Friday 12 November 2010

If you want to find out about omens

Look in my blog.
Why don't you check all the blogs, they're in the link.

But I am in a competition at Penguin. I received a lovely compliment. My little Regency of 1600 words had the nicest compliment. You don't have to vote. But I did receive a few compliments from people who I don't know. I didn't bother to ask people to vote for me because they are monitoring the competition quite heavily. Anyone who doesn't more or less go to read anything but one - vote and then run are being treated as suspect...

And besides, I want to know what is being felt by people reading the stories... not what my mother thinks.

But somebody said I have an Austen voice. That little compliment was worth all the tea in China. And to the person who wrote it, your little comment was like a piece of gold. Jane Austen is my hero and I'm not the only one.

The brief for the short story was very tight. It had to be for the Christmas Season. It had to be between 1300 to 1600 words. And it also had a couple of options for the basic plot. Into that I had to squeeze my little short story, give birth to characters and create the situation. The Regency desperately wanted to bust the barrier of 1600 words.

And what I discovered from a lot more than a few entries, people just don't know what a short story is. Seems they might have lost the art of it. One of the most ideal examples of what constitutes a short story is the O Henry Return of the Magi about the hair and the comb.

From comments left by people voting, on entries, the lack of knowledge of the concept of the short story is quite obvious. And some of the entries even have Chapter One or Part One or something. That isn't a short story. It's Chapter One of a novella or a novel.

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