Magical tales to help you drift off to sleep
Magical tales that make falling asleep easy: talking animals, gentle wonders and cozy worlds. A new short story appears every evening — free, no sign-up.
Franz Kafka once called tech support about his printer. After being transferred seven times, put on hold for three hours, and asked to verify his identity twelve times, he finally reached a representative who said, 'I'm sorry sir, but according to our records, you don't exist in our system.' Kafka hung up and immediately started writing a new novel.
Franz Kafka applies for a job at a modern tech company. HR asks: 'Describe a time you faced a frustrating bureaucratic obstacle.' Kafka submits a 200-page manuscript. He doesn't get the job. The rejection email gets lost in a labyrinthine spam filter. He spends three years trying to reach customer support. His descendants eventually receive an apology letter addressed to 'Dear Valued Insect.'
Three ghost writers meet at their annual convention. The first says, 'I wrote seventeen bestsellers last year.' The second boasts, 'I wrote twenty-three celebrity memoirs.' The third sighs, 'I wrote the autobiography of a man who claims to have written forty books himself.' They all nod knowingly. The bartender asks who's paying. All three point to empty chairs and say, 'Our clients.'
Dostoyevsky's editor once asked him to cut Crime and Punishment down to a more manageable length. Dostoyevsky replied, 'I could remove 200 pages of Raskolnikov's guilt and inner torment.' The editor nodded eagerly. 'But then,' Dostoyevsky continued, 'it would just be called Crime. And that's a very different genre.'
A medium claimed she could contact dead authors. A self-published writer hired her to reach Shakespeare. After an hour of silence, the medium said, 'He's not responding.' The writer sighed, 'Even from beyond the grave, traditional authors won't endorse indie writers.' The medium replied, 'Actually, he said he's busy - apparently everyone in the afterlife is writing a memoir.'
Dostoyevsky walks into a modern coffee shop. The barista asks: 'What can I get you?' Dostoyevsky stares into the distance for forty-five minutes, contemplates the moral implications of caffeine, questions whether ordering coffee makes him complicit in capitalism, considers the suffering of the coffee bean, and finally whispers: 'Black. Like my soul. No sugar — I don't deserve sweetness.' The barista nods: 'So... an Americano?' Dostoyevsky bursts into tears: 'You understand me!'
I joined a support group for writers who overuse semicolons; it was very therapeutic; we met every Tuesday; the coffee was excellent; our facilitator was understanding; she said we'd recover eventually; I'm not so sure; neither were the others; we communicated mostly through meaningful pauses; the group disbanded after someone discovered the em dash.
Leo Tolstoy's psychiatrist once asked him to describe his childhood in a few sentences. Three months later, the psychiatrist received a 1,200-page manuscript titled 'War and Peace: The Prequel - My Feelings About Breakfast, 1835-1840.' The psychiatrist retired immediately and took up farming instead.
A thesaurus walks into a bar, pub, tavern, inn, saloon, watering hole. The bartender says, 'Let me guess — you're a writer?' The thesaurus replies, 'Affirmative, correct, accurate, right, precisely, indeed.' The bartender sighs: 'Your tab is overdue, outstanding, unpaid, unsettled, delinquent.' The thesaurus faints — it had never been out-synonymed before.
If Franz Kafka worked in customer support: 'Thank you for calling. Your complaint has been received and forwarded to a department that may or may not exist. You are currently number undefined in the queue. Please hold while we transfer you to someone who will transfer you back to me. Your call is important to us in a cosmic, meaningless way. The hold music you are about to hear is the sound of bureaucracy consuming itself. Goodbye. Or perhaps, hello. We cannot be certain which.'
A writer finished her novel after ten years of work. She sent it to her editor, who returned it with one note: 'Perfect, but could you make the protagonist more relatable?' She rewrote it. 'Perfect, but now less relatable.' She rewrote it again. After fifty revisions, the editor finally admitted: 'I just wanted to see if you'd ever stop. Most writers quit by revision twelve. Congratulations, you've unlocked the secret ending—publication.'
My family staged an intervention last week. They said I had a problem with using too many synonyms. I was shocked, stunned, flabbergasted, astounded, dumbfounded, bewildered, and taken aback. They handed me a thesaurus and said, 'This is the problem.' I said, 'No, that's the issue, concern, difficulty, dilemma, predicament, quandary, and conundrum.'
Franz Kafka once called tech support about his printer. After being transferred seven times, put on hold for three hours, and asked to verify his identity twelve times, he finally reached a representative who said, 'I'm sorry sir, but according to our records, you don't exist in our system.' Kafka hung up and immediately started writing a new novel.
Franz Kafka applies for a job at a modern tech company. HR asks: 'Describe a time you faced a frustrating bureaucratic obstacle.' Kafka submits a 200-page manuscript. He doesn't get the job. The rejection email gets lost in a labyrinthine spam filter. He spends three years trying to reach customer support. His descendants eventually receive an apology letter addressed to 'Dear Valued Insect.'
Three ghost writers meet at their annual convention. The first says, 'I wrote seventeen bestsellers last year.' The second boasts, 'I wrote twenty-three celebrity memoirs.' The third sighs, 'I wrote the autobiography of a man who claims to have written forty books himself.' They all nod knowingly. The bartender asks who's paying. All three point to empty chairs and say, 'Our clients.'
Dostoyevsky's editor once asked him to cut Crime and Punishment down to a more manageable length. Dostoyevsky replied, 'I could remove 200 pages of Raskolnikov's guilt and inner torment.' The editor nodded eagerly. 'But then,' Dostoyevsky continued, 'it would just be called Crime. And that's a very different genre.'
A medium claimed she could contact dead authors. A self-published writer hired her to reach Shakespeare. After an hour of silence, the medium said, 'He's not responding.' The writer sighed, 'Even from beyond the grave, traditional authors won't endorse indie writers.' The medium replied, 'Actually, he said he's busy - apparently everyone in the afterlife is writing a memoir.'
Dostoyevsky walks into a modern coffee shop. The barista asks: 'What can I get you?' Dostoyevsky stares into the distance for forty-five minutes, contemplates the moral implications of caffeine, questions whether ordering coffee makes him complicit in capitalism, considers the suffering of the coffee bean, and finally whispers: 'Black. Like my soul. No sugar — I don't deserve sweetness.' The barista nods: 'So... an Americano?' Dostoyevsky bursts into tears: 'You understand me!'
I joined a support group for writers who overuse semicolons; it was very therapeutic; we met every Tuesday; the coffee was excellent; our facilitator was understanding; she said we'd recover eventually; I'm not so sure; neither were the others; we communicated mostly through meaningful pauses; the group disbanded after someone discovered the em dash.
Leo Tolstoy's psychiatrist once asked him to describe his childhood in a few sentences. Three months later, the psychiatrist received a 1,200-page manuscript titled 'War and Peace: The Prequel - My Feelings About Breakfast, 1835-1840.' The psychiatrist retired immediately and took up farming instead.
A thesaurus walks into a bar, pub, tavern, inn, saloon, watering hole. The bartender says, 'Let me guess — you're a writer?' The thesaurus replies, 'Affirmative, correct, accurate, right, precisely, indeed.' The bartender sighs: 'Your tab is overdue, outstanding, unpaid, unsettled, delinquent.' The thesaurus faints — it had never been out-synonymed before.
If Franz Kafka worked in customer support: 'Thank you for calling. Your complaint has been received and forwarded to a department that may or may not exist. You are currently number undefined in the queue. Please hold while we transfer you to someone who will transfer you back to me. Your call is important to us in a cosmic, meaningless way. The hold music you are about to hear is the sound of bureaucracy consuming itself. Goodbye. Or perhaps, hello. We cannot be certain which.'
A writer finished her novel after ten years of work. She sent it to her editor, who returned it with one note: 'Perfect, but could you make the protagonist more relatable?' She rewrote it. 'Perfect, but now less relatable.' She rewrote it again. After fifty revisions, the editor finally admitted: 'I just wanted to see if you'd ever stop. Most writers quit by revision twelve. Congratulations, you've unlocked the secret ending—publication.'
My family staged an intervention last week. They said I had a problem with using too many synonyms. I was shocked, stunned, flabbergasted, astounded, dumbfounded, bewildered, and taken aback. They handed me a thesaurus and said, 'This is the problem.' I said, 'No, that's the issue, concern, difficulty, dilemma, predicament, quandary, and conundrum.'
Nothing to read? Create your own book and read it! Like I do.
Create a book"Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly." — Isaac Asimov
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