Short Story Month, Day 7. Flash Jab Fiction!

You know, I really have no idea if anyone is reading along here, and I'm not checking stats, because I have a feeling that that would be counterproductive. Even if I'm only challenging myself this month, that's all well and good. But if you are checking in here at all, I'm happy to announce that Jack Bates, one of my Grimm Tales  partners in crime, has put up a very timely post today, offering another round of the Flash Jab Fiction Challenge, where one and all are invited to send him their best short, punchy crime fiction. Here are his rules:


1) No picture necessary (Note: sometimes he's made the challenge link to a photo.)
2) 750 words or less
3) Please don't plagiarize
4) Get it back to me within the next two weeks or sooner
5) With the authors' permission, stories get posted at Flash Jab Fiction
6) This is a writer's exercise done for fun; no fees, no pay. You get a byline and you keep the all rights. (Please notify me if you sell it so I can yank it from the blog.)
7) Embed the story in an email and shoot it to me at jacktheauthor@gmail.com (Bloody Knuckles reserves the right to post or not to post a story.)

Flash Jab Fiction, Bloody Knuckles, and The Hard Nosed Sleuth reserve the right not to post submissions. This is an adult fiction site but there are limitations to what I can run. No bigotry, pornography, or anything featuring the exploitation of children will be considered.

I like the pictures Jack  has chosen in the past, but maybe he's decided they are too daunting. In any case, this blog is all about prompts this month, so in case you need a nudge--or a jab-- I am going to the random word generator for help.... And the word is....

Warning

So head on over to Flash Jab , check out the lay of the land, and then, get cracking! You only have two weeks!

You have been warned.  

banner by Stephen Seighman

Short Story Month 2012, Day 6--Comics and random deities

Assyrian bird-headed deity

Possibly this should have gone up yesterday--in any event I was inspired to post it by National Free Comic Book Day, which took place on Saturday. We have two fine comic book stores in downtown Santa Cruz, and since they were both kind enough to participate in this fun day, I'll take a moment to give a nod to Comicopolis and Atlantis Fantasy World. Long may you prosper.

I was looking for a generator or random superheroes, as I thought that would be appropriate. So far, I've only found names rather than attributes, but I stumbled upon a "deity generator", and was very struck by this character, so it will be today's  prompt.

This god of assassination takes the form of an older man. He is tall and has a boyish build. His deep-set eyes are white. He has dark skin. His outfit is that of a warrior. He carries a sling. He has no shadow. He sometimes takes the form of a flying squirrel.

Scary dude, no?

logo bySteve Seighman http://stevenseighmandesign.com/

Short Story Month 2012, Day 5. Why short story month?

There hasn't been time to do much blog posting today, so instead I'll send you to Emerging Writers Network on why we're celebrating short story month. I think all too often the short story is seen as a means to some other, more important, and definitely more lucrative end. But just as a haiku is not a step on the way to an epic poem, the short story is not just writer's training for working up to a novel. It is complete in itself.

Here's the prompt.

The story is about a scuba diver who is in debt to an immoral college professor. It starts in a gun shop in a small city. The crux of the story involves a birthday celebration.

The story is about a scuba diver who is in debt to an immoral college professor. It starts in a gun shop in a small city. The crux of the story involves a birthday celebration.

logo bySteve Seighman http://stevenseighmandesign.com/

Short Story Month 2012, Day 4. Giallo

It's Friday. I suppose it's too early in the month to slack off a little (is it ever too early to slack off a little?) but I thought I'd mention this very funny site where you can generate your own giallo. Giallo is an Italian genre that originated with some cheap yellow genre paperbacks that were probably pretty sensationalist in their day--their day being before the advent of Friday the Thirteenth and the like. Anyway, it soon came to represent a certain kind of lurid film as well.

And thus the Do-it-Yourself Giallo Kit was born. Maybe it's only me, but I find this generator hilarious. I've often thought of writing a whole set of stories based on the things that come up here--the titles alone are terrific, and if you could somehow convey the slasher film mentality while keeping it somewhat tongue in cheek...Well, better minds than mine, right?

For today's prompt, here are a couple for examples, drawn very much at random:

A Butterfly with Teeth of Glass

Directed by
Matteo Bruni

A drug-addicted student finds a human torso which has been hacked up on stage, in front of an audience which doesn't understand what's going on. A politician inadvertently picks up the one piece of evidence that will solve the the killing. When another person is found murdered, he is able to take control of his shattered life long enough to unmask the real criminal.

My Heart is an Assassin with One Red Eye

Directed by
Ovidio Massaprodussi

A strange painter is found dead. A blind writer is implicated in the murder. After several bloody murders, she finds herself faced with the decision to betray her own twin.

Three Dead on a Frozen Landscape

Directed by
Romano Pecorino

A wealthy journalist is found brutally murdered in an old, abandoned warehouse. A bisexual sculptor seems to know a little too much about the the murder; and after decoding entries in a hidden journal, he unravels the complicated plot and leads the police to the criminal. Unfortunately, he is mistaken, and soon the real maniac is on his trail.

A Key of Ice in a Woman's Hands

Directed by Stefano Giocomonte

An old musician is murdered with a hatchet. A controversial student discovers the crime. After decoding entries in a hidden journal, she discovers that she herself is actually responsible; her own son is forced to kill her before she can kill again.

Yeah, I know--I've put up too many of these. I'm telling you, it's addicting.

Short Story Month, Day 3. 300 Characters

So I know what you're thinking now. After yesterday's post, you're thinking, yes, I would like to fuel our modern civilization with a completely random scribble in a cafe, but I just don't have time to write a short story this month. (Really? You don't have time to sit in a cafe and drink some sort of scrumptious coffee beverage while you doodle on a piece of paper? I thought everybody had time for that.)

The thing you should know about short stories right now is that some of them are short. I mean really, really short. You remember that old saw about angels dancing on a head of a pin? Well, some stories dance on the inside of a matchbook cover.

I've mentioned Matchbook stories here before, but it's been awhile. The editor and basically the guy who came up with the whole idea, Kyle Petersen, took a brief hiatus when becoming a new father and sticking with his full time job put artistic endeavors on the back burner for awhile, but he's back. Basically he edits a journal you can fit in the palm of your hand. It's a story that fits inside the cover of a matchbook. As someone in the lit world, he was a little frustrated by how stories don't seem to escape into the world of the non MFA, and had the vision to think that a matchbook, free for the taking, was a great way to put a little story into the hands of the right person at the right time.

But let's forget for the moment the troubling idea of submissions and focus on the task at hand--whittling the story form down to its essence.  The aim is to write a story that takes 300 characters or less (including spaces) and write a true story out of it. On a lark, I wrote one up and got an honorable mention of some sort on the blog, which is neither here nor there, but means I can post my own attempt at the form right here:

The Last Cigarette
As he finally caught a first dim glimpse of the cave's
fabled wonders, Roger thought he'd earned a smoke for his travails. As he
greedily put a cigarette to his lips, he tried to recall Evans' warning about
the place. Too late, he realized it might have had something to do with matches.

However, this was just a light-hearted approach to the challenge, and others proved that you could write a non jokey version even in this tiny context. I think probably the best example to date is Susan McCloskey's "After the War" . In fact, take a look at all the stories over on Matchbook Story , just to get an idea of the possibilities.

I'm thinking of this blog this month as about writing stories without knowing where they are headed. But you don't have to think that way. You could write something that you know you're going to submit to Matchbook Story in hopes of publication. (Kyle has told me that he likes to get little graph style notebook and then block out those 300 squares, but I found it easy enough to do right on his website--it won't let you go further when you've written too much, and this I know for sure.)

So, today's prompt? Well, a complicated scenario isn't quite the thing here, is it? But luckily for you, I have found a random word generator. I'm not going to censor this one, so we better hope it's good. The only thing I know for sure is that it will be some kind of noun...

Ready?

I mean, are you really, really ready?

Okay, here goes:

...Well, if I'm truthful, which I suppose I should be, the first thing I got was an error message, because the webpage had expired. But the next thing I got was  

Laser 

Which gives me an idea...

(So far, there have been three matchbook editions. Now Kyle Petersen's looking to discover what he'll put in the fourth.)

logo bySteve Seighman http://stevenseighmandesign.com/

Short Story Month, day 2. Private musings

How did you do with yesterday's prompt? Did it spark anything? I surprised myself by getting the beginning of a story out of it, which I'll continue to work on. But it made me realize that it might be too constricting a prompt for some, so I'll be varying the degrees of specificity as I go here.  

One of the reasons I wanted to do this blog right now is that I have recently been introduced to the Berlin Stories of Robert Walser. To tell you the truth, I don't know if I would call them stories or not.  The collection of his Berlin Stories, as they're called, are closer to the essay than to fiction. I did a little meditation on them here, if you'd like to know more, and I'll probably  be getting back to Walser before too long. But the subject of this post was an intriguing paragraph I read while studying up on Walser.

It comes from a blog called Wandering With Robert Walser. I happened to scroll down a ways, and came across this interesting post called A Piece of Paper, Destined for the Trash . Attributing the piece is a bit complicated, because I can't find the name of the actual blogger, and it is quoting an Argentine writer named Juan José Saer on Walser, but the translation is done by Heather Cleary for her book Lost in the Stacks. Just  take a look there--it will be clearer. 

Anyway, here is the paragraph:  

 
"The truth is, finding inspiration in the paper, in the place, in the table at which one writes is fairly common and generally accepted by the public. But what might generate resistance in this utilitarian and consequentialist world of ours is the assertion that a piece of paper destined for the trash bin has a more powerful energy to it than moral, philosophical, and social aesthetic imperatives, an energy absent in those imperatives and endowed with the unusual ability to generate a work of literature. The assertion that even the works most representative of the values of which a given culture is proud would not exist without the irrational dependence on a private stimulus that is totally irrelevant in the eyes of that culture, and which, because of this very irrelevance, presents itself as its negation. The assertion that this obvious particularity of Walser’s, which, given the nearly thirty years he spent locked away in a mental institution, many might be tempted to write off as dementia, is actually the model of all literary creation."

Perhaps this is a bit scholarly for what you were expecting from this simple blog. I parse it thus: A piece of paper destined for the trash has more energy than all of society's other values, and the society depends without knowing it on exactly these private musings.

Here's today's prompt.

Find a piece of paper, destined for the tr--uh, recycle bin. Write some private musing. Take your time. Think of yourself as Robert Walser, not in an insane asylum, no, but sitting in some Berlin cafe, as he did in his youth before the wars, happily scribbling about just anything at all.

When you're done, take it and dispose of it.

Or don't.

Destiny isn't everything.  

logo bySteve Seighman http://stevenseighmandesign.com/

Short Story Month 2012--Day One. Introductions

This is year six of Short Story Month over at Dan Wickett's Emerging Writers Network. I got the cool logo from him, which was designed for his site by Steven Seighman . I've decided to follow Dan's lead and refresh this foundering blog by celebrating the short story during the month of May as well. It's a bit of a commitment, so I've been wavering, but I'm plunging in at the last minute.

My running idea is to post something story-related here every day. I don't lack for links to interesting things--stories, blogs, websites, etc. It's just a matter of finding the time and energy to post them.

The other purpose, though, is to get people writing stories. Or at least sidling up to the idea of writing a story sometime. I think we get too hung up sometimes on the idea of publication and forget that this is both a challenging and pleasurable activity. To this end, I'm going to post a writing prompt every day as well. This isn't going to be the hard part, because I am going to mostly use one of several random story generators. Seventh Sanctum is a very enjoyable one, though it leans heavily toward sci fi and fantasy, so it won't be the only one I'll use. Here's today's:

The story is about an environmentalist who has a mysterious admirier: a hermit. It takes place in a village in the Arctic. The story begins with someone getting drunk, climaxes with a kidnapping, and ends with a massacre. The story is about a philanthropist who hates children. It takes place in a hardware store. The story begins with an accident and ends with a surgery. International crime plays a major role in this story.

The story is about committed midwives. It starts in a tourist town in a magical alternate universe. The critical element of the story is a war.<P>The story is about a wanderer who is obsessed with a romantic clerk. It starts on a frozen planet. The role of artificial intelligence in society plays a major role in the story.<P>This is a fish-out-of-water story with an emphasis on the dangers of small-mindedness. The story is about a starship communications officer, a moralistic thief, and an electrician who is engaged to an altruistic merchant. It starts on a post-apocalyptic planet. The crux of the story involves someone waking up up. The issues surrounding first-contact with an alien species is a major element of the story.<P>This is a tale about alienation. The story is about a naive CFO who is constantly annoyed by a rude pundit. It takes place on a mountainous planet. The story begins with someone buying a dwelling.<P>The story is about a philanthropist who hates children. It takes place in a hardware store. The story begins with an accident and ends with a surgery. International crime plays a major role in this story.

Feel free to alter that in any way you want, or go to Seventh Sanctum and generate your own prompt!

(And you can certainly post links in the comments to anything you'd like to share...)

The story is about a detective and a neurotic newscaster. It takes place in a town. The story begins with a death, climaxes with someone getting lost, and ends with hunting.