Publisher: 100 Word Stories
Weekly Challenge: 1040
Topic: Pick Two – Cover band, Slow down, Empty streets, Sculpture gallery, Shred
Submitted: March 29, 2026
Published: March 29, 2026
Participants: 7 total
Recommended Topic: Four Cheese Wheels and a llama
As the tour guide brought the group through a museum, a cheesy cover band was in one room playing ambient music of slicing, shredding, and melting cheese on a grill, another member was stretching mozzarella, while another was intensely focused curing a wheel of cheddar.
The exhibit itself was full of various sculptures of hats, swords, animals, flowers, and more.
They were colorful and seemed to wave in the air. It almost seemed as if static electricity drew them towards you.
In each room, the artist could be heard twisting, rubbing, and shaping new sculptures made of vibrant, colorful balloons.
About the 100 Word Stories Weekly Challenge
About the 100 Word Stories Weekly Challenge
100 Word Stories
…And, as always, keep it brief!
The 100 Word Stories Weekly Challenge was (and still is) hosted by Laurence Simon—better known in Second Life as Crap Mariner—who built a wonderfully strange, tight-knit community around storytelling discipline.
Originally, he started a daily random theme on ScriberOptics via 100words on May 13, 2005, based on a photo, using a combination of everyone’s submitted words rather than posting a single topic. He would write short 100-word stories featuring recurring characters, such as Abraham Lincoln and the Mustard Man.
In June 2005, he then spun the stories into their own subdomain from his personal blog at podcasting.isfullofcrap.com, featuring multiple authors and guest entries. Rather than daily challenges, he settled for weekly challenges, which were due on April 21, 2006, for the topic “Bunnies!” It was published on April 22, 2006. He continued each week posting a topic and invited people to write a story of 100 or [sic]Less Nessman 2.0 words long. Most participants went for exactly 100. It was a form of microfiction—a subset of flash fiction—where the limitation wasn’t restrictive but creatively freeing. Within those 100 words, stories could be funny, heartfelt, surreal, absurd, reflective, or unexpectedly powerful.
Laurence encouraged contributors not just to write but to perform. He always invited people to record themselves reading their stories and send in the audio so their voices could be part of the experience. If someone didn’t—or couldn’t—he gladly read their story for them. Sometimes he even used software to alter his voice, adding character variety, humor, or dramatic flair, so every episode felt like a small production rather than just a reading.
The project chose to respond to the creative emptiness of podcasts at the time not with cynicism, but with creativity. Laurence filled the internet with humor, storytelling, discipline, and imagination. Eventually, the project continued under his broader creative umbrella, “One A Day Until I Die,” where he continues to celebrate the joy of storytelling in all its weird and wonderful forms.
Episodes usually feature everyone’s submissions together in one podcast, and listeners vote on their favorites. The weekly winner not only gets bragging rights but also the honor of choosing the next topic—meaning the community itself shaped what came next. Many participants came from overlapping creative spaces: writers, musicians, podcasters, and especially people in Second Life, where the challenge became something of a shared cultural experience. It wasn’t just a writing exercise; it was friendship, collaboration, creative play, and a small but meaningful part of internet history.
I even had the chance to meet Laurence once at the Second Life Community Convention, where he was handing out refrigerator magnets promoting the podcast — including one I still have today on my fridge. It’s a little artifact from a wonderfully weird, wonderfully human creative era.
This project mattered. It still does.
Paper/Wood Floor Theme from an old version of 100 Word Stories Circa 2009
Behind the Story
Being the last challenge of the month, the prompt for this challenge was “Pick Two” with a list of topics to choose from: Cover band, Slow down, Empty streets, Sculpture gallery, and Shred. Usually, I like trying to challenge myself and pick from all the prompts.
However, as I was preparing to leave for church, I got an email from the host of 100 Word Stories, apologizing for losing my entry while navigating a flood of emails during his job hunt.
View email from the host, Laurence Simon
Created At: Sunday, March 29, 2026, 9:51 AM
From: Laurence Simon <isfullofcrap>
To: Lewis Moten <lewismoten>
Subject: Oops
hi there. Well, in the marathon of sending out resumes, getting a flood of confirmations, and then a resulting flood of rejections, my mailbox has been a little bit of a mess and I may have accidentally deleted your story for the week. If you could send it again, I would greatly appreciate it. I’m gonna wait to post things until late in the day even though I could probably post now and just do the usual those things up later on the feed, I think it’s easier for folks if I waited. I mean, what’s the rush? Laugh thanks
-ls/r
I was about to acknowledge the corn and admit that I hadn’t created a story—and to go ahead and proceed without me. It would have been the first week I missed since I started submitting stories again. By this time, I had submitted 24 stories since 2009, with 12 of them being from 2026. I was officially at the halfway point. I knew myself well. I needed to cross that threshold.
At that point, the person I usually pick up on my way into church confirmed he was still sick, so I had time. It only takes me about 15 minutes to set up the audio equipment at church now—but that’s only if everything runs smoothly and I find ample parking. There were enough signs pointing me toward making the effort to still get to church in time for the Palm Sunday service.
So I sat down and threw this together. Very fast. It’s raw—a first draft without much time to fully work out the chosen topics or blend them together.
I started with the sculpture gallery, and my mind immediately went to balloon sculptures. That’s something I do for kids using colorful 110 balloons when I’m dressed as a clown. I’m still learning, so I often watch videos and read books on different shapes.
The second topic I picked was a cover band—but I wanted it to be surreal, dreamlike, and completely out of left field. That’s where the cheese came in. I love cheese, even if my body disagrees. As I started listing things you can do with cheese, shredding naturally pulled in a third prompt: shred.
At some point, I leaned into that familiar “Lewie” tendency—well exceeds expectations. For added absurdity, I imagined one band member staring at a wheel of cheese, willing it to cure—as if the process itself had a sound. That idea was a quiet nod to my old Nextdoor bio:
It all started coming together quickly.
I originally tried to hold back the reveal that the sculptures weren’t balloons until the very end—but I needed more words. So the hints started slipping in earlier: waves in the air, static electricity pulling them closer, twisting, rubbing, shaping. It wasn’t a sharp twist ending, but it was still a twist—literally—of balloons.
That detail about “rubbing” comes from balloon sculpting itself—an advanced technique used to stretch sections into angles, like elbows for balloon figures. I picked it up while learning how to make Spider-Man, and it found its way into the story.
When I moved on to recording, I hit a snag. I opened Audacity and… silence. My microphone was still set to BlackHole 2ch from earlier, when I was capturing audio someone sent me through Facebook Messenger for the telephone project.
After fixing that, I managed about 45 seconds of audio. I ran it through my usual chain: noise reduction, click removal, filter curve EQ, graphic EQ, high-pass filter, compression, and loudness normalization.
That was enough—but it still didn’t feel like me.
So I added instrumental backing. I pasted the story into Producer.ai as a sound description to generate music. The first attempt failed without explanation. The second gave me two options. One was too bouncy, so I went with the other and pulled it into Audacity.
From there, I broke it apart—matching mood shifts, cutting clips, layering fades, and aligning everything with my narration. At one point, I even paused the reading just to let the “cheese music” take over.
Finally, I had something.
I replied to Lawrence, explaining that nothing had been lost—I had just been busy and short on time. I even added keywords so I could find it later in my archive.
View email reply to the host, Laurence Simon
Created At: Sunday, March 29, 2026, 10:26 AM
From: Lewis Moten <lewismoten>
To: Laurence Simon <isfullofcrap>
Subject: Re: Oops
I’ve been busy and haven’t done it. I was getting ready for church when I saw your email. I’m pressed for time, but I gave it a go. It’s really not my best to work on blending the two topics, cleaning up, and having a punch at the end, but at least it’s something. I can’t work on this anymore this morning. They need me to control the audio at the tech booth.
WEEKLY CHALLENGE 1040 – Pick Two – Cover ban, Slow down, Empty streets, Sculpture gallery, Shred
Title: A very Cultured Performance
Next topic suggestion: Four Cheese Wheels and a llama
As the tour guide brought the group through a museum, a cheesy cover band was in one room playing ambient music of slicing, shredding, and melting cheese on a grill, another member was stretching mozzarella, while another was intensely focused curing a wheel of cheddar.
The exhibit itself was full of various sculptures of hats, swords, animals, flowers, and more. They were colorful and seemed to wave in the air. It almost seemed as if static electricity drew them towards you. In each room, the artist could be heard twisting, rubbing, and shaping new sculptures made of vibrant, colorful balloons.
Best,
Lewis E. Moten III
35 minutes from receipt of email to delivery—failure, opportunity, time crunch, writing, recording, effects, instrumental generation, audio production, submission. I’ve spent more time writing this post.
Then I made it to church—on time. Everything was mostly set up already, but it turned out to be a good thing I was there. We’re now distributing hearing aids to some members, and that hadn’t been accounted for.
Everything came together. Service went off without a hitch.
Looking back, I realized I hadn’t actually used the word “gallery” for sculpture gallery—I used “museum” instead. That felt right. These prompts are meant to be interpreted, not followed word-for-word. Sometimes I’m abrasive about it, bending the rules outright; other times, they bend on their own as ideas rush in.
