of them are sfshorts-quality, but I hope you enjoy them nonetheless.

It crept up behind him. Silent. Slow. And made a meal of him the same way. But such is the way with mistakes of genetic botany.

Their old robot on the fritz, a new one was needed. 5 boxtops and $2 shipping later, it was fully assembled and ambling about the kitchen.

Chased about the galaxy for 700 years by the insectoid race, the refugees finally safely settled on world that looked like a giant larva.

Harold had rewired the microwave so it was only a matter of punching in a date and time to go back to before the messy spaghetti explosion.

The creatures requested only one thing in exchange for a binding peace. In the end, it was cheese that saved us all.

As he fled, rivulets of orange sweat dripped from his temples. The last one infected, all he could do now was settle in for the inevitable.

When I started writing this blog way back in the ancient times, I was using it to write. Sure, a lot of it was opiniony stuff, but there were a few poems and stories. It's something I enjoy doing.

Over the years, I've kind of stopped posting that stuff here. I think this is primarily because I think the audience of my site here would be confused about it. When I have posted fiction in the past amidst regular opinionated content, it has seriously confused regular readers, who have commented in what reads to me as humorous, but really isn't a kind way to treat readers.

So what I'm wondering is if I've yet sufficiently whittled down my readers with a lack of content to start posting just plain writing. Of course, I shouldn't care what readers think. It's my blog after all. I'm just curious.

Would you regulars who are left care if I posted some really bad fiction to the blog as I write it? I've been thinking of taking up a kind-of daily writing exercise that I could post to keep my writing production up.

Would it be helpful to mark the fiction/writing content in a different way? I'm wondering if that's a burden (slight as it may be) that I'd be willing to endure over time. Curious.

My writing queue is a mile long, and a year overdue. I've got ideas aplenty, a paradox of choice, and an imagined readership (not in its quantity, but its consistency) that demands perfection.

I've just noticed, moments ago, that the blogs I most enjoy reading these days are short. Three paragraphs convey their entire message. Most of the time, the message is a simple impression. You read it and you feel... a certain way. It's like sense memory -- a whiff of a stranger's prose puts you in a familiar place.

Clearly, I need to write more like that, but leave room for the bigger questions that often fill this space. Some new rules for authoring, which I'll feel free to break soon after I write them: No writing without music. Less thinking, more feeling. Fiction works, with warning. Short and sweet.

There are these creatures that live under my porch, and up until yesterday, they were quite friendly with me.

When I first noticed them, I thought that someone had dropped a sack of potatoes near the walkway to the front door. They were each about the size of a potato, with brown mottled skin, not unlike the textrue of a potato. They had very small eyes that were entirely pupil sunk into their noseless faces. Each had a pair of twig-like legs and arms, and some of them carried twigs sharpened into potato-people-sized spears. They seemed altogether shocked when I happened upon them.

I had come home early from work for a reason that now seems wholly insignificant, and found several of these creatures hopping out from under my porch and making strange gesticulations toward the mums in the planter with their spears. They were apparently involved in quite a heated argument, otherwise they might have noticed me pull into the driveway and scattered, leaving me none the wiser.

One of the group was grunting very loudly (for a potato) at the others, which I've come to learn, but not understand, is their primary means of communication. He was pointing his spear at one of the others, who had some yellow mum petals protruding from his mouth.

I must have looked as astonished as they did when they finally did notice me. I'm sure I stood on the walkway, staring in incredulity at the groundlings, just as they stared back at me. One of them even dropped his spear at the sight of me.

They didn't make an attempt to run. They weren't afraid, even though it seems that they had taken great effort not to be seen up until then. They calmly gathered their things and dragged the fat little potato who was eating our mums down through a hole under our porch that I hadn't noticed before.

I went in the back door.

I didn't know at first whether I should tell anyoe about them. I wasn't really sure that it had happened. And besides that, telling people that you've seen things like this is the kind of thing that gets you taken off of calling lists for holiday parties, especially if you can't offer proof. I wasn't interested in bothering them so long as they went back to not bothering me. Oh, well.

I guess at some point they figured that if I had seen them once and didn't do anything about it, then it wouldn't be of great harm if they showed themselves again. I was happy to have not had any additional hallucinations for two weeks when I pulled into my driveway after work one evening to find a pair of groundlings carrying something across the macadam.

It looked like the roots of a plant. They ran quickly across the pavement, leaving only slight crumbs of dirt from the roots as they ran. I thought I saw the rear carrier wave his little stick arm at me as they passed by, dashing under the porch into their burrow.

I tried to broach the subject with my wife. She's usually sympathetic to what she calls my "endearing idiosyncracies", but she simply wasn't buying the whole "potato men" thing. I showed her the dead plant on the side of the house, where they had obviously dug up the roots, but she said it must have been a neighbor's dog. I showed her the hole where they went under the porch. She had a close look, but didn't see anything moving or anything that looked like a potato man. Maybe I has seen a dirty squirrel or a groundhog or something, she suggested.

Needless to say, I haven't slept very well since then. When I do sleep, I have vivid dreams of my kids playing with these little potato-shaped men -- taking turns pushing them on swings, and turning little jumpropes. Sometimes, in these dreams, I'm in a frying pan, and I'm looking up at a human-sized potato man who is cooking me.

I've seen them a few times since I tried to reveal their existance to my wife. They're always doing something around the yard. Not exactly destructive, but never constructive. They seem to eat plants here and there, and they take the roots of things when they're dead or near death, which apparently happens a lot in our oddly alkaline soil. Who knows, maybe they're causing that?

For all I know, there could be a huge city of these creatures under my house. My house could be one of many portals from the underground potato person world onto the surface for when they stage their mass invasion!

Finally yesterday, I couldn't take it any more. Yes, they had left me well enough alone after I had discovered them, but they could have taken more pains to let me completely forget about them. This time I saw about twenty of them drag a small log into their burrow, and the straw broke that camel.

After dinner when it got a little dark, I hunted down my shovel. Feeling safe since I had never seen them out of their hole after dark, I started to fill the hole under the porch with dirt from my front yard. My neighbors might think me crazy, but they'd think me even more crazy if my sleeplessness left me rambling nonsensically about these little veggie folks living under my porch.

And so with the hole packed with fresh dirt and my lawn in need of patching, I dusted off my hands and headed inside.

My peaceful dreams of flying in jets with supermodels were interrupted by some strange noise in the bedroom. I woke up to find a pair of sinister-looking potato men on the bed near my wife's head. One of them held a pair of our scissors, which he had somehow managed to get out of the kitchen drawer. The other gripped the lock of hair that he casually snipped off, seeing that I was awake.

Aghast, I didn't react quickly enough to shoo them away before they both hopped off the bed and disappeared. Their message had been sent.

This morning, the hole was dug out again, and the yard was still mangled from my digging of last night. I don't know what intentions they mean, but I know that I don't stand a chance against them if they really wanted to cause me harm. As for today, I'm going to leave them alone, and probably call a real estate agent. Hopefully our next house just has termites.

Before we moved into the house that I still live in, we lived in a half-double next to the paper mill on Logan Avenue.

One of the best things about the house on Logan was the large parking lot in which the trucks used to park their trailers between the loading and unloading of recycled paper. My brother and I used to ride our bikes around the lot with other kids in our neighborhood, circling the trailers. For a gift I was given a bicycle odometer to keep track of the many miles that I pedaled around that asphalt lot.

There was also a weighing station, and if you looked in the booth that was attached to the truck-sized scale, you could see a red LED gauge of how many tons your bike weighed. A certain truck had once dropped a large bundle of colored paper chits that were likely due to be recycled. We found these pieces near the scale, assigned them all some value, and called them "Moon Money".

The lady on one end of the street had a pear tree in her back yard. If not for the swarms of bees it drew every year, the pears would have made a great harvest. As it was, she was a bit old and didn't bother picking any of them. They all fell to the ground and on the sidewalk to her back door, leaving a terrible mess that the bees loved, and keeping away many kids from snatching the remaining low fruit. This was probably her plan all along.

In our back yard, there were only a couple of bushes in addition to the separate garage that we used for storage. One year, my brother and I insisted upon the building of a treehouse from some plans in a book. My dad obliged by constructing some artificial "trees" with 4x4s and cement anchors. The little A-frame treehouse was very cool when it was finished.

In that house, I learned how to program computers. I recall a specific image in my mind of sitting at a table in my room in the attic, my Timex-Sinclair 2000 on a table in front of me hooked to a small black and white TV. The sun reflected off of the neighboring house was coming through my small attic window. I spent far too much time there.

I remember some mornings with Cathy Draper, the girl from across the block. Her mother left early for work, so she came to our house for breakfast and to catch the bus. She never sat down to eat. Abby reminds me of her in that way.

Cathy and I explored the abandoned house near hers. We always said it was haunted, and both had said we saw something strang emoving around on the second floor.

Inside the house was a wreck. There were huge holes in the uncarpeted wooden floor, through which you could see the basement. The stairs were rickety, and although I refused to even step foot inside, Cathy wasn't afraid to get to the stair banister before turning around and running for fear of a noise from the haunted second floor.

Our immediate neighbors on the unattached side were the Reeves. They were as close to hillbilly as I ever want to live next to. The boy that lived there - I'm not sure who's boy it was, really - was always playing in the dirt in the back yard with that Dukes of Hazard car. His name was Boo. I'm sure his momma shot his daddy with a shotgun at some point. Their front porch stairs had a metal sign that said, "No Solicitors".

Across the alley from them lived the Browns. Mrs. Brown was always very nice to us, and her and her daughter, Angie, babysat for us now and then. I remember eating oatmeal cream pies at her house while my parents visitied my grandfather in the hospital.

Next door to the Browns lived Becky and Alicia. Becky was a bit older than me, maybe a school grade. Alicia was more my brother's age. One afternoon we played a kissing game in one of those collapsible plastic tunnels in Mrs. Brown's big yard. I didn't even realize what was going on when Alicia kissed me.

We moved away from Logan Avenue when I was 10. It was October. I don't remember much about the move, other than we were moving the last boxes into the house when the trick-or-treaters were walking the street.