"...it is understandable that someone should ask how it was possible to know that these things happened so and not in some other manner, the reply to be given is that all stories are like those about the creation of the universe, no one was there, no one witnessed anything, yet everyone knows what happened."
--Jose Saramago, Blindness, p. 265.
A while back, I complained about the fact that writers aren't more inventive: when authors find a stable, compelling voice and mode of telling stories, they rarely deviate. I decried this on the theory that different stories demand different voices and approaches, and that part of what readers expect from writers is a new way of seeing things. If there really are only seven plots, as Christopher Booker argues in (you guessed it) The Seven Basic Plots, then it's up to authors to relay their stories in the most inventive, varied ways possible. And part of the skill of being a writer, it seems to me, is to avoid getting too comfortable in any one combination of voice and point of view.
Well. I was soon to be hoist by my own petard.
A couple of weeks ago, desperate for something diverting to read, I picked up a Terry Pratchett novel, Monstrous Regiment. Those of you familiar with Pratchett know that he's a very funny man. I don't pretend to have read all of his books -- his oeuvre is quite large -- but based on those I have read, I'd say he's not particularly inventive in the way that I describe above. His charm comes in his ability to elaborate endlessly on the Discworld he's created. Most fantasy writers create a world and then find themselves stuck with characters and mores that grow increasingly rigid, until the whole thing groans creaking to a halt, and the author has to create an entirely new world. Not Pratchett. From within his Discworld, he's fearlessly found new characters to write about, on topics as varied as the postal system or what it's like to be Death, though his overriding theme is human folly and stupidity. From his abiding rage, he is able to spin endless jokes and riffs on contemporary culture, while never failing to be entertaining.
So imagine my disappointment when I opened Monstrous Regiment and found that it was ... earnest. Oh, there're occasional jokes (there's a vampire in it who has, like a reformed alcoholic, sworn off human blood - he's a member of the Temperance League), but all in all, it's a fairly bitter story about sexism and the stupidity of war (and humans for waging it). So it was entertaining enough, but it lacked the usual Pratchett brio. As author of over 20 novels, he's got a right to flag occasionally, of course. But man, was I mad that he dared to write a book that was halfway serious. What I wanted was the old Pratchett, the usual Pratchett, the one I was comfortable with. It's not clear that he was experimenting with something new, by the way, just that he was angrier and maybe sadder than when writing other books, but the effect was the same: he blazed a new trail, and I was damned if I was going with him. Put me in mind of T.R. Pearson, whose voice in The Last of How it Was and other earlier novels is peerless and quite mannered; but when he began to deliberately break it down in a later novel, Cry Me a River, and meld it with contemporary details and a less mellifluous voice, he lost some of his charm for me, no matter how much I admired him for his daring.
Which just goes to show you: that's why writers aren't more inventive.
From "The Drug Pushers," by Carl Elliott, The Atlantic Monthly, April 2006, p. 91:
The seduction, whether by one company or several, is often quite gradual. My brother Hal explained to me how he wound up on the speakers' bureau of a major pharmaceutical company. It started when a company rep asked him if he'd be interested in giving a talk about clinical depression to a community group. The honorarium was $1,000. Hal thought, Why not? It seemed almost a public service. The next time, the company asked him to talk not to the public but to practitioners at a community hospital. Soon company reps were making suggestions about content. "Why don't you mention the side-effect profiles of the different anti-depressants?" they asked. Uneasy, Hal tried to ignore these suggestions. Still, the more talks he gave, the more the reps became focused on antidepressants rather than depression. The company began giving him PowerPoint slides to use, which he also ignored. The reps started telling him, "You know, we have you on the local circuit giving these talks, but you're medical-school faculty; we could get you on the national circuit. That's where the real money is." The mention of big money made him even more uneasy. Eventually the reps asked him to lecture about a new version of their antidepressant drug. Soon after that, Hal told them, "I can't do this anymore."
Looking back on this trajectory, Hal said, "It's kind of like you're a woman at a party, and your boss says to you, 'Look, do me a favor: be nice to this guy over there.' And you see the guy is not bad-looking, and you're unattached, so you say, 'Why not? I can be nice.' The problem is that it never ends with that party. Soon you find yourself on the way to a Bangkok brothel in the cargo hold of an unmarked plane. And you say, 'Whoa, this is not what I agreed to.' But then you have to ask yourself, 'When did the prostitution actually start? Wasn't it at that party?'"
Like most literature fans, I don't read a lot of short story collections, and once I do, I don't re-read many of them. This is partly a pragmatic decision (who has the time to re-read everything?); but not many deserve re-reading, either. Then again, those that do deserve it don't necessarily inspire it: Dubliners, for example, is arguably the most famous short story collection ever, but I've not cracked its spine since I first read it 23 years ago. Compare that with my experience with Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son: I tore through it in an afternoon, but I could never really put it down, so to speak, until I finally gave in and re-read it over a year later.
Which brings me to Lisa Moore's 2002 collection, Open, which was a bestseller in Canada and a finalist for the Giller Prize there, but was largely unnoticed here in the States. (I have my public library to thank for bringing it to my attention: thank you, thank you, Multnomah County.) One could say that my decision to re-read Johnson and Moore and not Joyce says more about my reading tastes than their relative merits -- and you'd have a strong case. Moore's collection, at any rate, appears at first glance to be disappointingly homogeneous. Almost all of the ten stories are first-person (and those that aren't may as well be), the main character is always a woman, usually middle-aged with a child or step-child and an emotionally remote husband to whom she is nevertheless almost helplessly attracted. Even the stories' greatest strengths -- their sensuous, room-wrecking imagery and their odd fusion of past and present -- are unvarying from story to story, which is the sort of thing that usually causes my heart to sink.
With all that said, though, I found myself re-reading Open within a week of finishing it, and suggest you get started on her too. If you're a fan of the monotonously sequential or you're deaf to imagery (so to speak), then skip it. But if you've got an ear for voice and like stories that appear to be relentlessly allusive and indirect, than Moore should be on your bedside table by nightfall.
The stories in Open are fragmentary, non-sequential, unpredictable, and rely heavily on repeated imagery to convey their emotional undercurrents. Here's the section I found when browsing the book at the library that convinced me to check it out:
I guess I should read the Manifesto. The literary critic who spoke before you at the conference said it was an authorless tract. That Marx repeatedly tried to make it sound as though it came from thin air, or rose by itself from the people, spontaneously. He was willing to claim the bad poetry of his youth that even Penguin didn't want to publish. But the Manifesto just was. Just passed through his pen.
Tell me what happened? Did you meet somebody? (from "Mouths, Open," p. 29)
You don't need to know that the narrator and her partner (the "you" mentioned in the second sentence) are in a relationship, and that the narrator's partner is turning away from her -- it's abundantly clear. The longing in the second paragraph, the abrupt juxtaposition, is poignant. Marx's delusion, his attempt to remove his fingerprints from his own work, suggests fertile parallels: perhaps the narrator's partner is attempting to dissociate himself from his own work (the life he's built with the narrator, or his responsibility for breaking them up); or perhaps the narrator is trying to remove herself from the pain of his rejection by accepting that it "just is," that it's historically inevitable.
Much of Moore's fiction works like this, by suggestion and juxtaposition. In this way, she is able to dramatize how memory can radically impinge upon the present - many of her characters seem to live in an unstable storm of past and present, a cinematic montage of moments flashing by. In some stories, like "The Way the Light Is," she makes her debts to the cinema explicit; in others, like "Mouths, Open," she uses the technique and expects her readers to follow. She can pull this off because of the sheer sensuousness of her imagery and the sharp turns she takes to pull the reader through the story.
Like a poet, she is prodigal with her images: at an outdoor party, "a paper napkin flutters off the table and dips, like a dove shot out of the sky, a gash of lipstick on its breast" (154). Or this:
Melody comes out with a bottle of orange juice. It has stopped raining. Steam lifts off the asphalt and floats into the trees. Sky, Canadian flag, child with red shirt -- all mirrored in the glossy water on the pavement at our feet. A car passes and the child's reflection is a crazy red flame breaking apart under the tires. The juice in Melody's hand has an orange halo. A brief rainbow arcs over the wet forest behind the Irving station (8).
She can stumble, too, as she does here, when the narrator of "Craving" describes a childhood friend's dexterity in handling adolescent boys:
She could suss out the swift-forming passions of the gang of boys we knew, and make them heel. She knew the circuit of their collective synaptic skittering and played it like pinball (62).
I have trouble imagining "passions" coming to "heel," but more than that, "circuit of their collective synaptic skittering" isn't nearly as concrete as her imagery usually is - it's abstractly interesting, but works better for its sound than its sense. (Nor can I imagine playing a "skittering" like "pinball," but that's comparatively minor.) Sure, I'd've liked to see her edit this sort of thing out, but it's a mark of the sheer fertility of imagery that her stories don't suffer from lapses like this one - she knows her next one will be better, and so does the reader.
Her opening story, "Melody," is impressive because it tells four stories in one, almost all indirectly: the narrator, a teenager, slowly awakens to desire, sexual and otherwise, as she carelessly betrays her friends, including Melody, who has an abortion after getting pregnant by an older man; the narrator's subsequent marriage and five years of grief after her husband dies; the mistake of her second marriage to a rich dentist; and the wrenching power of Melody's reappearance in her life at 40. (Actually, the piece may contain fewer than four stories or it could be more; like all of Moore's work, it's hell to summarize.)
Other pieces are weaker -- "Grace," for example, the novella that closes the collection, is wonderful but shows the weakness of applying her technique to longer fiction: it's exhausting, after a while. One stops taking in the imagery and the connections and begins longing for closure. But there are many standouts here. "Craving" is about an old theme - the destruction of romantic illusion - but does it well. The narrator is at the dinner table with two old friends she hasn't seen since her teens, and their respective men:
She's thinking, Remember the guy on the surboard in Hawaii? I felt total abandon. An evanescing of self, my zest uncorked.
Yes, but if you had kept going, it wouldn't have been abandon. He wouldn't be a man swathed in the nimbus of an incandescent wave, muzzling the snarling lip of that bone-crushing maw of ocean with a flexed calf muscle. He would be one of these guys at the table, half drunk and full of mild love (62-3).
Perhaps the best story of all is "The Way the Light Is," in which the narrator is making a short film inspired by a poem by John Steffler. She describes the poem as being about "the elusive," and tries to do this by filming her friend Mina, who affects nonchalance that her husband sleeps with other women but unintentionally keeps revealing her pain. The narrator describes the video her own husband took of their son's birth, a series of jumpcuts of the contractions (the camera was shut off during all the peaceful, happy moments in between) and then the bloody, terrifying complication that follows. She and her son survive, and then she writes, ostensibly about Steffler's poem, "Everyone knows what it means to want something with such intensity you crush it in your haste to have it. " But of course she's talking about giving birth, and her friend Mina's longing for her husband, and even the way in which artists always fail to entirely grasp what they're reaching for, and so for that story alone, the book is worth your while.
Sorry to spoil the punchline, but there's no better headline. From the Chicago Tribune, May 5, 1987:
"Duemling said a contra doctor requested 60,000 containers of dental floss and thousands of toothbrushes and tubes of toothpaste to start a major dental care program for the contra troops and their families.
But contra military leaders said few Nicaraguans use dental floss and questioned whether the department should have filled that part of the order.
'We're guerillas,' one said. 'We don't floss our teeth.'"
You may have noticed that there haven't been any new issues of The King's English lately. We were on hiatus (one of them fancy Anglo-Saxon words for "vacation"), but now we're back. Good thing, too: while you were sleeping, we picked up another Million Writers Award for being the Best Publisher of Novella-Length Fiction in 2005 (for the second-year in a row). Bill Bukovsan, "Pig Roast." Spring 2005. James Chapman, "The Audience." Fall 2005. M. Frias-May, "The Longest Suicide Note by Stanley K." Fall 2005. J. Todd Gillette, "Halcyon." Sumer 2005. (Also, the First-Prize Winner of the Blodgett Waxwing Prize in Literary Fiction) Kei Miller, "The Fear of Stones." Winter 2005. Check out the announcement on our home page, and be sure to drop the authors an e-mail to congratulate 'em. We've already told them we're proud, but they'd rather hear it from you.
What's more, five of the eleven fiction pieces we published last year were chosen as "notable stories of 2005" in the same contest, putting us in the same company as the august Agni and the well-funded Narrative (which can afford to pay the likes of Rick Bass for publication).
And who were the authors honored?
Here, for example, is a text-message version of "Paradise Lost" disseminated by some scholars in England: "Devl kikd outa hevn coz jelus of jesus&strts war. pd'off wiv god so corupts man (md by god) wiv apel. devl stays serpnt 4hole life&man ruind. Woe un2mnkind."
From “The Pleasures of the Text,” by Charles McGrath, January 22, 2006, the “New York Times Magazine."
From "Worlds Enough: Travels in an Adolescent Genre," by L.J. Davis, Harper's, January 2002, pp. 71-2:
"Also cited is Erasmus Darwin, the poet-scientist-physician, grandfather of the naturalist, inventor of the steering wheel, discoverer of photosynthesis -- and a corpulent libertine who played the trombone to his flowers, cut a semicircle out of his dining-room table so that he could get closer to his food, and sketched the world's first known schematic drawing of a hybrid ramjet-rocket engine ...
"As a novel, Frankenstein is a pretty punk piece of work. The good doctor is a crashing bore, the monster is no better, the book is a lot of talk, and at the end Mary [Shelley] can think of no denouement more compelling than to assemble her cast at the North Pole, where they close our little drama with another rousing gabfest. Nonetheless, a fragment of all this chin music is not without its interest. The thing that qualifies the book as the first modern science-fiction novel (though it is not, as I will shortly astound you by demonstrating, the first science-fiction novel) is electricity ...
"The history of science fiction usually begins here, with Frankenstein. The history is wrong ... the world's first sci-fi author was a certain Lucian of Samosata, a Romanized Syrian whose two lunar-space operas, Icaromenippus and True History, by some incredible fluke escaped the torching of the Alexandrine Library by the Emperor Theodosius in 391. Writing in the second century, Lucian took his protagonists to the moon ... On the moon, we learn, the poor have wooden phalluses and the phalluses of the rich are made of ivory, which sounds perfectly plausible to me. "
Why is it that writers are prized for their ability to reproduce the same sort of thing over and over in the same key? Once I discovered the charm and brilliance of J.P. Donleavy's voice in The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B., I expected him to reinvent himself with the same verve in each of his novels. Imagine my disappointment when I learned that his remarkable voice, so hard-won, had ossified ever since he first revealed it in The Ginger Man. (And it's not like the man was content to write his To Kill a Mockingbird and then fall silent; he's written a heckuva lot in the same voice.) Similarly, most short story collections make an author's tics, thinness of experience, or powers of invention glaringly obvious. (I hope this is mostly an illusion -- in other words, that authors are generally more versatile than they appear in print and must appear more homogeneous to satisfy readers and sell books -- but I'm doubtful. Even the most disciplined writer can't help but betray himself or herself; we never kill all our darlings.) You can't read Russell Hoban's Kleinzeit and Riddley Walker without being impressed by how completely he revinvented himself - subject matter, voice, tone, and even orthography are all different. That's what writers should do from book to book, I think. But even Hoban suffers from this problem, as much of his opus is stamped from the same mold.
The French philosopher and historian Ernest Renan once wrote that a nation "is a group of people united by a mistaken view about the past and a hatred of its neighbors."
--Quoted in "In a Dark Time," by David Remnick, The New Yorker, March 18, 2002, p. 51.
From "Imperial Bedroom," in How to Be Alone, by Jonathan Franzen. Originally appeared in 1998.
"The novelist Richard Powers recently declared in a Times op-ed piece that privacy is a 'vanishing illusion' and that the struggle over the encryption of digital communications is therefore as 'great with consequence' as the Cold War. Powers defines 'the private' as 'that part of life that goes unregistered,' and he sees in the digital footprints we leave whenever we charge things the approach of 'that moment when each person's every living day will become a Bloomsday, recorded in complete detail and reproducible with a few deft keystrokes.' It is scary, of course, to think that the mystery of our identities might be reducible to finite data sequences. That Powers can seriously compare credit-card fraud and intercepted cell-phone calls to thermonuclear incineration, however, speaks mainly to the infectiousness of privacy panic. Where, after all, is it 'registered' what Powers or anybody else is thinking, seeing, saying, wishing, planning, dreaming, and feeling ashamed of? A digital Ulysses consisting of nothing but a list of its hero's purchases and other recordable transactions might run, at most, to four pages: was there really nothing more to Bloom's day?"
From an essay by Guy Davenport in Harper's, January 2002, p. 63:
"If Olga and Ezra [Pound] had not sought out Vivaldi's manuscripts, edited them, and, most crucially, microfilmed them, we too would not be familiar with him. Bach admired him, but after Vivaldi's death (in 1741), the world forgot him. FBI agents were the first to hear him in America in our time: the shortwave broadcasts that Pound made from Rome in World War II were preceded by Vivaldi concerti."
From "Goodness Knows Nothing of Beauty," by William Gass:
"That attachment to human life which demands that it be chosen over everything else is mostly humbug. It can be reasonably, if not decisively, argued that the world is already suffering from a surfeit of such animals; that most human beings rarely deserve the esteem some philosophers have for them; that historically humans have treated their pets better than they have treated one another; that no one is so essential he or she cannot be replaced a thousand times over; that death is inevitable anyhow; that it is our sense of community and our own identity which lead us to persist in our parochial overestimation; that it is rather a wish of philosophers than a fact that man be more important than anything else that's mortal, since nature remains mum and scarcely supports the idea, nor do the actions of man himself. Man makes a worse God than God, and when God was alive, he knew it. "
From Lost in a Good Book, by Jasper Fforde, p. 61:
"Remember, Thursday, that scientific thought, indeed, any mode of thought whether it be religious or philosophical or anything else, is just like the fashions that we wear -- only much longer-lived. It's a little like a boy band."
"Scientific thought a boy band? How do you figure that?"
"Well, every now and then a boy band comes along. We like it, buy the records, posters, parade them on TV, idolize them right up until--"
"--the next boy band?" I suggested.
"Precisely. Aristotle was a boy band. A very good one, but only number six or seven. He was the best boy band until Isaac Newton, but even Newton was transplanted by an even newer boy band. Same haircuts -- but different moves."
"Einstein, right?"
"Right. Do you see what I'm saying?"
From "Olduvai & All That," in The Aztec Treasure House: New and Collected Essays, by Evan S. Connell, p. 31:
"[Louis] Leakey, with his wife Mary, camped season after season at the edge [of Olduvai Gorge], walked down into the gorge looking for bones, and shared a water hole with various large animals. "We could never get rid of the taste of rhino urine," he said, "even after filtering the water through charcoal and boiling it and using it in tea with lemon."
See Deborah Bauer's otherwise-unremarkable "Flying Angels" in the July 2005 issue of Carve for this gem:
"Hard-edged dewy lawns and rows of begonias border the miniature tutors and Spanish-style bungalows."One wonders if the tutors are small-minded as well as tiny, and if they favor begonias --?
Don't we read fiction for robust pleasures like character, gorgeous language, and tragedy so pungent it slashes the hands? Damn right we do. Then why do writers (and editors) think they can get away with hanging a story on a gimmick?
Case in point: Theodore Ross' 920-word one-liner, "The Somalian Smokes It Up," in the July 2005 issue of Pindeldyboz. In such a short story, you wouldn't think it would take Ross three paragraphs (285 words, if you must know) to explain how the main character got nicknamed "The Somalian," but it does; and just when it appears that something's about to happen, the story flames out in a joke: having seen a beggar defecating in the open street, the Somalian concludes (in a tortured point-of-view shift), "Isn't that just the way of things in Cambodia, his home: someone always shitting on the Promised Land." Sheesh. This from an editor at Harper's. Read it yourself and tell me you're not disappointed.
Another case in point: Debra Broughton's "Colour of Friendship," appearing in the January 2005 issue of Word Riot. This time, it's a different kind of punchline, the sort used in detective fiction and spooky movies all the time: the main character is the one who committed the murder, though in this case you only realize there was a murder at the very end. --Oops, I think I gave away the ending again.
The problem, see, is that these stories aren't genre stories, where gimmicks and guessing games are part of the deal. Both of the stories I've mentioned so far are both presented as literature, and guess what, kids? A higher standard applies. A good rule of thumb is that literature is worth reading more than once. If it can only stand up to one reading (because the second time through, for example, you already know that Bruce Willis' character in Sixth Sense is actually dead), you're probably not writing literature. If your entire story relies on not telling the reader something critical -- not just the minor misdirections of any storyteller, choosing her pace and order of events; no, I mean, for example, when you showed your main character walking out on her boyfriend and you deliberately didn't tell your readers that she'd just stabbed him to death -- if your story rests on that sort of dishonesty, you should realize that your story's not going to be worth reading twice.
One last example: "Self Defense," by Michael Hartford, also in Pindeldyboz' July issue. Again, this is a different kind of one-liner, old as time: the main character, a normal, suburban dad, is provoked beyond endurance by his wife, who keeps shooting him with a squirt gun at their son's birthday party. In the story, much is made of attempts by the politically-correct to separate squirt guns from real guns (the ones in the story are made in the shape of animals, and the manufacturer calls them "squirters"). But scratch the surface, it seems, and we find humanity's primal impulses locked, loaded, and staring us in the face. Never mind that we know nothing, really, about the relationship between the husband and wife in this story - to understand the hostility they unleash, it's supposed to be enough, apparently, that she keeps criticizing his choices for the party (what food to serve, how to cook it, whether or not to give out the squirt guns) and that he keeps ignoring her.
Even if these stories were better than they are (when was the last time you read a story like "Self Defense," where a calm, ordinary day in the suburbs turns violent?), they'd still be weak, because they're designed only to shock the reader with the punch, if not the punchline. Are their characters presented with real conflicts that will, no matter the choice they make, cost them something they love? No. Are the stories distinguished by blazing language or formally challenging? No. These are easy stories to write, simple in concept and simple to execute. It's the curse of the short story form -- it's hell to write a great one, but it's easy to write one O. Henry would've been proud of. Try extending any of these for 20 pages, and they'd fall flat. Don't we all write and publish stories that fall flat? Absolutely. But let's not set our sights so dadgum low.
--Benjamin Chambers, Founding Editor
Roderick Leyland’s, “Are You Lonesome Tonight,” (Eclectica, April/May 2005) starts off with a bang:
It’s a bugger when you bungle your first brain transplant. Isn’t it? Yeah, he knows what I mean. Blood, grey matter, bone fragments… Blimey! Was I on a learning curve! That’s what they say, these days, isn’t it? Not, I’ve got it wrong; but, I’m on a curve. I know the kind of curve I prefer. Don’t you, dear? Cor, look at her blushing under the pancake. I wear pancake too, love, but I’m not one of them. No, it prevents the lights burning me out, sweetheart, and stops me looking like a corpse. Who said, That wouldn’t make any difference? You wanna come up here, son, and try yourself? Yeah, you’re very brave, down there in the dark. Big gob, small dick.This paragraph packs an awful lot into a few short sentences: it announces that the piece is going to be formally challenging, establishes the speaker as a stand-up comic, and gives him a particular sort of persona—he is vulgar and sexually aggressive, the sort of man who uses humiliation as a tool for seduction, who is able (or, more importantly, wants his audience to believe he is able) to shame a woman into bed and her boyfriend or husband into a sort of grinning acquiescence. (As for brain surgery and corpses, well—we’ll get to those later.) The stage seems set for turnabout—at some point, the reader suspects, our crude comic will get his comeuppance but good.
…she [Ronnie’s doctor] says [of the tumor], It’s the size of a pea.
I say, Get your specs on, girl. Listen: when I walk in the showers, heads turn.
Desmond, she says, it needs treating.
I say, Then give it a night on the town. What d’you reckon: limo, dinner at the Ritz, a box at the theatre and a suite in a Park Lane hotel?
…Oh yeah, that paper: New Pop Weekly. Now then, every week they print a list of the Top Sixty. Have you heard some of these?
Wanna Grapple with your Tackle, by Vicky Virago and the Vixens.
Want that Hunk in My Bunk, by Kathie Klutch and the Crampons.
You’re in my Flat, by Mick Manse and the Maisonettes.
“No, she says, I don’t want to stroke your cat. I asked for a Marmite sandwich!”
Ronnie approaches the front of the stage, almost falling into the orchestra pit, and becomes conspiratorial.
Ronnie continues to stand on the stage looking into the auditorium, waiting. The audience is attentive. People have gathered in the wings.
Silence has invaded the theatre and occupied everyone.
It went quiet, my mum was still, and I couldn’t wake her. I shook her but she just lay there, warm. They said leave her, she needs rest now, but she never woke. And that’s God’s truth.
Check out Terry Bisson's spooky little entertainment, "Super 8." Fun ride.
The best news, first: The King's English won the Million Writers Award for Best Publisher of Novella-Length Fiction, 2005. Not bad for a one-year anniversary present, eh?
Hey, but there's a heck of a lot of good fiction out there on the web, and I'd like to urge you to check some of it out. Jason Sanford of storySouth, who runs and hosts the Million Writers Award, has chosen the top ten online stories of 2004. I'm sorry to say he didn't choose the three nominees from The King's English for his finalists, but his top ten should be worth reading. (Sorry, I haven't read them, either. Can't quite convince the folks at my day job that you need me more than they do.) Read the stories and vote for your favorite.
The King's English top three novellas for 2004, in alpha order, by author:
"Wednesday,"
by A'Dora PhillipsBe sure to check 'em out!
