Your Story - On Receipt

Here's a wonderfully quirky way of getting writers in print - stories on a book store till receipt!

BookXcess is inviting 100-word entries for its "receipt stories" - check out the website Jackie Ng and Andrew Yap (left) have set up to read some examples and submit your own.

The discount bookstore is going from strength to strength - last year alone they sold 200,000 books - so there's  whole lot of reading going on in this city!

Share Your City Stories!

Here's a new website I think you are going to enjoy very much. It will feature stories all set in the city where many of you live, and best of all, those stories are going to be written by you!

(Roll of drums ...)

Launched today at The British Council - City of Shared Stories Kuala Lumpur.

As you can see, it is a map of the city, dotted with little red tags. Each tag is a very short story told in under 1600 characters. One is mine. (Look for the little tag stuck into Tropicana Golf and Country Resort!) Others in this first batch were written by Daphne Lee, Damyanti Ghosh, Liyana/Dizzy, Priya K, and Jerome Kugan. If you like what you read click on the I like this story button.

And ... if you think you can do better, go right ahead. Locate your story at a specific spot on the map and write or paste it into the space provided, and then it will be there for everyone else to visit. Your story can be in English or BM (or even, as we learned at the launch today in Chinese or Tamil).

The website is a part of the City of Stories creative writing project and is a sister site to the UK site, City of Shared Stories , run by the writers development organisation Spread The Word.

The project is intended to get Malaysians writing and enjoying short fiction, and I think it is going to be a lot of fun, so let's get that map covered!

Show Them Your Shorts

Saras reminded me today about the Writer's Digest Short Short Story Competition, and you may also like to enter.

The word limit is 1,500 words ... or fewer, and all submission details are here. Note that there is a charge of US$12 for each entry submitted.

Experimenting with Brevity

Gabby Goh picked up the story about the six word memoirs in the Malay Mail today, and also finds three other very interesting "microfiction" sites you might like :

One Sentence

"Most of the best stories that we tell from our lives have one really, really good part that make the rest of the boring story worth it. This is about that one line. This is about telling the most interesting or poignant story possible in the least amount of words. This is about small bite-sized pieces of extraordinary lives and ordinary lives alike... the happy, the sad, the funny, the depressing."

"When the brain tumor failed to kill her, we were convinced that it’s because evil doesn’t die." — fancy spatula

Four Word Film Review (FWFR)

"When the FWFR was first conceived, the idea was to accept four word reviews of films. The domain was paid for, the logo designed and the name had a kinda’ catchy ring to it. Over time the site and its aims have evolved, however, as it became increasingly more obvious four words was great fun for summing up films also.

These days, the FWFR offers a mixed bag of content – some summaries, some reviews, some a bit of both, but all of them valid comments in one way or another of the film in question." — benj clews

Micro Horror

Founded and edited by Nathan Rosen, the site is a free online archive for horror microfiction – in 666 words or less.

Microfiction is also referred to as flash fiction or short-short stories. The general goal of a microfiction author is to tell a story, set a mood or depict a scene in as few words as possible.

"Horror, I’ve come to believe, is particularly well suited to the microfiction form, and the best horror microfiction can be as brief and shocking as a punch to the stomach," writes Rosen.

Budding horror writers are welcome to submit their articles.

Your Life ... in Six Words

Seeing how you all rose nobly to the challenge of writing sixteen-word stories for KLUE magazine some time back, I thought you'd be interested in this competition at Smith magazine for six-word memoirs.

What's more, the Guardian is also inviting you to have a go! (I've put mine up there already.)

A first collection was compiled into a book called Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure edited by Rachel Fershleiser and Larry Smith. (Called One Life, Six Words, What's Yours? in the UK).

Particularly notable mini-stories include Blake Morrison's :

Womb. Bloom. Groom. Gloom. Rheum. Tomb.

and John Banville's :

Should have lived more written less.

There's are tons more for you to enjoy in this video :



Postscript :

Alice Teh read the book and writes about it here.

Malaysian Poetic Chronicles

Leon Wing sent this little ad for his new website The Malaysian Poetic Chronicles which gives the poets and short short story writers among you a place to post your work:

Do you possess verses which are,
worse, not chronicled and not even
perused through a monocle?
Do you ache with want for any place
To berth your poetic eggs?

Look no more.

The Msian Poetic Chronicles will give your poems – and even short shorts (stories) – a home.

We can even talk about your poems and short shorts (not the ones you’re wearing, mind. Just the stories behind them).

We’ll feature your work online, if we feel they need eyes to see them and lips to read them.

If you are in FaceBook you can message Leon Wing, and copy and paste your poem or short story into the message. If not, do the same or attach a Word document to chiefchronicler@gmail.com

And, write a little about how you created that piece.

Include a short bio, with links to any of your sites.

Chief Chronicler
Leon Wing

Some pieces are already up including poems from Leon and Ted and a short short from Yusuf Martin.

In the Mood for Love

Are you in the mood for love?

The Times has six very good short short stories on the theme written by Matt Thorne, Lionel Shriver, James Meek, Jilly Cooper, Adele Parks and Tim Lott. Best of all there's the invitation for you to write your own love story in 300 words.

If you want something a bit more substantial, over at the Boston Globe there's a list of ten great novels to read when you feel like some literary romance - prepare to be surprised! The list is drawn from Haille Ephron's 1001 Books for every Mood which sound like another book about books I must add to my collection.

All the Lonely People

I asked you a couple of days ago what you are reading and it's only fair I should reciprocate! I have a fair bit of catching up to do here. Here's a start.

The book I've enjoyed most recently is far and away No-one Belongs Here More than You, Miranda July's funny, sad, startling collection of short stories that won the Frank O'Connor last year. You may remember that the book comes with different coloured covers so that you can coordinate your copy with your clothes. I bought mine via Abebooks and got a bright green copy which clashed a bit with my wardrobe. (Just read on Eric's blog that he found copies at MPH Midvalley but he doesn't say what colour.)

Often bordering on the bizarre, these 16 stories of lonely misfits, injured by life, aching for love and acceptance would really hurt to read, but the characters are survivors, buffered by their rich fantasy lives.

The protagonist of Shared Patio longs to write for a magazine advice column and the story is sprinkled with offbeat advice. She builds fantasies around her neighbour which she gets close to fulfilling when he has an epileptic fit on the shared patio one day.

In Swim Team a woman coaches a swimming team comprising old people in her apartment and without the aid of water (although she does provide them with bowls when they need to practice breathing exercises!)

A woman dreams of an erotic encounter with Prince William in Majesty and awake plots how she might meet him.

In The Sister A lonely man is set up on a date with a colleague's sister who never turns up, and turns out never to have existed. Perhaps it doesn't matter in the end.

It's hard to pick a favourite, but Something That Needs Nothing is a love story that broke my heart. This Person is about how we will always go on sabotaging ourselves is as perfect a short short story as they come, and you can read the whole thing here.

I wonder it everyone reading the book will find themselves reflected in this book. Do you feel as lonely, as out of sync with the world, as uncertain, as July's characters?

It's frightening to admit, but I do sometimes. I really do! And if you say yes too, I think I will look at you oddly (as of course you will have to look at me). Maybe this is the great unsayable - we aren't as together as we'd like the world to think we are.

But when you look at Miranda July, who successful, young and beautiful, everything her characters are not, you wonder how the hell she channels these voices!

I feel like turning the book over and beginning it all over again. This is a collection that is staying on my writing desk to stir up my slothful own muse.

Here's a video from a really fun literary event organised around the book by Strangers in Seattle, and you can hear the author reading excerpts that are bound to have you rushing out for the book.

Just make sure you coordinate clothes and handbag and shoes.

Sufian's Mission

Sufian Abas is Reads Monthly's pin-up boy in Starmag today. Daphne Lee sums him up thusly :

... a sulky young man who smells like freshly-pressed laundry.* He takes stunning photographs ... but (it is said) they are nothing compared to his beautiful, detailed work in cross-stitch. ... He tap dances. He enjoys skinny-dipping. And climbing trees. He loves horses, especially unicorns. He dislikes children, but thinks they might be delicious curried, or roasted and served with carrots and potatoes. Sufian claims that he was once nearly murdered by a witch.

But most importantly :

Sufian Abas is on a mission to save Malay fiction by producing works that people would actually want to read.

written in :

... the sort of Malay you hear on the street ... the Malay people actually use and understand ...

And he's conscious of filling a gap (presently almost uninhabited!) between what he calls the heavy literary prose and and the sort of trash you find in Malay romance novels. He also, and I think this is a particularly interesting point, urges non-Malay writers to write to Malay because they would bring something different to the language.

Anyway Daphne likes Sufian's book ... better than two other local collections she didn't think as good as they were cracked up to be on the blogs. (Blog?) Ahem. Never mind. We fought it out at the Food Foundry yesterday in between mouthfuls of toast and scrambled eggs . Chaque'un à son goût ... in short story collections as in breakfast dishes.

Priya K. reviews Sufian's book and finds the stories :

... snappy and heartbreaking ... the writing style is deceptively simple, opting for everyday language and pop culture references. The result is street poetry, with classic lines such as “dengan air mata berlenagan dan berkilauan seperti bebola disko” (with tears shining like disco balls). ... Philosophic pulp fiction, if I may venture to coin a term.

My review of Nikita Lalwani's Gifted is in Starmag today though with a Borders voucher when Kinokuniya was kind enough to give me the copy of the book which is a bit embarrassing. But never mind ... there is a 30% discount voucher for selected titles from Kino to clip out.**

Ted reviews Hitomi Kanehara's Auto Fiction (and reminds me that I still want to buy her Snakes and Earrings) and Martin Spice John Le Carre's Mission Song.

There's news too of bookstore events in April including of a free creative writing workshop to be run by Kam Raslan at MPH.

(*Hmm, just how close did Daphne get?)
(** There's a strange and sad postscript I want to stick at the end of my original post on the book.)

Maggie Wins Txtlit

Bernice sent me an e-mail telling me that one of her ex-creative writing students from CENFAD, Mag Tan Yee Mei (who, as Maggie Tan, wrote a story Theatre des Marionettes which appeared in Silverfish New Writing 5) has won a UK writing competition for a romantic micro story submitted by SMS.

Biggest congrats from me too.

Maggie is now studying Art History and English Literature at the University of East Anglia. She apparently enjoys writing fairy tales in her spare time, and I bet you any money that she will turn out to be one of Raman's Silverfish "lappers". You might remember Maggie's appearance at reading at Seksan's some time back. She was so shy that Bernice had to read her story for her!

Apostrophe Interpreted

The winners of the sixteen-word short story competition organised by KLue Magazine have been announced. I was one of the judges but didn't actually know who won (apart from Georgette!) till just now since although I dutifully scored the final selection of stories, there were no names attached (quite rightly).

The final selection was very good, but the best stories were like little haiku - complete in themselves, leaving space for the reader to fill the gaps.

The awards were given out at Central Market Wednesday night, but I was in no fit state to go after a twelve hour round trip to Nibong Tebal to see a student teach. Pity, as I know it would have been fun and so many of my favourite peeps there.

The sixteen finalists have had their stories interpreted in visual form by local artists, and the pieces are on display until Sunday at Central Market Annexe.

And the six winners get to go to the Ubud Writers' and Readers' Festival!

Biggest congrats and well done to Klue for organising such an interesting contest.

Short Short Shortlist

Congrats to our own Amaruhizat who is one of the finalists in the first Nanotales competition for short short stories, co-sponsored by the Guardian and Ziji. 100 entries made it through out of 2187 stories submitted, and organizer Ziv Navoth says :

... in my humble opinion, we may have some of the world's best stories!

The winner is to be decided by public voting, rather than by the judges, a decision that not all agree with, going by the comments on Ziv's blog page. I must say I like the idea that there is public participation which encourages the stories to be read and thought about, and which perhaps will in turn encourage others to try their hand at Nanotales.

Go visit Amaruhizat's page here and do drop by to leave him some comments about his story and rate it. But do read the rest of the stories and judge all of them on merit!!!

Sheddings and Beheadings

One of the National Short Story Prize finalists, Hanif Kureishi, is reportedly very angry with the BBC which has cancelled the radio broadcast of his shortlisted story.

Weddings and Beheadings describes the work of a cameraman who has been forced to take on work filming the executions that have become a feature of recent kidnaps in the Middle East. BBC officials felt that broadcasting it "would not be right" as concern grows for BBC Gaza correspondent Alan Johnson.

Kureishi says:

There are journalists and newspapers in peril all the time around the world. We support them by supporting freedom of speech rather than by censoring ourselves.

I agree.

Incidentally, you can read Kureishi's story on the Prospect Magazine website.

Postscript:

Maureen Freely on the Guardian blog makes the very important point that even nice censorship is censorship and therefore cannot be condoned.

... and the more we condone it, the more we wrap it up in sheepish clothing, the more we convince ourselves that it is the only way to fend off the wolves, the more of it we'll see.

(Photo nicked from the BBC website.)

More Six Word Wonders

We were just talking about six word stories the other day, and now the Guardian obligingly gives us a list of them by a whole range of contemporary authors. The ones that delighted me most:

Bob's last message: Bermuda Triangle, Baloney.
Elmore Leonard

Megan's baby: John's surname, Jim's eyes.
Simon Armitage

"The Earth? We ate it yesterday."
Yann Martel

And probably the cleverest, a whole story in five letters and an ampersand:

A&E IOU
Toby Litt

And if you feel inspired to write some of your own, here's a site to submit them to.

All of a Twitter in 140 Characters!

Yang-May Ooi is certainly quickly at home with new technology. While she was in Malaysia, she phone blogged her adventures. And now she's all of a twitter over a (relatively) new mini-blogging and messaging facility called ... Twitter.

Excited by the possibilities of this new medium, she is asking readers if they can be creative in 140 characters (like in an SMS message) to produce Twitter mini-flash fiction or digital haiku:

What I would really love to see are Twitterers who can write something interesting or thought-provoking in 140 characters so that I can have something worthwhile to read on my mobile phone - when I'm on the bus or hanging around waiting in between real-life events. So here's a challenge to all you flash fiction writers and haiku poets, can you Twitter interestingly, uniquely, fascinatingly, challengingly to entertain, bewitch, bedazzle and enthrall the masses on their phones? Let me know if you have such a Twitter account and I'll feature you on Fusion View!

She reckons that my local readership should go for this as Malaysians have short attention spans ... (now where was I?) ... and are joined at the hip to their handphones ... (just excuse me while I answer that ...)

140 characters! We thought we were pushing the limits with six-word stories, the other day!

And speaking of short short stories, here's one you must read - Julio Cortazar's post-modern piece A Continuity of Parks. Just coffee break length and magic.

Short, Shorter, Shortest

Some of you scribblers were a bit thrown by the prospect of writing very short fiction for the two recent competitions I posted news of. (Here and here.) Can an effective short story be written in 600 hundred words, 1,000 words?

Jules Horne on the Guardian blog tells us not to be dismissive of the form:

Ultra-short stories are newly fashionable and marketed as quick fixes of fiction, but the best of them demand close attention - and time - from readers.

Nanotale, nanonovel, flash fiction, microfiction, sudden fiction... call it what you will, the ultra-short story is enjoying a much-hyped revival. At a time when not-so-short story writers are struggling to get their collections out, it's the tiniest tales that seem to be squeezing on to publishers' lists. Ziv Nanoth's Nanotales is the latest in a recent line of pithy prose works by often experimental writers including Dan Rhodes, Dave Eggers and David Gaffney.

Of course, the short prose form is far from new. It has roots leading back to Aesop's fables; from the 19th century on, French writers such as Baudelaire and Max Jacob wrote prose poems that explore the boundaries between prose and poetry, and could happily sit with either. Twentith-century exponents include Italo Calvino, Franz Kafka, Elizabeth Bishop and Raymond Queneau, whose Oulipo movement of experimental writers pushed formal constraints to the limit.

Maybe that's why I'm perturbed to hear nanotales marketed as an ideal form for our attention-deficit age. These distinguished writers, often at the maverick outer edges of their art, weren't interested in offering up quick fixes for us to absorb between tube stops. They were drawn to its special challenges: the distilled essence of storytelling, the condensed emotion, the perception shift, the power of the unexpressed.

That said, it's easy to see why microshort stories have taken off in the digital age. They can be read at a single sitting, on a single screen. They fit beautifully into a blog. They can be whizzed around on the same "have-you-heard?" grapevines that bring us jokes, news and gossip. And now, they can even be heard: a 200-word short story makes a perfect minute-long podcast. Maybe that's their future - carried around on our iPods, as a kind of fictional "Thought for the Day"? Writers like Patrick McLean are taking this even further, with straight-to-audio stories written specially for the web.

As Horne points out, the usual length of a short-short story is between 100 and 1,000 words, so 600 words is actually quite a generous allowance! Not so long ago, Starlight posted a 300-word story challenge on her blog, and many of you tried your hand at it. (Incidentally, short-short-story.com is a very useful resource for writers of flash fiction.)

One of the best short stories I ever read was about a postcard to the future and was just 50 words long and incredibly effective! (It was in a an ELT writing textbook ... if anyone knows it and could send me a copy I would be so grateful).* There are some good fifty word stories on Bill Collin's website, if you think it can't be done.

And of course, there are stories that are shorter still. Horne reminds us of the Hemingway example:

For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn.

which he describes as:

... a perfect specimen: a mighty backstory, a compelling character, and an emotional kick to crack the toughest heart.

Then there's this one by Margaret Atwood which I like even more:

Longed for him. Got him. Shit.

While a reader adds a cryptic six word tale by Joss Whedon:

Gown removed carelessly. Head, less so.

And knowing you guys (bored in the office, reading me surreptitously when the boss' back is turned) you want a go too.

Postscript

*Hsian found the 50 word story I was trying to recall here. And this is it:

The Postcard

Friendless, he despatched a letter to the twelfth century. Illuminated scrolls arrived by return post. Jottings to Tutankahmen secured hieroglyphics on papyrus; Hannibal sent a campaign report. But when he addressed the future, hoping for cassettes crammed with wonders, a postcard drifted back with scorched edges. It glowed all night.

Isn't it just wonderful? It gives me goosebumps.

I forgot to tell you that the Guardian website has some of the Nanotales up already so if you want to see some samples ...

Write a Nanotale!

The world's #1 short story competition has just launched and we're looking for the world's best stories on life, death, pleasure, pain, - anything goes as long as it is under 1000 words, in English and written by you.

If you think you've got what it takes and you manage to convince the public and a panel of judges, then Ziji will turn you into a published author.

The Guardian has teamed up with Bebo and Ziji publishing and is inviting stories of less than 1,000 words before March 16 2007.

There's nothing in the rules to say writers must be British. Anyway, you're all loyal Guardian readers, aren't you!

And even if you don't want to enter, there is some excellent advice from Ziv Navoth on writing the short story. The author's website is here.

The Last Man on Earth Sat Alone in a Room

I have had about a hundred more hits on my site than usual today (from across the globe) and everyone seems to be googling the same words to get here:

The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock at the door...

They're landing on my Great First Lines post from yonks ago, where Amir posted the above in the comments - not only a great title but one of the shortest short stories ever.

Please can someone stop by long enough to tell me what's happening and put me out of my misery???

Story Stars

Starlight is inviting you to share your short short stories (300 words max) with her and either post them on your own blog, or send them to her so she can put them up on hers. As she says - on your marks, get set, WRITE!

Taking Snapshots

My friends Aneeta Sundararaj, Saradha Narayanan and A. Jessie Michael have just published a collection of short fiction together: Snapshots by is published by Oak, and available to buy here.

Biggest congrats for having the guts, gumption and gusto to get your project off the ground! I've not read it yet, but Lotus Reads gives a glowing account of it here.

It's gratifying to see that the creative writing workshop which was held at the KL Litfest a couple of years ago was the starting point for the collaboration. Craig Cormick and Satendra Nandan from the University of Canberra's Creative Writing programme ran afternoon sessions for keen writers and wannabe's at the Australian High Commission*. Craig encouraged the writers and edited the final selection.

Good luck now with getting the books sold!!

(*Okay, a touch of jealousy here ... I organised the workshops but couldn't attend because everything else was going on at the same time! Sob!)