Connecting Words and Technology

Stories.com, Connecting Words and Technology

Forgive me Father for I have sinned, my last confession was a ‘click’ ago.

Seldom is absolution as swift as a click, but, after all, this is the age of Silicon Gods and judgement tagged with, “you’ve got mail – ‘two Our Father’s and three Hail Mary’s and don’t forget the typo in paragraph three’ .” Every day, writers from around the world seek immediate absolution, or at least an honest review, at the crossroads of electronic media and heart felt passion. A busy intersection indeed, but everyone has the right of way at Stories.com, where reading and writing are the medium of choice and technology delivers culture.

Stories.com is a community of writers and readers, novice and practiced alike, gathering from all corners of the world to write, read and assess. A community diverse in geography, but connected by technology and words. Stories.com writer Dale Brabb writes in a poem entitled ‘Words’, “Do not underestimate the power of words, Overlook their possibilities, Or ignore their impact, For though they are not made of matter, Whole universes live and die within them…”

Stories.com is a virtual community with nothing virtual about its human touch, where thoughts and emotions, and fears and hopes are shared as prose and poetry, and the shield of remoteness fails to hide the core of human expression. As with any community, they honor the dead, comfort the distressed, educate students, learn from teachers, welcome new neighbors, reward the most accomplished, police the miscreants and exchange in common currency.

On Stories.com, all readers are encouraged to rate (on a five star scale) and comment constructively on each other’s works. Readers can award ‘Gift points’, the currency of their exchange, in recognition of exceptional works. Gift Points are received, or otherwise purchased on the site, and exchanged for branded merchandise. Works can be self promoted in countless popular forums, or, as is more often the case, a neighborly welcome wagon will take up your cause and deliver you from darkness into the bright light of readership.

On Stories.com readers read aplenty, and writers, who are known by their ‘handles’, as witty and anonymous as ‘ThankUDriveThru’ or ‘WhataWriter’, or as exacting as their real name, write bountifully. Writers create a portfolio of works, all works are classified into an appropriate genre and labeled as Prose, or Lyric, or Poetry, Short Story, etc. All readers and writers are welcomed on the site and there are no restrictions to what you can post, all works must, however, be self rated, from ‘G’ to ‘X.’ Students post their work for review by teachers and interested bystanders alike, playwrights test an audience that pays with intellect and judgment and a word of encouragement, and poets, poets free their emotions like a timid leaf in a cool autumn breeze.

Writers are classified in a hierarchy of colorful portfolios, a status determined by the writer’s involvement in the ‘community’, with little weight, if any, given to the quality of their work, an environment promoting prolificacy over trepidation. Writers who die are honored by a permanent white portfolio and are memorialized by contests and tributes in their honor.

The truth is, everyone is a writer, everyone has penned a poem or a piece of prose, or written a love letter or an essay for English 101 and, who among us would not expose our work, if not in glorious self avowal, then in anonymity, in return for which one gets instant absolution or constructive penitence. And one thing is almost guaranteed, that is the great sense of satisfaction that someone has read your work and took the care to rate it and to comment on it. It’s an uplifting drug sure to make you a more prolific writer, if not an altogether better writer.

To think more than one sleeps and to read more than one writes, I believe, is a proper balance for a writer, and Stories.com is the place where this measured balance is realized in one great tasty helping. So, pick up your guitar or your pen, grab hold of your mouse, straighten your shoulders, and visit Stories.com for a slice of cerebral sustenance of fact and fiction, with an appetizer of lip-smacking poetry, chased by raw prose as delightful to the ear as it is to the pallet.


PRD 2/02