We always play games with words when we get together. It’s a good type of activity that allows us, as writers, to feel that we are being productive while we are getting inebriated. Often, the next morning, we look over what we have written and realize that we write better sober. Sometimes, though, we are glad that we were under the influence of whatever substance it was that put us in such a state. You know, the whole Coleridge thing. Regardless, it is good exercise for lazy writers.

This is game that Dirk, Scott, William, and Anne Bargar made up and played in December of 1997. We took a stack of blue notecards, each took five of them, wrote titles, and then shuffled them in a deck, dealt them out, and wrote little stories for about two hours. The only rules were that you had to write something from the title, and you could not get your own title. There’s a lot of crap here, sure, but hey it’s aelatory—there’s moments:

BLUE NOTE CARDS