Geheim

'Yay! O, Gods!'

I study forlornly my mythic craft, all fifty thousand lipograms: strings curiously (and ab ovo) omitting that symbol.

I'm fading. 'Don't nod!' It's midnight, but no halting virtuosos! Pious throughout an oncoming rational snap, 'n' auricular, nightly tintinnabulation.

Focussing now. Shorthand? Acrostics?

'Can mayhaps adapt
A futuristic haiku
Distinct in transcript...'

Monomania...

I wrote the story above back in 2016. It has the following properties:

• It's in Standard Pilish (the number of letters per word follows a pattern derived from the digits of the mathematical constant Pi in decimal, as determined by Mike Keith)
• It's a lipogram (the letter 'e' does not appear once)
• No word is repeated throughout the text
• It contains each of the following:
  • a haiku
  • an example of onomatopoeia
  • a two-word palindrome (and two simple one-word palindromes too)
• It follows the additional "Section 12" rule from Mike Keith's Cadaeic Cadenza, in that the haiku:
  • is also an acrostic for the first few digits of Pi
  • besides omitting 'e', does not contain the letter 'o' as a reference to the shape from which Pi is derived (although this particular rule sadly applies to the penultimate paragraph, not the antipenultimate...)
• It's exactly 55 words long, and can be therefore considered a valid piece of microfiction
• The title is both:
  • German/Dutch for "secret"
  • the result of taking the first 6 digits of Pi (in decimal, including the leading 3), adding 4 to each, and taking that letter of the English alphabet
• "In the spirit of Oulipo the constraint is reflected in the story itself": the text describes an author who has finished writing a lipogram, and who seeks to continue completing pieces of constrained writing despite their obvious fatigue
• This author might be Ernest Vincent Wright, who indeed wrote a "fifty thousand" word story that omitted the letter 'e', titled "Gadsby"