Bite-Sized Fiction
(Warning, a few large gifs ahead!)
Ever since seeing a Sunday Morning piece about the short story vending machines in France, I've been obsessed with the idea. Of course, those machines are amazing and advanced and certainly far too expensive to get a hold of, even as they move from being a cool experiment in France to being something awesome for places around the world.
Every year, I get to spend about $1,000 from a naming rights' fund for our Teen Room. Part of that money this year went to making a hacked version of a "short story machine" for about $150. Behold, my Bite-Sized Fiction Machine!
It might not look like much, but it's been up for just under a week, and I've already had 35 stories taken from it. There are 66 capsules pictured, with 33 stories total. I don't get a whole lot of teen traffic at the moment due to a lack of outreach, but I can tell you that our new gaming computers and consoles haven't gotten 35 combined uses yet (though they're close to it).
So far, so good. I hope enthusiasm about the machine keeps up. We're going to start running a contest for stories for the machine. Any appropriate stories will automatically go in, and winning stories will get featured anywhere and everywhere I can get them. I hope this adds to a sense of ownership by the teens.
(Right now it's a lot of Aesop's fables, microfiction I've written, and contest entries from BBC's kids' 500 word short story contests.)
And, because I love the sharing of ideas, I want to offer my ideas into the oasis so I feel less bad about when I have to dip into the oasis myself! Here's a quick run-down of what I did.
First, you have to buy a capsule machine! There are websites galore for this, and websites dedicated to such machines. Mine is a 2" capsule dispenser, and I paid a little extra to not require quarters to operate it. I also had to buy 2" acorn capsules, which I found on eBay. I already had a receipt tape printer, and the next box of receipt tape will be coming out of my budget instead of technical services in exchange for me printing up a small storm (I've used less than one roll so far).
Now, for the gifs!
I have a word document that's set up to print to the width of my receipt tape. It took a bit of trial and error to make it just right, but it comes out in size 12 Times New Roman, which is a decent reading size, and most of the time it doesn't come out much longer than you see here. This is one of my longest stories, at exactly 500 words. Only two are longer so far, and all of my contests will cap at 500 words.
Each story is saved to its own document so that it clips nicely and I can print whichever ones I need to on demand. It's a fairly quick process now that I have a format for it, though I imagine I must drive my co-workers crazy when I have to print a large number of them at a single time.
Next, the folding! This took even more trial and error. Initially, I wanted to roll each story, but the roll was slightly too large for the 2" capsules.
Next, I tried to fold it lengthwise and then roll it, but that resulted in a wonky roll that looked terribly.
So now I fold it like you see here. It isn't as nice as a roll, but it worked, doesn't affect the print as far as I've been able to tell (I had one printed and folded for about two weeks and opened it with no print deterioration).
Then, it's into the capsules with each story. When I'm doing a full restock (I say that like I've done that more than once), I have two bags and have one copy of each story in each bag to try and keep everything mixed up well.
Then the capsules get dropped into the machine! The keyed top sometimes gets me and is difficult to open or close, but it tends to be fairly straightforward. The capsules falling in has a very satisfying sound.
These machines feel like they're bigger on the inside! I can't believe there are 66 capsules in there and it still seems so empty.
You can see some of my setup here, too. The basket is for empty capsules, so hopefully I can get away with just 100 capsules for a while. I also made a "series" set. I'll be changing the stories inside every two or three months, with various categories and contests. The next series will be our first contest and another "hodgepodge" of stories, but then I hope to focus on different genres, and contact publishers and see if I'm allowed to print 500-word portions to drive teens to new books. I'll be asking my teens for more ideas.
And that's my new baby! I love this machine and the fact that it's done well. I get a lot of ideas I think are awesome, and my bosses and co-workers think are awesome, that don't get any teen love. This has been an amazing building experience so far and I hope to get better with it. Have ideas? Want more details on doing it yourself? Don't be shy about e-mailing me! I can be reached at samma@phlib.org.
I'm going to end on the teaser video I made of the machine a couple of weeks before the reveal of my new additions and changes to the Teen Room.
