So, some of you may be looking at this thread and wondering what a drabble is. A Drabble is an extremely short work of fiction with exactly one hundred words. In some of my past communities we have participated in a theme challenge where we had a list of words or phrases and were asked to write a drabble for each one.

For this board I’m going to do it a bit differently. The fun of these are that everyone can participate no matter their level of writing skill. Even the authors who are in the middle of a huge epic can take a little time to write them (hint hint). So here are the rules:

1. I will make a new thread for each theme. Most likely once every two weeks. If it gets popular and you guys want it a bit quicker or a bit slower we can do that.
2. You will write your 100 word response and post it in THIS THREAD. Please don’t make an entry for them on the fic boards. It will get really spammy if you do and will be counter productive to the community.
3. Post any FDK you have for the drabbles in this thread. Let the author know you are talking about their drabble to keep confusion down. This should be pretty easy.
4. Keep your drabbles clean and within the rules of the general fic boards.
5. You don’t have to use the words of the theme in your drabble but it does need to be something related to that theme and the LnC show. If you have questions just ask me about it.
6. I would prefer to be the one to introduce these themes and set up the threads, however if you have a suggestion for a new theme please pm it to me and I can add it to the list. ^_^ They should be simple themes and nothing to specific.
7. NEW: These drabbles will be submitted to the archive. If you DO NOT WANT your drabble to be submitted please let me know. All past drabbles before this rule was made will not be subject to this rule (wow that is a mouthful). I will contact each of you individually.
8. NEW: There will be a one month time limit for each drabble. The cut off date will be announced in each thread. All drabbles for that theme must be submitted by that date in order for it to be included on the archive.

Here is this week’s theme: Midnight

Have fun with it!

CUTOFF DATE: 4/13/07

How do you count things like...
1) hyphenated compounds (all-night)
2) abbreviated forms (it's)
3) compounds without hyphons (ice cream)?

Which is one word, which is counted as two words?

I'd count abbreviations and the compound words as one word. The other... I'd say two words. But if you have to cheat and it is like 101 words because of that compound I don't think we will mind.

~Jojo, who isn't actually planning on counting your words since there is no prize involved. LOL

To be honest my other communities used a different definition of drabble... you guys would call most of those vignettes. I think making them 100 words is more fun for this community though.

MS Word tells me this has 100 words in it. I trust Microsoft... sometimes.

It's an "adaptation" of an episode. And before anyone starts with the "not another TOGOM" please know that this is my first. And I absolutely could not help myself.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Midnight was just a few short minutes away.

As the container filled up with cement, Lois Lane knew that it was all over. She would never see tomorrow. Her life flashed in front of her eyes: an unhappy childhood, disastrous relationships, a job she lived for, Lex Luthor, Superman. And Clark.

Was there any point in living anyway, she wondered. Clark had been killed earlier tonight. Killed while saving her life. Holding on to shreds of hope that she may be seeing him again, up there, Lois closed her eyes and waited for midnight to come and take her away.

~ the end ~

Nice one, Lara! But only because we know that THE END is not truly the end of all.

So, here's my take on the challenge. OpenOffice claims it's 100 words, but it counts all compounds as two words...

*****Midnight*****

It was a cloudless midsummer midweek night. There was an all-night party going on in the apartment next door, so Lois decided to stay up all night. In her skin-tight, midnight-blue nighty, she was looking out the window, admiring the night sky. She contemplated the men in her life:

Superman, her knight in shining armour – or, rather, tight-fitting tights of bright blue spandex.

And the man with poor sight, a knight of the pen. The man she always went to when in fright.

She should have seen right away that, for her, only Clark was right.

YAY! I'm glad some other people are taking these on. ^_^ I'll make one big FDK post in a bit for all of you guys. But I'm loving them so far! Olympe: I'm trusting my word processor for the word count as well so let's just go with what they tell us. ^_~

---------Midnight-----------

At night she would lay in her bed and fantasized about telling him. Sometimes she barged right into his apartment and told him and other times he was the one to confess to her. There were nights she almost had the courage to call him and tell him right there how she felt, but the clock on her nightstand would glare at her showing the late hour and she would lose her nerve. Closing her eyes she would pray for the strength to tell him in the light of the day when the comfort of darkness was no longer there.

Jojo, your drabble makes me melt into a puddle! And it so reminds me of some lines from one of my favourite songs:

Can you feel the love tonight?
The peace the evening brings
The world, for once, in perfect harmony
With all its living things.

(from: The Lion King)

Mellie - niiiice! Interesting use of hyphenated words... was there a reason or it just happened that way?

Jojo - aawww!!! Beautiful.

Cool challenge, btw. I'll definitely be looking out for more of these, that was *really* fun to do!!

@Lara: There was a reason. My idea included some wordplay. My first step was looking up all sorts of expression containing either 'mid', 'night' or a rhyme on 'night'. I ended up with more than five dozen expression - and, doing the maths, I realized that I couldn't use them all. So I chose the ones fitting best. Then I wrote what I wanted to write. And deleted more than half of it because there were still too many words, thereby erasing most of the puns.

awww! you should post it somewhere so we could read that...

There's just a little problem: I really deleted it. But I still have my brainstorming paper. I'll try to reconstruct it, but not now. For me, it's time for bed - 1:30 am already...

Aw, Lara, I really liked how you showed Lois’ feelings in only a few words. Wonderful!

Cute, Mellie! Yes, she should have seen it right away!

Oh, my gosh, JoJo! So mysterious! I take it she’s trying to work up the nerve to tell her she loves him?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Okay, here's my take. 100 words by MS Word...


Midnight. If he flew slowly enough, it could be midnight for a full twenty-four hours. Or he could experience midnight twenty-four times. Midnight in Madrid, Malmo, Munich. Midnight in Mayaguez, Melbourne, Manchester. He needed the stillness and solitude of midnight. Lois had just said yes to Lex Luthor. How could she do that? How?

Maybe if he just told her the truth then things would be different. Would they? No, he didn’t think they would. She wasn’t ready to know that Clark Kent was Superman. And he wasn’t ready to tell her. He sighed. It was midnight in Metropolis. Again.

~Fin~

So cute. I like all of them.

Lara, I really like the way yours clips so well to the context while still conveying Lois' state of mind. In 100 words it's a vignette that feels really complete (we know what we know...). I can really see it and I like that despairing mood. *shrug*

Jojo, I love how you work in the time and her thinking it's too late. That "glare" of the clock really fits well. Then there's the whole sexiness of the fantasy, but that might be my gutterbrain talking.

Nancy you mention Mayaguez! That gets me oh my gosh. That city is close to my heart, imagine my shock when I saw the name. I love how you weave in his thoughts with the flying and the time. Kinda surreal, I never thought about it but yeah time is interesting when you can get from one side of the world to the next in seconds/minutes.

Alcyone, I lived in Puerto Rico so it just seemed natural to mention a city from there!

Oooh! Nancy! Love what you did with your 100 words!! Excellent!!!

Thanks, Lara!

Nancy, your take on it is wonderful! And it tells us how much can happen in twenty-four hours. Oh, there didn't happen anything?

Nice idea, jojo. I love your takes on the topic. Here is mine...

***Midnight***

He woke as the extra beat of Lois’ heart gave his lullaby a slightly new rhythm. Everything else was the same, returning to normal as her heart continued its steady beat. She was breathing evenly, her chest rising and falling slowly. Those lovely, harmless extra beats of her heart were surely part of the pleasant ways to wake up. Certainly not as good as one of her amazing kisses, but he could watch the tender lines of her lips. And when her faint sounds of sleeping lulled him back to his own dreamland, he would dream of kissing her.

awww! I love that, Barbara! Very sweet!

Thank you, Lara

Yes, it's sweet. I'd have liked it more with an additional (and very rapid) heart-beat coming from her womb, though...

Nice, Barbara. Your 'Midnight' story could fit in very easily with Serendipitous Infinity (in a few chapters).

Well, I took a stab at it. A couple stabs, actually. I've got a couple companion pieces here. Just a slight difference in the writing, but I hope the feeling is changed a lot.


---Midnight #1---

The cape, once bright and proud, lay in soiled tatters in the corner. What was once a symbol of Truth, of Justice, and – most of all – of Hope, now held nothing but memories of disaster and failure. Truth was no longer resplendent. Truth was screams of terror, cries of despair, the vacant stares of the dead. There had been no justice tonight. The young, the elderly, the innocent – none of them had been spared from the abyss of loss and death. Hope was lost here in the dark of his bedroom, alone with the knowledge he could never do enough.

---Midnight #2---

The cape, once bright and proud, lay in soiled tatters in the corner. What was once a symbol of Truth, of Justice, and – most of all – of Hope, now held nothing but memories of disaster and failure. Truth was no longer resplendent. Truth was screams of terror, cries of despair, the vacant stares of the dead. There had been no justice tonight. The young, the elderly, the innocent – none had been spared from the abyss of loss and death. Hope would be found in the dark of his bedroom, with the woman who believed whatever he could do was enough.

Wow! What a difference! I wouldn't have believed it possible.

Oooh! Jessi - that's so... wow! I like the second a lot more, but they're really wonderful, both of them!!

Okay first off... Do you guys want these every week or just once every 2 weeks? I want to make sure everyone has enough time to join in on these. ^_~

Lara: I loved it! You did such a good job expressing so much with only a few words. ^_^

Olympe: Loved the play on words. Nicely done

Classicalla: Ohh, nice one. I like your take on this one. It was neat to see him experience midnight in each city. I liked it. ^_^

bakasi: Oh nice!! I'm of the same opinion as Olympe. I'd have loved it if there was a baby's heart beat in there as well. So cute!

Jessi: Wow, you really did this challenge justice. I loved it and the very poetic way you presented it. ^_^

Thank you, I'm glad you all liked it.

I don't know if I can post feedback for all the ones before me, but I've read and loved them all. Great job, everyone!

Jessi

I'd say once a week - if you make it so it's every Friday, that would be cool! You know, fixed schedule.. so we'd all remember to come back.

Okay, deal! I'll post them up every Friday then. ^_~ I have a nice little list so we should be set until people get sick of them.

I liked your two different takes, Jessi.

Thanks, JoJo! You made my day!

I like the once a week idea!

Okay, Midnight as you would rather have it.

***Midnight***the second

He couldn’t sleep, but he didn’t mind. Actually it was a nice way of being sleepless, the nicest imaginable. He couldn’t get enough of the faint sound that was filling the bedroom only for his ears. The faint but rapid heart beat resounded in his lovely wife. It was too quick to count and almost too quick to notice its unsteady rhythm, unlike the much slower and steadier heart beat of Lois. But the flimsy heart continued its work and filled a new little being with life. He drank in every second of it, knowing that this was just for him.

Once more, I _love_ the drabble idea. Cannot wait for what Jojo has in store for us on Friday. That said on to comments

bakasi- the first one was sweet, I liked the focus on the kisses. I think the heartbeat thing lends itself quite well to some cute pregnancy moments, so when others asked I could see why. I can't say I liked one more than the other though.

Cape Fetish- Yum. The cape is all the more heart wrenching for all the omissions--all the 'failures' it carries. You can totally feel the heaviness of having to carry the burden of so much suffering and pain. Amazing though, how the last lines in the second make such a huge difference.

alcyone

Thank you, Barbara! This one is so... hmmmm. It makes me melt.

I'm busy enough right now trying to catch up on all the posts from the last week I've been absent from the boards. But next week, I might just try my hand at a drabble.

Since they blocked this site at work, I haven't been able to check it as often as I'd like, but I couldn't resist trying one. It's based on my story "Tales from the Krypt" available on the archive (shameless plug!)...

Midnight

Since gaining her powers, she found that she just didn't need to sleep as much anymore. Instead, she prefered to fly. Sometimes an updraft would cause her to lose her balance, but only for a moment and then she would be off at full speed. She smiled, a big toothy grin, as she did loop-de-loops in midair, sure because of the late hour that no one was watching. 13-year-old Bobby Kent knew that his big sister would be really pissed to know that he knew this secret that she's been keeping for the last three years, she'd get over it!

By the way, I loved reading everyone else's too!!

Okay, I wrote one! It's 97 words:

He flew through the black midnight blanket of stars, insecure in his ability to stop the leviathan that threatened his adopted home. Another twenty minutes passed, and he brought the air tank to his face just before oxygen deprivation could blacken his vision. Up ahead, the asteroid came into his sight and he poured on the speed, faster, as fast as he could make himself go in the nearly frictionless almost-void. He thrust his fists in front of him, aiming for the target he had been drilled on back home. Impact! And his world became another midnight.

Very nice, Darcy! Very nice.

Thanks, Nancy! I'm glad you liked it.

Finally got back to do the first one: (just found some boo-boos and edited them)

Midnight – when a city that never sleeps takes a nap. He listened to his city from his perch beneath a globe atop a building he knew as well as his own apartment. His city. Was it presumptuous to call it that? He wasn’t sure. The newspaper published in the building below called him their favorite son, the Man of Steel. A reporter at that same paper named him Superman. Was that presumptuous as well?

Midnight – when thoughts of the city below and all the people of Earth worried his mind.

Sirens. A new day. Time to get back to work.

Taking a stab at this:

-Midnight-

The dreams always woke her up. No, that was wrong, she always woke herself up before they continued.

Coward, her brain taunted her.

She, a coward? Not tonight.

She always dreamed of him coming to her. Holding her, whispering in her ear, all that he longed to do to her for so long.

How he wanted to run his fingers through her hair, nibble on her earlobe, bite her lip, his mouth closing over hers...

She moaned. She always woke up before anything happened.

She closed her eyes. In her mind, she reached up and took off his glasses...

------------

Let me know what you think!

The Little Tornado.

Cinderella

She felt like Cinderella.

No… he was Cinderella, and the clock tower has struck its final sound and the spell was wearing off. She wasn’t sure if that made her Prince Charming or the evil stepmother. No, it wasn’t in this fairytale for her to be his Prince Charming.

Evil stepmother. Definatley.

She brushed aside the ragged slip of cloth to reveal more of what he had hidden from her. She had believed it had been someone else keeping them apart.

Looking up into his heartbroken eyes, she realized that in the end it didn’t matter. She loved him still. More?

“So that’s what you’ve been hiding.”

It's funny how things just pop into your head out of nowhere. Here's mine, 100 words exactly.

Midnight

His eyes followed her every movement. Suddenly feeling overheated with desire, his heart started to beat faster as his eyes were drawn to her curvaceous…assets. He’d never been the type of man that ogled women shamelessly, but she wasn’t just any woman.

She was special.

The midnight color of her hair caught the light as she moved, and he could imagine that her dark eyes would’ve been sparkling had she been facing him. For the moment he was content to watch her from afar.

She was the woman he’d been waiting for—the woman of his dreams.

She was Rehalia

Midnight
By Nancy V. Sont

It was nearly midnight. Lois had come over with movies and pizza. Clark had sat beside her. Comfortably. They’d laughed, argued and teased. How often had they done this? They hadn't even looked at the paperwork they were supposedly going over.

The movie credits were running. Crusts of pizza had slid from the precariously placed box on the coffee table to the carpet when Lois had yawned and stretched her legs.

Clark’s arm was across the back of the couch almost touching Lois. Another perfect evening. He’d tell her in a minute, as soon as the clock stopped chiming.

My friend Lizz helps my.. she's very good in english.. Me too.. but only to speak..

So it is my fault??!!!

Nooo! its not you're fault~!
ofcourse not!!!!
you're my best friend!!!!Q!!!!!AQQA@!!!

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxjes
sun

Hey guys~

this is my first fic so don't blame me if you don't like it

Lois was waiting for Clark to return from his latest rescue. He had left nearly two hours ago, and it was now almost midnight. The milk she had poured for herself had gone warm, so she dumped it in the sink and headed upstairs. As she left the kitchen, the ceramic floor felt cold on her bare feet, but was comforted by the thick carpet that lay inside their bedroom.
She would just have to hope he would be holding her when she woke up. She wouldn't worry too much though, he could take care of himself. She sighed inwardly.

please tell me how i did, and constuctive criticism is welcome.

thx.

@Catherine Bruce

Just stumbled on these doing a random read... I really like yours! I got chills once I realize it was Mayson. Well done!

She wasn't at work that morning. Worse, her desk looked like it had been ransacked. Her chair was knocked over; papers were everywhere.

Then he saw it. A note lay on her desk, written last night. The handwriting was frenzied. Spilled coffee made the ink bleed.

Clark,
Going to meet an anonymous source. Says he witnessed something about the kidnappings. It's 12 AM. Call me when---

She hadn't finished writing the message. Her pen had scratched and torn through the paper as though her arm was yanked from behind.

His hands shook as he read the note. Lois was in danger.