“Drink
responsibly.”
Dionysus* #quote
Today I went to my card game thing, tomorrow there shall be another.
Anyway onto the flash fiction!
The Mathematician And His Dream
Professor Mentine wanted to be a writer but his only skill was math.
He could be called the very best at math. He grabbed a degree quickly
and managed to teach while easily making equations on the side for
whatever sciencey, mathmaticy thing that needed to be done. People
hired him to work out an equation for making their processors run
faster, or guiding missiles, or running their nuclear reactors, or
optimizing their accounting. Any problem he could solve. Except for
the fact he couldn't write for the life of him. Yet he wanted to make
a story of some sort. He wanted to be creative. Make a book.
His grandfather read him stories when he was young and made him love
the written word. And eventually Mentine read on his own and even
read the works his grandfather created and wanted to follow in his
footsteps. Create stories to entertain and make people happy.
But Mentine had little talent for coming up with ideas in a strong
flow. He couldn't even copy ideas into a narrative that well, ripping
off someone still required him to write some form of original flow of
description and thought.
But he tried and tried and worked on coming up with some form of
solution. During one depressed evening of working on writing he just
fiddled with his calculator. At that point an epiphany occurred
worthy of him shouting “Eureka!” He decided he would use the
talent he knew he had.
He would use mathematics to solve fiction.
So he began studying movies, novels, comic books and every form of
story he could get his hands on. He even filled his house with the
sounds of old radio broadcasts. He scrawled numbers, words and notes
on page after page of paper.
It took him three years to reach his conclusion. He wrote a book and
it got published with moderately good sales. He would sell again, but
he certainly wouldn't be famous.
“Doctor Mentine,” his editor said to him over the phone. “I
must say your work is very mass appeal, though probably the most
formulaic thing I have ever seen. Most of its originality is from a
mix of a whole bunch of different formulas. You might need to add
something, more...you if you want your book to make it big.”
Formulaic? Mentine thought about the editors words. Formula did fit
a mathematician though. Mentine scrawled a few numbers on paper after
call. But there is more to math than formulas, and maybe more to
books and stories than the patterns he found.
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