Alfie Dog stories win awards

I received an email from Alfie Dog publishers a few days ago. They are thrilled that all three of the stories they entered in the Write Well awards were selected as winners and will appear in an anthology soon, as an ebook or a print copy.

I didn't want to wait for the anthology, so I bought the three stories immediately and enjoyed them all. I can see why they were chosen.

I think it's wonderful that these days I can buy short stories individually. When I buy collections of stories I usually like only a couple in the book and skip through the others. This way I simply choose the ones I want to read, and it's quite inexpensive.

concision in fiction

An article on AVClub in January introduced me to a new word - concision. In defence of short story writing as a stand-alone career (asserting the right of authors to not write novels), Kevin McFarland said: 'There is nothing wrong with concision in fiction.'

When I read this word, I knew it meant the writing was concise, but I had thought the noun for this concept was  conciseness. 

The Australian Macquarie Dictionary defines conciseness as 'the quality of being concise' and concision as  'concise quality; brevity; terseness'. So I guess I can add this new word to my vocabulary as a synonym for the word I already knew. 

WordReference Forums, which appears to be north-American based, has a discussion of these two words, and the consensus seems to be that conciseness is the more usual term, with concision seeming pretentious and somewhat old-fashioned. One interesting comment is that concision implies an action (like words such as decision, incision, division), while conciseness implies a quality.

purchasing single stories online

After I read Mike Carey's wonderful short story, Iphigenia in Aulis, in An Apple for the Creature, I searched around the internet, hoping I could download it as a single story and have it to re-read anytime I liked. But, alas, I wasn't successful in the search. It was one of those stories where you read the last word and sit in a moment of thoughtful silence, before flicking back through the pages to enjoy the highlights once more.

It was in the running for Best Short Story in The Edgars  this year, but didn't win. I will have to search out the winning story, because it must have been something special to beat Carey's tale.

However, I have come across another interesting site, called alfiedog, where you can buy single stories for a few cents. I think this is a site worth revisiting, because I certainly enjoyed the first story I purchased.

African short stories and the Internet

As I browsed the Melbourne City Library recently, I saw a book facing out, probably placed by a librarian who recommended it. The book was The Granta Book of the African Short Story. That sure looked interesting, but I didn't want to carry a book on public transport because I had my hands full already.

Next day, I wandered into my local library, and there, facing out on the 'recent returns and new books' display, was the same book. Obviously I was meant to borrow it.

So I'm reading it.

In the introduction, Helon Habila says:

With the coming of the Internet to many parts of urban Africa in the late 1990s, a new avenue for publishing was discovered and the African short story finally began to get its long-overdue moment of recognition. [This follows a discussion of the emphasis on novels at the expense of short stories.] The traditional publishing landscape, with its excessive restrictions, was suddenly superseded. The Internet is today doing what the newspapers and magazines did to the development of the short story in Europe and America at the start of the industrial age. It is worth pointing out that the Internet, due to its own peculiar restrictions, seems actually to favour short stories over novels, thereby reversing the restrictions that traditional publishing had placed on African fiction.

Food for thought. Is the Internet giving the short story new life everywhere in the world? I hope so.

In my opinion, eReaders also favour short stories. It seems ages since I bought a BeBook Neo. I didn't use it for a long time, until I had the bright idea of transferring to it the stories I download from my subscription to Beneath Ceaseless Skies. Now I can sit comfortably at the table with my eReader propped up on my Book Seat, or lie in bed and take in a short fantasy or sci-fi story.

needle-felting is like creative writing

My sister is working on a needle-felted landscape based on a photo of a riverside path along the Yarra. Tree ferns line one side of the winding track.

She laid down fibres with her needle-felting machine but put it aside because she didn’t know what to do next. Then she decided on some hand-stitching and embroidery to give it more depth and make it look more like the concept she had in her mind when she began.



It’s been weeks now and the project sits on a bookshelf where she can look at it from across the room and assess how it resembles the original photo. She keeps adding layers. She sews over it and dulls it down. When a spot doesn’t look right she removes it by sewing over it again. She needs to highlight the brightness of the sun on the tree fern leaves. She needs to bring the sunny spots into sharper contrast to the shadows on the winding path.

It’s like writing.

I've been watching a series of videos of Robert Olen Butler, the Pulitzer-winning author, as he writes a short story in real-time. Thirty-four hours of watching his creative process. Seventeen two-hour sessions.

His method makes me think of my sister's needle-felted project, because he writes about three hundred words each night; and then reads them over next evening, and adds to them, and changes them, and re-arranges them, and perfects them, before moving on.

It's amazing and inspirational to watch.