Well. Finally, here they are! Thanks so much to all who have participated so far! It's been great fun reading all of your stories. Now (at last), you can read each others! Please, if you're the author of one of these stories, and I mis-read a word, let me know.

This was the first nervous project that I started. After I got it started, I wondered why I didn't do it as a travelling LMAO rather than a collection. Oh well, maybe next time. If you came here by accident, you might want to Visit the object's original page on nervousness.org, otherwise you'll likely be very bewildered about the context of these stories.

This was the assignment (taken from the Nervousness Page:
"We did an excercise in my improvisation class to help us free up the creative synapses in our heads. The point was to see how creative our brains were when we couldn't stop to think about what we were creating ("Silencing the mental editor"). Here's how it goes: Write a story while counting backwards from 100 out loud. Don't ever stop counting to think about your story. Don't ever stop writing. Don't cross out a word or edit anything. Don't think about where your story is going or what you're writing; just focus on counting all the numbers correctly. Keep counting and writing simultaniously until you get to zero. Then your story is finished. In my class, we all had to read our stories out loud. Some were bizarre, some were hilarious, some beautiful, but they were all fascinating! I want to translate this excercise into a nervous project. So get out those pens and paper, free your mind, and write. Only two rules: follow the guidlines above for how to write, and keep it to one piece of paper. When you're done, feel free to decorate your page with illustrations or whatever else. Send it to me. When I begin to receive them, I'll post a link with everyone's stories so we can all laugh and be inspired and confused. If I'm feeling really industrious, I'll make a little book of all the stories to send to all the participants. Don't count on it though! ;-) Try to get yours to me in no more than two weeks. It shouldn't take more than 15 minutes to write the actual story. I've posted my first "mindless" story to prove to you that no story's too silly. Have fun!"