Spinning a story for my 200 followers

Yep, you read it right –the Factory is now the proud owner of 200 followers!

(Owner? That sounds wrong. Maybe you should say… caterer, or something?)

(Shut up Wrinkles this is not your post.)

(Well, technically…)

(I said Shut. Up.)

Two hundred followers. *Contented sigh* Wow. My second hundred-follower milestone. In your face, beginning-of-third-anniversary-post.

And of course, thank you, dear audience of mine. You made this possible.

Let me tell you a little secret, though. This 200-follower post has been long overdue. And by long, I mean around a month. For all my moping about not having enough followers to show for three years on WordPress, you’d think I’d be more excited about this. Truth be told, I was. I really was delighted when I got the notification, but at that time I had zero ideas for this milestone post, and later on, even when I did come up with one, I was either too tired or too full of PCM to follow through with it.

Anyway, here we are now, so let’s begin. The follower milestones are something that the blogging community helps you achieve, so I’ve decided to involve all of you (well, ten of you, anyway) in this celebration. It’s not a competition or a blogging award, but a spin-the-story game. I’ll start a story, somebody will continue it, then someone else, and so on, until it circles back to me, and then I’ll end it. My cousins and I played a game similar to this once -the story went in a completely different direction from what I’d intended, and we had a lot of fun.

So at the end of this post, you’ll see a 200-word beginning and a nomination for the person who’ll continue it.  Now, following the advice of all my class 9-12 teachers, I won’t write paragraphs but continue in points.

1. You have to continue the story from where the previous person left off. Make sure your addition is around 200 words long. Don’t go more than 20 words above or below.
2. If you’re popular and you’re sure you won’t embarrass yourself by doing so, put out an open call in your post for the person who gets to continue after you- like, the first person who comments on your post and requests to participate gets to continue (or come up with any other rule of your own. The only thing that matters is that only one person should continue after you). Or, if you’re like the host of this thing, nominate one person to continue with the story.
3. Every person who participates allots themselves a number. I’m number 0. Keep updating this number as this thing exchanges hands. If you’re number 10, you can only nominate the host again because she will then end this story.
4. Link to number 0 and the person who wrote the part before you so that readers who haven’t read the previous part(s) are able to. There’s no need to link to all of the people who wrote before you since the host will keep adding all the parts in her number 0 post.
5. Obviously, copy-paste this list of rules in your own post.

Right, then *claps hands authoritatively*. Let’s see how this turns out. And here comes part zero.

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Simple Pendulum, part 0

Ashton didn’t understand the logic of Physics being taught at school. According to him, it was basically overanalysing a rolling ball. He could not grasp why or when in his life would he ever need to calculate the velocity of a rolling ball. Or the amplitude of a simple pendulum, as the towering Miss Rhonda was teaching them to at present.
He checked his watch for the umpteenth time in two minutes. Time always seemed to slow down here.
Just as he was nodding off, his eyes were inadvertently drawn to the crude ball-and-string diagram on the whiteboard. Maybe it was because he was so dizzy, but the black-marker pendulum seemed to sway slightly. He squeezed his eyes shut and opened them back again. The pendulum stopped. The sound of the duster being whacked on the table snapped him out of his reverie.
“…and you better pay attention, people, because I’m gonna test you on Oscillations next Tuesday. This is…”
Ashton yawned. Her tirade would continue for another two minutes and then she’d resume teaching, hoping the threat of the test would make students listen. Not him, though.
His eyes went to the pendulum again. As he looked, it started –what was that word Miss Rhonda had said? –oscillating slightly again, seeming to hypnotise him.

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I nominate my good friend Tanushka to continue this. (By the way, her followers can thank me as well for giving them this chance to see her prose-writing skills in action.)

I’ll keep updating the new parts here as they’re added, so you won’t need to go very far:

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Part 4
• Part 5
• Part 6
• Part 7
• Part 8
• Part 9
• Part 10