Halloween Contest Winners
October 31, 2010
Halloween Contest Winner:
Armies of misshapen children, plastic faces, plastic wings, plastic bags. Kneeling, we pray the door will hold. The candy bowl is empty.
Stephen V. Ramey
Honorable Mentions:
The worst of it was he’d had his heart-attack riding the ghost train. Now, however much he wailed and screamed, no-one took him seriously.
Simon Kewin
They crawl inside, rise, stand erect at the foot of Jimmy’s bed. Roach relatives of the squashed mess he left outside, hungry for vengeance.
Milo Fowler
October 30: Stephen V. Ramey
October 30, 2010
Drunken gods battle, lightning meets lightning, death rays collide. One universe born, another destroyed, testament to hops and barley.
Stephen V. Ramey @svramey writes wrongs at the New Castle. Find his blog at http://stephenvramey.wordpress.com
October 28: Stephen V. Ramey
October 28, 2010
Protons collided at light speed, producing showers of hadrons, antimatter, even Higgs. A Little Bang on God’s door. She was not amused.
Stephen V. Ramey @svramey writes wrongs at the New Castle. Find his blog at http://stephenvramey.wordpress.com
October 26: Stephen V. Ramey
October 26, 2010
The doctor’s graceful fingers unwind bandages from my son’s head. No wedding band. I smile. This has been a delicate operation for us all.
Stephen V. Ramey @svramey writes wrongs at the New Castle. Find his blog at http://stephenvramey.wordpress.com
Author Showcase: Stephen Ramey
October 26, 2010
Stephen V. Ramey @svramey writes wrongs at the New Castle. Find his blog at http://stephenvramey.wordpress.com. His work has appeared in trapeze magazine on multiple occasions. To conclude October, he has agreed to share his thoughts on twitter fiction.
tm: Tell us a little about your writing style and how you construct a story.
SR: Sometimes it begins with an image, more often with a sentence flashing through my thoughts. The challenge then becomes adding a sense of movement to the piece. Sometimes this means inverting the inciting image in some way, other times it’s a matter of thinking in plot terms: beginning, middle, end. On occasion, I will find an evocative line in a short story I’ve written and lay that out on the twitter table for dissection. For every twitter story I place, there are two or three that do not work out. One thing I do religiously is revise. I don’t think a single twitter story has gone out without at least three or four wording rearrangements, word substitutions, or complete rewrites. The first attempt is usually NOT genius, in my experience, though it often contains a grain of something worth pursuing.
tm: What made you decide to start writing twitter fiction?
SR: Failure. I took a course in flash fiction writing from the good folks at Flash Me Magazine. One of the exercises was to write three twitter fictions. I failed miserably. No one understood them, no one felt moved by them, and no one had constructive criticism for making them stronger. Since I don’t like failing, I kept trying…and trying…and trying. Ironically, I’ve since placed two of these three twitter stories with respected markets, but it was a desire to overcome failure that pushed me to that end. Nowadays, I mainly write twitter fiction as a diversion from larger projects. I love the challenge of the process. Compressing a story experience into 140 characters? How cool is that?
tm: What is the difference between “genred” fiction and “literary” fiction?
SR: In the simplest terms, literary twitter strives for a sense of emotional resonance, while genre twitter seeks to invert or expose an idea. Many strong twitter stories are crafted in the gray area between these poles. My work tends toward the genre end of the spectrum, but I do try to incorporate a literary sensibility. I still recall reading an article in Writers Digest many years ago advising writers to pay attention to rhythms in their prose. That opened my eyes to an entire new dimension and I’ve not been the same writer since. I also read an interview with William Gibson, and his assertion that his gift to genre was to bring literary technique to science fictional idea. I found that encouraging. I guess you could call me transgenred, a literary soul trapped within a genre thought process.
tm: What is your favorite genre to write in twitter?
SR: Horror is easiest, because it’s fairly easy to bludgeon dark sap from an innocent root. I find Science Fiction most challenging because I’m not really an idea guy by nature. Consequently, Science Fiction is my favorite genre to attempt, because I fail so often.
October 23: Aaron Rudolph
October 23, 2010
Gopol never asked to be born into a bi-species family and he/she never asked for his/her mother to put angl-mak sauce on a hamburger.
Aaron Rudolph writes poetry and micro fiction. He wishes he was an astronaut.
October 21: Richard H. Fay
October 21, 2010
moonlit moor / hoof beats thunder / dead huntsmen ride
Richard H. Fay @RHFay is a poet, artist, and fan of spooky things. His musings can be found at http://azurelionproductions.blogspot.com/
October 19: Mike Donoghue
October 19, 2010
Ed changed into a tough man’s man. Treated women as ladies. Lip off to him and he’d split it. But to me — he’d always be my little sister.
Mike @mpdonoghue mostly lives in his head, but resides in Vancouver.
October 16: Andrew Gorman
October 16, 2010
The poltergeist tossed my belongings off my shelf, hitting me square in the nose. I threw them back. It ended better than my marriage.
Andrew Gorman @Commonfright is a writer from a small town in Massachusetts.
October 14: Varenjka B
October 14, 2010
Snow crunched as they entered the cemetery. Stars glittered. She felt safe with Ivan. Leaned in to kiss. He gripped, “Fresh blood, Master!”
Varenjka B @Elixir_V thinks translating poetry is like describing the Mona Lisa to a blind man. It can be done, but it’s just not the same
