Wandering Shop Story 3

Prompt Word: Weed Minervie and Chip 1 “Hey! Get your dirty hands off of me.” “I’m sorry, but grandma told me I had to pull you out of the garden.” “I’m not some common weed, I’m a sentient being!” “Please stop screaming, you might kill the neighbors. Anyway, I’m much more scared of grandma than I am of you,” said the boy as he put the Mandrake into a silent bag....

23 Oct 2025 · 1 min · Gary Allen Vollink

Wandering Shop Story 2

Prompt Word: Joint Penny Collins, Business Manager 1 Trying too hard to sound authoritative, the new business manager concluded her presentation, “This is why I am proposing that this be done as an amalgamation between our companies.” There was some murmuring around the board room. “Ms. Collins, I appreciate the proposal, and I see that you’ve thought this through, but for all of our sakes, please put away the thesaurus. You are talking about a joint venture....

22 Oct 2025 · 1 min · Gary Allen Vollink

Wandering Shop Story 1

Prompt Word: Heroine “I’m just a person, like any other,” she said uncomfortably. “You are a heroine, like in the stories,” said the young man. “You are mistaken, I’m afraid. What I did is I showed up, I took a long time to assess how I might actually be of help, and then I did the bare minimum to make sure this didn’t become a disaster. Anybody would do that,” she said....

21 Oct 2025 · 1 min · Gary Allen Vollink

Wandering Shop Stories Primer

Mastodon and the Wandering Shop So, there’s a social network called Mastodon. It’s basically the only one that I’m active on these days. Mastodon is a federated social network, which means that individuals and groups of folks get together to build and pay for a server that runs the Mastodon software. Each server is called an instance. The Mastodon instance that I joined is a server that is loosely organized with members who are interested in Science Fiction and Fantasy....

20 Oct 2025 · 2 min · Gary Allen Vollink