The Ten-Minute Storyteller
43 episodes
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Creator: iHeartPodcasts
Solo Multigenre Anthology Audio Book
Synopsis:
Want to hear some entertaining stories but don't have a lot of time? Here's your ticket to ride. The Ten-Minute Storyteller arrives packed with humor, pathos, humanity, and originality… in ten minutes or less. All stories written and narrated by Bill Simpson, an acclaimed novelist who has, after many years in the kitchen, perfected the short short story.
Format: Audio Book
Continuity: Anthology
Writing: Scripted
Voices: Solo
Genres: Multigenre
Soundscape: Voices only
Completion status: Not applicable
Not tagged: [Maturity] [Creator demographics] [Character demographics] [Country of origin] [Transcript] [Content warnings]
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Episodes:
Thu, 27 Mar 2025 14:12:15 +0000
This week we meet Carl. Carl’s made his dough. Occupies the corner office. He’s traveled the world. Bought the beach house and the fishing boat and the snazzy fleet of cars.
Too bad he hasn’t been able to escape the past. The war. The damn war. He’s tried everything but he can’t silence the explosions. The relentless explosions.
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Thu, 20 Mar 2025 07:00:00 +0000
This week we meet Reverend Johnson. Reverend Johnsonlikes to run out of gas. In the old days heliked to run out for spiritual reasons. These days his reasons are more bodily in nature.But no matter, spiritual or physical, the Revhas found a way, as humans so aptly do, to justify hiscarnal delights while pledging his faith to God. And to Jesus.
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Thu, 13 Mar 2025 18:33:32 +0000
This week we meet Bev. Not so very long ago Bev was single, happy and wild. Then 30 hit, maternal hormones raged, and, well, here we are. With hubby in the suburbs and four kids under three.
4 under 3! Yikes!
Will she make it? Survive the gauntlet? Hard to say. She’s already at wit’s end. And the day has only just begun.
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Thu, 06 Mar 2025 08:00:00 +0000
This week we meet the Smites. The Smites have dough. A large portfolio. And an almost desperate need to travel, even during the height of the Covid scare in the late summer of 2020 when they decide to take a little trip to the Bahamas.
While up at MIT their only child, David, works eighteen hours a day on his messenger RNA research in the hope of finding a vaccine for the dreaded virus
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Thu, 27 Feb 2025 08:00:00 +0000
This week we meet Gordon. Or Gordo as he prefers to be called.
Gordo has a cushy job with the old man’s construction company. Record keeper for a big Port Authority job at the passenger ship terminals. Plenty of time to do his two favorite things: Read & Write. Gordo wants to be a novelist. Of import. A Twain. A Melville. A Marquez.
But can he withstand the pressures? The family pressures. Peer pressures. Financial pressures. The Twins Pressures of Desire & Consumption. It’s a tall order. A tough task. He likes to think he’d rather be dead than give in to these pressures.
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Thu, 06 Feb 2025 08:00:00 +0000
This week we meet Liam.Liam works for AAPT (Animals Are People Too). It’s a tough job, as dailyhe has to make sure livestock animals are being treated humanely before destruction.Prior to this employment, Liam worked as a deckhand on freighters that circled the globe. He led a wild, carefree life, boozing and whoring his way from Boston to Bangkok to Buenos Aires. Until that day on the Black Sea off the coast of Romania...
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Thu, 30 Jan 2025 08:00:00 +0000
This week we meet Dan. Dan wants an eye for an eye.
Sure, he’d been a frat boy, done his share of drinking and carousing. But it was different then. More innocent. They didn’t slip mickeys into the girls’ drinks.
Dan’s memory of his college days might be a tad murky and a touch selective, but he knows what he knows, and he knows the names of the boys who violated his daughter.
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Thu, 23 Jan 2025 08:00:00 +0000
This week we meet James. More than a quarter of a century ago James penned a critically acclaimed bestseller. Hollywood even made a movie out of the novel starring Al Pacino. The success of the book helped him earn tenure at the university where he taught literature and writing.
Tenure put him on easy street.
Or did it?
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Thu, 09 Jan 2025 08:00:00 +0000
This week we meet Pete. Pete's a podiatrist. Pete does feet. Pete works for the New York State Department of Corrections. He does the inmates' feet. It's a tough job but somebody has to do it.
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Father Joseph and His Blood Red Ferraiolo
Thu, 19 Dec 2024 08:00:00 +0000
All's well at the local parish. At least on the surface.
This week we meet Father Joseph. Father Joseph and Nathaniel's parents sit in the priest's office and have a nice little chat. They discuss the upcoming pancake breakfast, the flower show to raise money for the local orphanage, and next Sunday's sermon on assisting the poor and the persecuted.
Father Joseph has an engaging smile and an easy laugh. He is very popular among his parishioners. Unfortunately, Joe is a very sick pup.
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Thu, 12 Dec 2024 08:00:00 +0000
This week we meet Larry. Lar, like crazy armed nut-jobs from sea to shining sea, owns a Bushmaster XM-15 with a Vortex Spitfire scope and plenty of ammo. All legally obtained.
It's a beautiful spring morning. Opening Day of a brand new baseball season. The sun is shining. The grass is green. The boys are ready to play ball.
But unless sanity suddenly intervenes, unlikely, it’s best to prepare for more American carnage.
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Thu, 05 Dec 2024 08:00:00 +0000
This week we meet Jack. Jack’s about to turn ten. His family has just arrived at their Airbnb on the coast of Maine.
Right next door to their sea-front cottage is a graveyard, with gravestones dating back before the 18th century. Young Jack stumbles upon one stone that sends a shiver of terror down his spine.
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Thu, 28 Nov 2024 08:00:00 +0000
This week we meet Jen. Jen’s been having some trouble sleeping. A lot on her mind. Kids. Job. Boss. Ex-hubby. Noisy furnace. And on and on. No end to the toils and troubles.
She stuffed her ears with wax plugs. Meditated. Found something to be grateful for. Fell asleep lickity split.
But now it’s just three hours later. And she’s awake. Wide awake. In the pitch black of early morning. Body and brain buzzing. Monkey noise fills her head. She feels right on the edge of madness.
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Thu, 21 Nov 2024 08:00:00 +0000
This week we visit an old Southern plantation. Likely one that grows cotton or tobakkie. The War for Independence has come and gone. The Founders have grown fat and happy.
But their slaves, well, not so much.
Folks don’t like being enslaved. And so, occasionally, they rise up and fight back.
They declare their Independence.
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Stan, Ollie, & The Fifth Metatarsal
Thu, 14 Nov 2024 08:00:00 +0000
This week we meet Stan. And Ollie. Neighbors. Friendly but not really friends.
Stan has a wife, three kids, a couple businesses. He’s a busy guy, high strung, stressed out. And now this broken bone in his left foot has him hobbled.
Ollie’s divorced. A good guy, a lonely guy.
Ollie and Stan’s wife Patty often walk their dogs together. Long walks. In the hills. Now something has transpired between Ollie and Patty. Or has it?
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Thu, 07 Nov 2024 08:00:00 +0000
This week we meet G Otterbein. When G Otterbein moves in next door, the MacLeod boys are quite certain he is either Gestapo, SS, or a concentration camp guard.
Their father landed on Omaha Beach on June 6, 1944. Over the next year he battled the Nazis and helped liberate the death camps. He has no love for Germans. And he has passed his hatred on to his boys.
How’s it going to work out in this tranquil New Jersey suburb?
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Thu, 31 Oct 2024 07:00:00 +0000
This week we meet The Kid. The Kid just wants to shoot some hoops. Get in some practice before his school team tryouts next week.
But inside the old dairy barn out back where his father has hung a hoop, the kid runs into a spooky stranger. The unexpected encounter will have consequences neither of them can imagine.
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Thu, 10 Oct 2024 07:00:00 +0000
This week we meet Tammy. Every day Tammy thinks about doing it. And every day she doesn’t do it.
She wants to do it, or at least she thinks she does, but still she doesn’t do it.
She wants to do this and do that, go here and go there, but desire so rarely leads to action.
What is Life? What’s it for? What are we supposed to do with it? Is it anything more than the Random Thoughts in our Heads?
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Thu, 03 Oct 2024 07:00:00 +0000
This week we meet Tad. After years of Talk Therapy Tad finally has a breakthrough. He finally spits out the Truth. Finally utters the unutterable. But is his Shrink listening? Or has his Shrink checked out of the Game, consumed as he is by his own angsts and anxieties, his own dreams and desires?
SHRUNK asks those old Socratic questions: Do our fellow humans hear a word we say? Or does all the gibberish just fall on deaf ears?
Was it, me wonders, a giant cosmic joke to allow Humans to Communicate with all these silly little utterances that spill from our lips?
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Thu, 26 Sep 2024 07:00:00 +0000
This week we meet Baby Kane and his parents, Adam and Erin. Baby Kane is just about to escape from the back yard and crawl up onto the railroad tracks at the same moment the Union Pacific rolls west across the New Mexico desert.
Will Baby Kane get splattered by the lead locomotive? If he manages to stay off the tracks, what about the venomous rattlesnake that’s just had its rattle severed by the fleeing caboose? Will that sidewinder nail Baby Kane if not the train?
Mom and Dad are busy with their new biz, Land of Enchantment Adult Gifts and Novelties. They don’t know their boy’s in jeopardy. They don’t know what evils lurk.
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The Heiress and the Fastballer
Thu, 19 Sep 2024 07:00:00 +0000
This week we meet the Fastballer. Throws over a hundred mph. Just signed a big fat MLB contract.
She’s a billionaire’s daughter. A wild thing. Really likes to have a good time. The crazier the better.
They meet at a South Beach soiree and that same night she recruits him for a trip to Greece to attend a fancy destination wedding.
What could possibly go wrong?
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Thu, 12 Sep 2024 07:00:00 +0000
This week we meet Constance. Constance Sillence. The fifth of nine children. She bore five children of her own, two surviving.
The short, unhappy life of Constance Sillence unnerves and disheartens even the hardest souls, but alas, her story is as common as passed gas.
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Thu, 05 Sep 2024 07:00:00 +0000
This week we meet Ace. Ace’s girlfriend decided it might be fun to vacation in Israel, enjoy some of the ancient sites mentioned in the Bible. So off they went.
Unfortunately, some bad timing along with some very bad luck turned their vacation into a nightmare of Biblical proportions.
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Thu, 29 Aug 2024 07:00:00 +0000
This week we meet Ralph. Ralph’s a good old country boy who epitomizes the old cliché: Never judge a book by its cover.
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Thu, 22 Aug 2024 07:00:00 +0000
This week we meet Zeb. A monument to virility. Manly to the core. Fifty years chasing the ladies. But, alas, not so much anymore.
He started young, made women his vocation. Unfortunately, it’s looking like he’ll need a fresh inspiration.
Times they are a-changin, machinery all worn out. Poor boy’s emasculated, of that there is no doubt.
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Thu, 15 Aug 2024 07:00:00 +0000
This week we meet the last super model. As a kid, because of her looks, she was used and abused, deceived and exploited. They used her to hawk perfume and blue jeans, underwear and dreams. But she was tough, resilient, ambitious. She channeled that abuse and exploitation to build her own company, to make millions, to beat them at their own game. But at what price?
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Thu, 01 Aug 2024 07:00:00 +0000
This week we meet Stu. Stu’s up in his hilltop mansion cradling his assault rifle. He’s waiting for the barbarians. While Stu waits he remembers. Grows nostalgic. Longs to revisit the glory days of his youth when, fresh out of college, he lived free as a bird for a couple years out on the open road.Stu hears them. Coming up through the woods. He sees them crossing the manicured lawn. Over the wall and up onto the patio.At least he thinks he sees them.
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Thu, 25 Jul 2024 07:00:00 +0000
This week we meet Sam. A decent fellow without hard opinions, Sam thinks he might run for school board. Help out. Do his civic duty.He meets with some“concerned parents.” Listens to their concerns. Critical race theory. Sexed. Books that need burning.
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Thu, 18 Jul 2024 07:00:00 +0000
This week we meet Crumb and Fuse. Driving home from a boozy party in Crumb’s 911, they spot a raccoon crossing the road. Crumb swerves and goes out of his way to run over the coon. The act sets off a confrontation between the two men. They argue and taunt one another. Fire off wise cracks and insults. A philosophical melee. It's a beautiful triangle: Booze, men, and their egos.
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It's Hot, but Hell, It Ain't That Hot
Thu, 11 Jul 2024 07:00:00 +0000
This week we meet Gary. Gary Edward Earl, better known as Gad. Gad N Earl. He’s been tasked with fixing the supply chain problems. He could do the job from his home office in the GardenState suburbs, but what fun would that be?Gas wants to hit the road.Get outta town. Everywhere he goes it’s hot hot hot. Broiling hot. And humid. Despite it being late October. But no big thang. AC’s hummin, baby. Pushing out it’s cool, dry hair. Limos. Airport terminals. 787s. Office buildings. Restaurants. Hotel lobbies. Hotel suites.
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Thu, 04 Jul 2024 07:00:00 +0000
This week we meet Big Al Stevens. For years, decades, Big Al spent enormous amounts of time and money shopping and consuming, buying no end of crapola he didn’t need and probably didn’t want. But consuming was an addiction. Al coveted a wide array of products and services large and small. It was a never-ending compulsion. A kind of enslavement.
Eventually Al became fed up with this vicious cycle. He broke his addiction, vowed to become an anti-consumer, to buy only those goods and services that were 100% essential. And for a couple years Al succeeded. He was happy. Calm. Content.
Until one day…
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Thu, 27 Jun 2024 07:00:00 +0000
This week we meet Lem. Lem Carson. Lem leaves work feeling good. Feeling fine. His presentation went well. He's looking forward to a mellow ride home followed by a pleasant evening with the family.
Unfortunately, a couple of external events intrude upon Lem’s peaceful, easy feeling. Soon his brain shifts into overdrive and all the old woes and grievances begin to churn.
Work. Wife. Kids. Parents. Money. Materialism. It’s all fodder now.
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Thu, 20 Jun 2024 07:00:00 +0000
This week we have a couple boys, men actually, dealing with some personal issues, when out of the blue they dang near slam their large vehicles into one another. Gonna be hell to pay if they don’t calm down and pull themselves together.These boy/men are on edge. Kids. Wives. Ex-wives. Work. Life for crying out loud. A volatile mix.
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The Gorgeous Girl On the Harley Sportster 883
Thu, 13 Jun 2024 07:00:00 +0000
Stud Macintyre loves the ladies. So when an exceptionally beautiful young lady shows up on a Harley for the Sunday morning canyon ride, Stud is all a-lather. He right away hits on the gorgeous girl on the Harley Sportster 883. She succumbs immediately to his masculine charms. They go to dinner.Then back to her place. She is Stud's fantasy come true.Only one minor hiccup...
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Thu, 06 Jun 2024 07:00:00 +0000
Winky is a young, dedicated high school English teacher. She’s also broke. Well, almost. Hanging on by a thread. A dollar ain’t what it used to be.
Fortunately, a girl has options.
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Thu, 30 May 2024 07:00:00 +0000
MUSIC BY THE SEA is a timeless tale of empowerment, of emancipation, of never giving up the ship.
Widowed, she has come alone to the sea from the flatlands of Illinois. She has come with hope and expectation.
But soon, like the story of her life, hope and expectation dissolve into quiet bitterness. She decides it might be best to simply wade into the waves and let the vast ocean carry her, and her precious cello, away.
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Thu, 23 May 2024 07:00:00 +0000
AFTER THE WEDDING is a tough tale too often told.
Too much booze at his bud’s wedding. Too much grass. Too many pills. And now this crazy chick who jumped in his car when the cops whirled in and chased everyone off.
She’s blitzed. Practically comatose. Must’ve consumed too much of something. Entirely incoherent.
It’s not just the illegal drugs; it’s the prescription meds here in these United States of Drug & Alcohol Abuse.
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Thu, 16 May 2024 07:00:00 +0000
THE PASS CATCHER is a cautionary tale for all of us who love the game.
A knee injury sidelined the pass catcher before the start of his third NFL season. But the damage had already been done. Four years of high school ball. Four years of college ball. Two years of pro ball.
Ten years of whacks to the head. Too many concussions to count. This is the once legendary pass catcher’s life today.
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Thu, 09 May 2024 07:00:00 +0000
COLLEGE BOY could easily be subtitled Life on Easy Street or Made in the Shade.
Ed’s young, spoiled, apathetic, takes a whole lot for granted. He doesn’t like to push himself, physically or mentally. He just wants to… slide and glide.
Ed’s a Zoomer.
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Thu, 02 May 2024 07:00:00 +0000
Like many of the stories in this series, THE WINDOW WASHER AND HIS PUP rolls right out of real life. Real events.
Many of us take our great good fortune for granted. A roof over our heads, three squares a day, good health, families that love us. But for many, life’s not so sweet. Take John Adams for instance. Not a whole lot of joy or good luck in his life.
But hey, maybe his luck is about to change.
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Thu, 25 Apr 2024 07:00:00 +0000
THE HAIRCUT, a simple tale on the surface, in fact teems with tension, highly charged emotions, and fear of the unknown.
THE HAIRCUT is a timeless tale of fathers and sons, domestic strife, loss of innocence, and the long haul to manhood.
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Thu, 18 Apr 2024 07:00:00 +0000
This is a story of loss and survival. It’s an anti-war story, a story about not judging a book, or in this case a person, by its cover, or in this case his physical appearance. It’s kind of an amusing tale that’s so damn sad, you might just want to cry.
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Introducing: The Ten-Minute Storyteller
Thu, 11 Apr 2024 05:05:00 +0000
Want to hear some entertaining stories but don't have a lot of time? The stories in this podcast are short and tough or short and sweet. Bill Simpson has been writing fiction for a long time and has perfected the short short story. Subject matter varies considerably. The Ten-Minute Storyteller is packed with humor, pathos, vulnerability, humanity, and originality. Read by the author without editing, polishing, or any high tech gadgetry. Just the raw material for the listener's listening pleasure.
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