Based on the wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rafelcofer, as generated by the random article button.

Maria Ballester was a plain woman. Not unattractive but not attractive either, she'd always been firmly in the middle of the class at school and the homeless shelter she ran in the centre of town was well appointed, but it wasn't really big enough. She was a woman completely suited to her town: not the biggest but not smallest in the region, not the most exciting but not the most boring either, not the most loud but not the most quiet. She was the mayor, but the role was mainly ceremonial; an appearance on Constitution Day, things like that. It was a town held together by buts.

No one suspected that she spent her evenings with the devil. He would turn up, most nights at 7pm, 8pm on Fridays, and they'd drink wine and talk about sport. He always wore a suit, unlike her husband who had been found in a lake the year before and had been buried in his regulation fishing waistcoat and jeans. He talked to her with respect. There were no buts with the devil. He knew what he liked and he liked Maria, so he told her. They'd talk a lot about Rafael Nadal and the devil promised that one day Maria would meet him. Whenever this happened she'd always blush and change the subject.

Maria looked up at the far side of the lake. There was no one around and the air was completely still. The sun's glow was dying and the lights were starting to blink on in the town. She dropped the rolled up body from the jetty and watched it sink, his tattooed, bruised forearm somehow coming free from the blanket and arcing upwards as if reaching up to the surface.

It was 8pm. There was a knock at the door. The devil smiled. He was wearing a dark three-piece and black shiny shoes. “Did you see Nadal versus Djokovic?”

Glyn slid the 7" out of the sleeve and put it on the turntable. Needle down, speakers up.

It was rubbish. Utter rubbish.

It wasn't always easy being an experimental instrumental surf rock fan.

Todd Bennett, Gary Cook and Philip Brown were very drunk athletes indeed. When they'd met former Olympians, they'd heard all about the crowds and the podium and the press but they'd never been told about the Olympic village. It was awesome. After four years of 5am starts running around a drizzly track in the West Midlands, a 24 hour party town full of beautiful athletes from across the world in sunny Los Angeles was almost completely overwhelming. Of course, they still had training to do, but so many of the other athletes had already finished their events that it was like trying to cram for school exams when everyone else was already off for the summer.

From their chrome bar stools, they could see Steve Cram in the distance behind a pampas grass, snogging a diver. They'd played beer pong with the Danish fencing team and were mid-way through a shot drinking competition with a group of Hungarian weightlifters when Seb Coe ambled in, a Swedish shot putter on his arm. They'd been down at the beach throwing javelins at nesting seagulls. He was completely nude, aside from a pair of wayfarer sunglasses and his medal from the 1500 metres. "Shouldn't you guys be getting a bit of shut-eye? I saw Akabusi earlier, praying by the McDonald's. Already in his pyjamas. He was going to be in bed by eight."

The relay final. They'd completely forgotten. The Hungarians seemed to understand and graciously accepted a draw.

Bill Nugent knew he wasn't going to win. He was only in the team because he knew the captain from church and had been in the army for a bit (before pretending to get Malaria) and so could at least load a gun, and could most of the time shoot it (usually, as he'd made clear to the captain, at a savage rather than a multi-coloured target).

He'd already come last in the 50m rifle prone, the 300m free rifle and the 25m small-bore rifle. For a while it looked as if he wouldn't come last in the 25m, but the Italian doing even worse than him got his thumb caught in the barrel while loading and so had to pull out. Bill slumped into last.

He looked down at the piece of paper he'd been given at breakfast: 11am, 100m running deer. Sounds fun, Bill thought. He got the free bus up to the range. A beautiful Swedish woman with one eye told him that the running deer was taking place right at the edge of the range, and she pointed at some wide fields.

Bill was first up. It was meant to be the Italian but they'd amputated his finger and he was sat next to the referee gingerly poking his bandage.

Bill raised his rifle. A whistle blew. There she is. Bang.

"He's shot a sheep!"

He had shot a sheep. The Italian thought it was hilarious.

"I couldn't see a deer!" protested Bill, quickly letting any pretensions about coming anything other than last slip away.

The one eyed Swedish woman, who had run over after hearing the commotion, gave him a look (or half) of disdain and pointed at the "deer", a wooden target on a moving pulley.

"Ahh."

"Woah. That's sick." said Jerome, flicking a ball of paper into the bin.

"If I was that dog, I'd have been like 'no way, dude'."

"No way man, dogs eat anything. My dog ate a rat and then hurled it up again and ate all the hurl."

"Really?"

"Yeah. They still do this sort of stuff in Russia, man. Like, making a cow do a horse and stuff. I saw it on TV."

"Woah."

Greg wondered how the horse felt. 

"I can't believe we're gonna be doctors, man."

I'm now half-way through the 100 days of writing a story a day and so at this stage I thought it'd be good to think about how it's going so far.

I'm going to do this in the style of a sportsman infront of a microphone and ask myself questions and answer them, "Did I think we did our best? Yes I do. Do I think we need to do more? Of course."

It's a style of writing that I really dislike but it's much easier than making all your writing make sense and I'm using my laptop in Cardiff library and my battery is running out.

Am I enjoying myself? Most of the time, yes. Imagine really wanting to go to bed but realising that you have to write a short story about a town in Estonia. There's a bit of that. But in those situations I've come to have no compunction about bashing out some real rubbish. Some of the stories are better than others, but for me it's become as much about the discipline of doing something every day as it has been about what is produced.

Do I think the stories are any good? Some are good and some are toecurlingly bad. Some wikipedia articles pop up when I press the random article button and the story falls into my head immediately and I know exactly how it's going to work. Those are the ones that turn out well. Other times, the article pops up and my brain doesn't fire at all, and those are the bad ones. I don't know whether it is to do with the articles themselves and how conducive they are to writing a good story or whether it is to do with how my brain is doing that day.

Am I a better person? The name of the project is "100 days to make me a better person". The "better person" bit has always been a bit of a weird one for me. I want to become better at writing and being good at writing certainly doesn't make you a better person, Jeffrey Archer being a prime example (although, is Jeffrey Archer any good at writing? I don't know enough about these things. I read a collection of short stories by him and thought they were ok. However, I was 15 and on holiday in France. Wow, that paints a pretty accurate picture of my teenage years. Sitting in a caravan reading a Jeffrey Archer. I think that says a lot about me.)

Am I getting better at writing? My favourite story so far is the second one I wrote, which is pretty annoying. I think it's an inevitable consequence of being more enthusiastic in the first few days, or more willing to let it take up more of my time. My main hope was that writing these stories would help spark ideas for other things and that has happened, but not in the way that I'd expected, or hoped, it would. I had hoped that it would be a good way of coming up with stand up or with comedy sketches, but apart from a couple, I don't think they are useful in that way. A couple of them could be turned into short plays, I think, but I imagine I'd be pretty bad at that.

This seems pretty negative. Is it? No! I'm enjoying myself, and that's the important thing. Also, I think I've learned something about discipline which is useful and perhaps makes me a better person. I am now at a stage where if I did miss one, I'd feel incredibly guilty, as though I'd let myself down. This is a wonderful lesson to learn: that if you set your mind to do something every day, before long you will do it because if you don't you'll feel terrible. This is valuable and think that it is something that I can use in the future to get things done. At this stage, I think when the hundred days is up, I will set my mind to doing something else for another hundred days. The fact that I've not yet missed a day (apart from Christmas when I deliberately gave myself a day off) is something I am proud of. However, if you are reading this and you began the hundred days challenge and have since given up, please be mindful of the fact that I am underemployed and the work I do is not a 9-5 or a 10-6. What is surprising isn't that I have managed to do it every day, but that I haven't written more.

Have I learned anything else? I write much better in the morning than at any other time. I think I can be completely single minded in the morning and as the day goes on, my brain gets clogged up, like when you've had a laptop for ages and it doesn't know what to do with all the information it's having to juggle with and it gets really slow. Despite this, 80% of the stories I've done so far have been written in the hour between 11pm and midnight. Another thing I have learned is that without the element of internet scrutiny, I certainly would not have carried on with this. I think that's a shocking indictment of my egoism. Is egoism a word? Is that the correct way to use it?

Have I come close to giving up? Yes. I considered giving up at 50. With hindsight, a challenge that was slightly less demanding would have been better. And in terms of bettering myself, I'd have been better off doing press-ups. However, a pledge is a pledge is a pledge.

Do my stories count as short stories? I'm not sure. They're basically shorter than any other short stories I read but I think they're entertaining and usually tell a story of sorts.

What have I learned about Wikipedia? People love sports.

How do you feel about the next 50 days? I think the stories will get shorter, and possibly worse. Unlike in December and January when I had quite a lot of free time, February is shaping up to be a busy month in which I will be working away from home in London and so a number of the stories will have to be hastily written little things, bashed out on my mobile phone. So expect a lot of the stories to look like this:

"Stev@en looked at the skry. It ws grey & :) low, lik a.. ceeling."

Thanks to those of you who've read any of them so far. I really like feedback and would honestly welcome some negative feedback if you think something is particularly bad. As someone who calls themself a comedian, I think I have a good sense of what is funny, but when I write one that isn't meant to be particularly funny, I don't think I have a good sense of what works at all.

Right, my battery has done admirably but I think it's about to fall on its sword so I'd better turn her off. I'm going to go and look at the bar that a friend has built in his back garden. Now there's a project worth writing about.