And lived to tell the tale. You might find it weird that I had the need to write about it, but hey, first times can to be special.
And while I have created many blog posts, and a lot of longer fiction (several scripts and a novel), I hadn’t written a short story that wasn’t for a school project. Stories tend to come to me in longer forms and plots. That said, I’ve gotten into reading short stories and discovered some interesting gems.
As for this one, I had this scene in my mind for some time. I didn’t know whether it would be a part of a longer story, but I realized it stood perfectly well on its own. It’s a bit tragicomic, dark, honest and blunt. It’s also definitely not literary fiction, though I’m not sure where it’d fit in genre fiction. Do short (short) stories even have genres?
Anyway, the story is less than 1500 words, and therefore was appropriate for the Writer’s Digest’s now closed Short Short Story Contest.
For me, plots, characters and dialogue carry a lot of value. And I hope I was able to reflect this on this particular story. There is a clear beginning and end, a specific problem that turns out to be a tad ironic and a somewhat relatable character that did something very irrational.
I’m really fond of the story, and since contests are typically long shots, I’ll be researching for other contests and potential markets until the results come out.
Wish me luck.
May inspiration and luck be with you when it comes to your stories, and their publication:)
So have you written short stories?
I’m from the “French Quarter.”
Ten minutes walk, to the north, the Jewish ghetto.
Nazis stole our food.
If you had, say, five cows, Nazis took four.
Kid Blink, Crutch Man, Racetrack Billy, we ate pigeons and rabbits.
Pigeon soup was good.
Fat Belgian pigeons; big and fat, like chickens.
That’s what we ate.
Hi Pinar,
I didn’t know you wrote about writing and productivity. Hadn’t paid much attention to the posts when I visited last time (from BAFB). You have a nice blog.
As for writing my first story, it was an autobiography and I had copied the idea from my classmate. I forgot most of the autobiography but how I wrote it, I put it in a post. I wrote that post just for the contest at BAFB. The link is in my name, if you click it.
Hope to visit again. Didn’t you do anything about the writer site and blog linking yet?
Hi Raspal,
Thanks for visiting and commenting:)
I cover a lot of aspects of non-fiction and fiction, so writing and productivity tend to come into play.
I’ll make sure to check your story out.
This is the writer site/blog. It links to my other blogs if I mention something in their niches. For instance, I have a series where I analyze story conflicts of movies, so if I have covered those movies on my movie blog, I link there. I also do a bit of internal linking, and of course I link to other writers’ blogs for resources too.