Posted by Tony Lieu on September 14th, 2006 — Posted in Scribbling, Bah Humbug
Gray walls, gray bars. Painted gray bedframe, gray metal toilet. Plain white cover on the thin mattress. I’m holed up in the county jail, and that’s just for a quick holiday until the trial. I’ll be living in this plain gray world for quite a while, I’m sure. Let me tell you my story to pass the time.
I grew up in Chicago, the fourth of five children. My Pa was a truck driver, he was barely ever around. My Ma was a waitress, on the good months, usually working two jobs every day just to keep food on our plates and clothes on our backs. The clothes were all hand-me-downs for me. Every once in a while there would be a pair of new shoes under the christmas tree, or some jeans on a birthday. My brothers and sisters and I, we had it hard, and we all looked out for each other. We had to.
Even so, every few weeks somebody would come home with a black eye, or worse. Most kids, even the bullies, were smart enough to know that the other two brothers would take care of you if you messed with one of us, but some just couldn’t back down from a challenge, or had something to prove. It was my two sisters that had it the worst. They usually wouldn’t even tell us who it was. Or sometimes they pretended that the son of a bitch was really her boyfriend. We pretended to believe them, because we didn’t want them to hurt any more than they had to.
Only two of us finished high school. I was one of the lucky ones. After school was over, I was always out somewhere looking for work, but nobody ever seemed to want a kid like me. I spent so much time out on the streets looking for someone with an open job who wasn’t a racist, one day the streets just felt like where I belonged. Ma never would have approved, but with her at work more than she was at home, it was easy to hide it from her. I ended up joining a gang. They didn’t discriminate, long as I did what I was told.
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Posted by Tony Lieu on September 11th, 2006 — Posted in Scribbling, Fantasy
Glancing at my watch, I saw that it was 6:30 PM, closing time was tantalizingly close, and my back ached from leaning over all day. Even so, the boredom was worse. Sitting around the store with nothing productive to do can get old very quickly, and you can only straighten out the display models so many times in a day.
As I started a gentle stroll around the display tables out front, I heard the bell jingle, announcing the customer coming through the door. I looked up to see a woman in a complicated pink dress, yet not complicated enough to hide the few extra pounds she was carrying. I put on my best customer service smile and dove right in.
“Welcome to Shoe Town, may I be of assistance?” I ask.
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Posted by Tony Lieu on September 10th, 2006 — Posted in Scribbling
“A quarter!” he cries out, excited beyond reason.
Ricky is the eight year old son of a single mother. His father ran out when he was three, and his mom has struggled ever since to make ends meet. She tries hard to give him an allowance, but it still only totals one dollar each month, and Ricky always spends it on the same thing. So, faced with something as valuable as an unclaimed quarter within his grasp, he tends to become rather single-minded. He rushes to pick it up.
Through the rest of the school week, Ricky keeps his eyes open as always. He’s always been surprised, but also secretly very pleased, that people are so careless about their change. To his young disadvantaged eyes, each one is a gold mine. A nickle here, a dime there, always vigilant, Ricky builds his fortune one coin at a time.
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Posted by Tony Lieu on September 9th, 2006 — Posted in Default
So, quite some time ago, I purchased a bulk lot of 66 different books on eBay, for what worked out to around a dollar a piece, after shipping which was quite a steal. Not to mention that around half of them were hardcovers, to boot!
Why do I mention this? Well, one of them was Writers of the Future, which is the grand result of a writing contest: the winners get published.
Not that I didn’t know/expect that writing contests exist, but seeing the results in my hands got me to thinking. And I thought, “I could do this,” while reading most of the stories therein. Plus, not only do the winners get published, they get some hefty prizes: $1,000 for first place, each quarter. Then each year, the quarterly first place winners are judged again, the winner garnering another $5,000.
With the possibility of fame, fortune, and riches hanging in the balance, how could I do anything besides begin writing? So I did! I began outlining my ideas. Then, at the very end of August, I picked one, and started outlining the story for that idea. I’ve begun writing that as a short story, which is looking like it might end up in the 10,000 word range.
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