What with vet and doctor bills, repairs to the house and other expenses, I just had to borrow $800 to pay this month's bills. Accordingly, I've increased the amount I'm asking in the Hatbox because, quite frankly, the time I spend running the site could be spent doing something that would earn money. Expenses on the site have gone up also, since running websites and servers is Piper's actual job, I feel I have to pay her at least some for the time she spends working on the site and the servers as well.

Three things:

We passed 19,000 stories on Sunday, 19,001 to be exact. We'll probably hit 20,000 sometime in July; Fictionmania may get there first. :)

Sing to the tune of "Desperado":

Desayuno, ¿por qué no vienes a nuestras mesas?
You've been visiting other places
Son casi diez.
¡Ay, haces tan frio!
You don't have any more pancakes.
Me gustan aquellos tanto.
¿No hacer más puedes?

Con abrazos,
Erin

Here's his lesson for this morning:

Daddy's brother, Uncle Virgil, dropped in on the New Years party that had turned into an Arkansawyer wake for Hank Williams. Naturally, the story had to be retold about the time he had shown up at Ma Dale's and eaten two whole fried chickens all by himself, with biscuits and corn on the cob and buttermilk to drink. Uncle Virgil stood five-foot-five and weighed about 120 pounds but he was a legendary eater.

It's almost the end of the month and we are still a bit short of our goal for the month. Please, if you can, help us keep BigCloset up and running by subscribing. Thanks.

Hugs,
Erin and Piper

Mom taught me my letters and how to sound-spell and I would puzzle out some of the shorter words, getting good enough that with my supply of imagination, a lot of people thought I could read. By the middle of the following summer, before my fifth birthday, I really could though I still needed help with some of the harder words.

I’m not sure how long we stayed with Ma and Pa that time, not more than a few months I’m sure. We moved into a house in town that wasn’t much more than a shed for a short time and then into a place I called The Little Red House. It had asphalt siding made to look like red bricks and it sat between the schoolhouse and The Big Red House where another bunch of cousins lived.

We moved back to Senath, Missouri, midway down the western edge of the Bootheel sometime in 1952. Both sets of grandparents lived there and aunts, uncles and cousins; too many to shake a stick at, as the saying goes.

I'm on the phone with her right now. She's been having difficulties, some people ripped her off and the bank and police are giving her a hard time. She needs some local friends in the Tampa area.

Hugs,
Erin

Mom took an immediate job in one of the agricultural sheds since Aunt Opal would stay at home to take care of me and John. Dad soon joined Mom, sorting fruit and vegetables for shipment. I seem to remember this as being cantaloupes, but that doesn't seem right since we arrived in fall after most of the melons would have already been harvested.

Near the end of the three weeks, Aunt Grace got a phone call from Aunt Opal, the oldest of the sisters. Aunt Opal lived in Brawley, California a town almost as much like Casa Grande as Cleveland is like Chicago, which is to say, quite a lot and not at all.

The song, "Big Rock Candy Mountain" may have saved my Aunt Opal's life back in 1951. It happened like this:

These pictures can be disturbing, be warned. :)

Gender Bent

BigCloset is not a social media site, it's not chaos and it's not a place without rules. One of the rules is don't post as a story something that isn't a story. A piece of a story that doesn't have a title yet, that's perhaps posted to draw comments and be developed later into a story should not be posted as fiction. It should go probably as a blog or as a forum post under one of the writing categories. There are places here for such posts but they don't belong with the stories.

It's another contest! The 2012 April Fools and Other Wise Contest will be open for submissions from 1 April, 2012, 12:01 A.M. until 5 May, 2012, 11:59 P.M. PDT.

Submissions should be original stories or stand alone chapters in a series or serial, not posted elsewhere before or during the contest and voting, and should have some transgender content. Length is arbitrary but should probably not be much over 10,000 words because we want people to have enough time to read all the entries if they want to.

Not a lot of enthusiasm for this here at BC, so the consensus among our admins is also no. At least, not for BC. We have two other sites we are attempting to bring up within the next six months that reader tags might be just the thing.

However, this discussion gave us some parameters for this:

1. It would be opt-in for authors whether they allowed any of their stories to use user tags. Default, no user tags. And a switch where authors could turn off user tags for one or all of their stories.

What do you all think of allowing readers to write tags to stories? This would be an opt-in for authors to allow or not and readers would have to spend buttons to be able to write tags, maybe. I'm just thinking out loud sort of but I found a neat module someone has already written. We'd also need a couple of three "tagerators" to keep the new tags coherent and appropriate. Perhaps authors could moderate tags on their own stories?

Hugs,
Erin

It's almost the end of March and we've had a bit more expenses this month than usual, including me personally who has just spent close to $500 bucks on unexpected private expense (including $225 for plumbing repairs). So if you haven't joined the Hatbox yet, now would be a good time. There will be some new content for the Hatbox going up soon, too.

Contest are fun and seem to increase involvement in the site. So I'm thinking of a contest to run from April 1 to May 5. Since there are several important calendar dates in that range, including April Fool's Day, Passover, Easter, IRS Day, May Day and Cinco de Mayo, I'm thinking of offering a choice of themes for contest entries, like these:

Sometimes the funnies can teach all of us something: http://www.slagoon.com/cgi-bin/sviewer.pl

:)

Hugs,
Erin

We've added two new sets of categories, one for fiction (also story, wysiwyg, storylink) and one for blogs.

Sometime between 11a.m. and noon, PST, this morning, we hit 20,000,000 visitors on the site counter. Since that only goes back to June 15, 2005, we really had probably a million visitors in the six years before that. At the current rate of visitors coming to the site, we'll hit another 20 million in about three years. :)

Writing here is for amateurs, amateurs in the original sense of people who do what they do for the love of doing it. If you're not happy about how long chapters are or how often they are posted, be polite and kind because if you simply make demands you might as well kick the authors and tell them to stop having fun.

Have you read about the new hydraulic bikes? You pedal them and a liquid transmission sends the power to the wheels -- they're going to market them under the name The Viscous Cycle.

:)
Erin

Doing the administration here is not easy, keeping things friendly and focussed on stories, storytelling, reading and commenting on stories. Maybe I should do away with the blogs.

Twice today I have had to remove comments for being unfriendly, both times because some reported news event and someone's fairly innocuous comment sparked replies that got political and maybe a bit unfriendly. Whenever this happens, it has nothing to do with my own politics, sometimes I have to remove posts that I agree with because not doing so eventually leads to flames, in my experience.

Had another of my patentable weird dreams. This one was about a fictional high school in Malibu known by the nickname of Surfer High. In the dream, I was pitching this as a cable TV show.

One of the exec types says, "I like what you've done there, with the double meaning in the title. It's not a double entendre unless it's dirty, right?"