The Real Lance Brown

I’m looking to push myself to write more short stories, and the best way I’ve found is to be given basic guidelines/parameters for the story. Namely, a word limit and some sort of jumping off point. It could be a characters, a scenario, a phrase or sentence, or a combination of those or whatever else. (Yes, even a picture, potentially.) Anything to build a story on.

In the spirit of the social media age, I’m asking my Twitter “tweeps” to send me suggested story prompts in the form of tweets. If all goes well, I will solicit ideas each Friday, then spend the weekend working on the story, which I’ll post and announce on Monday (or earlier).

At this point, I’m going to pick my favorite from each Friday’s submissions, and write that story. In the future, I may devise a more random way to choose the “winning” prompt.

And by winning, I mean you win the fact that my story will be based off of your suggestion. Not a huge prize to say the least, but it doesn’t take much to “enter” either. :-) Plus I’ll give you props via tweets and such, and a link with the story if/when I post it on my site. (I may want to submit it somewhere instead.)

So here are the guidelines:

1. Tweet your suggestion on Friday to @FreelanceLance, in a normal-length tweet.
2. Aside from “@FreelanceLance”, your tweet has to include a number between 200 and 2000–the word limit– and a story seed of some sort. That part is up to you.
3. I’ll take suggestions until late night Friday night (PDT), and will announce my pick then and in the morning.
4. At this point, more than one tweet/suggestion is fine, as long as you don’t mind competing with yourself. ;-)

Sound good? I really appreciate you playing along and helping me scratch my creative itch. I hope I can do your ideas some justice!

You can fire off a tweet to me via this link.

Thanks so much! If you have any questions, just post a comment here or send me a tweet.

The mission:

To compile a list of three hundred and eleven 311 fans who are on Twitter, and make it easy for other 311 fans to find and follow them!

Options:

• There is a site called NinjaFollow that will let you mass-follow folks, if they are in a comma-separated text file. (Though I don’t know if they are trustworthy; we may need to seek out another way to do bulk following.) So if we get all the usernames, we can make a text file so people can literally follow all 311 311 fans in one shot.
• We can also make a list that links to each person’s profile individually, if people want to explore the 311 that way.

The toughest part will be collecting the 311 311 fans (with them preferably being good people for other 311 fans to follow). The simplest way to collect them is for 311 fans to self-identify and ask to be on the list. (The more complicated ways involve searching 311 Tweets, and using Twitter search, etc.)

So let’s make this easy – send the 311 lovers you know that are on Twitter here. And if you are a lover of 311, post a comment letting us know your Twitter username or Twitter URL. If you get on the list, we’ll send you a tweet when the “Twitter 311 311″ reaches 311, so you can follow your fellow fans en masse. :-)

Thanks for your help!

Be well, be free,

Lance Brown
@FreelanceLance on Twitter

The Twitter 311 311 so far (not in any particular order):

1. FreelanceLance
2. prettcooljewel
3. mavro311
4. DeannasLuvn311
5. KarenAnn311
6. jessLove311
7. gus311
8. Dubmatic311
9. ExcitableJen311
10. charleen311
11. travis311
12. j311stp
13. appliedscience
14. WILLYloves311
15. MikeO311
16. * You? *

Add yourself by posting a comment below with your Twitter username or a link to your Twitter profile.

NOTE: 311 fans with public Twitter accounts may get added to this list without being asked at times; if you want to be taken off the list just let me know  at lance@lancebrown.org.

P.S. – Please don’t ask to be added to this list if you’re not really a 311 fan, or if you intend to spam the people that follow you. Thanks!