Flash Fiction : Light Years (16/100)

... Earth? ...








Light Years is a work of flash fiction. In fact it is the slowest piece of flash-fiction ever written. In real-time its one hundred words would take exactly 10,000 years to recount. Because of the limitations of a normal human life-span, it has been specially accelerated to the speed of one word per week. It will therefore take just under two years to tell from start to finish.

For a full history of the transmissions, click here.

Christmas Book Quiz - Win a Copy of How Fiction Works

It's competition time! Up for grabs over the Christmas period : a copy of James Wood's How Fiction Works, an excellent little book that I read and reviewed a while back. Here's what I thought about it :

I enjoyed How Fiction Works very much. It isn’t actually intended to be a guide for writers at all. It does explore the techniques writers use to conjure up effective fictional worlds but is mainly aimed at readers. Nevertheless, I think writers can take a lot from it ... this is certainly a book to dip into again and again. It is emphatically not a “How to Write” guide; it is more of a “How Others Have Written.” And it’s all the better for it.

To win it, you'll need to email the answers to the following bookish questions to quiz@simonkewin.co.uk. Also, I'm asking that you are signed up as a follower of my blog (by clicking on the Follow button on any of my blog posts). This is a completely free and painless process. I'm not going to send you messages or hassle you in any way. It just makes me feel more loved.

Please include your snail-mail address so I can send you the book if you win. I'll pay the postage but I'm not responsible for any additional taxes or import duties that may be levied once I've sent the book off. I absolutely guarantee not to pass on any of your contact details to another living soul. But if you don't want to send your address and just want to enter for pleasure, that's fine. Entries are to reach me by midday (GMT) on January 1st 2010. If there's a tie, I'll pick a winner at random. Judge's decision is final. If I've got anything wrong then, meh, it's just a bit of fun!


So, onto the questions :

1. How many ghosts visited Ebenezer Scrooge on Christmas Eve in Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol?
   
2. In which poem is there a "rough beast" that "slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?"
   
3. A person holds 66 books in their hands. They put one book down. Now they are holding no books at all. What book was it they put down?
4. Find a verbal connection between Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes,  Pied Beauty by Gerard Manley Hopkins and Ludd-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees.
   
5. Which book did the American critic Edmund Wilson famously describe as "long-winded balderdash"?
6. Which Victorian novel ends with the words "He was withered, wrinkled, and loathsome of visage. It was not till they had examined the rings that they recognized who it was"? 
7. Which novel contains these lines in a poetic preface : "And, gentle reader, you as well / The fountainhead of all remittance. / Buy me before good sense insists / You'll strain your purse and sprain your wrists."
8. In which Shakespeare play do Sir Toby Belch and Sir Andrew Aguecheek appear?
   
9. Who lived in the house at Pooh Corner in the A. A. Milne story?
   
10. What was the sequel to Arthur C. Clarke's 2001 : A Space Odyssey?

Best of luck! And Merry Christmas to one and all.

Flash Fiction : Light Years (15/100)

... hope. ...








Light Years is a work of flash fiction. In fact it is the slowest piece of flash-fiction ever written. In real-time its one hundred words would take exactly 10,000 years to recount. Because of the limitations of a normal human life-span, it has been specially accelerated to the speed of one word per week. It will therefore take just under two years to tell from start to finish.

For a full history of the transmissions, click here.

Flash Fiction : Light Years (14/100)

... No ...








Light Years is a work of flash fiction. In fact it is the slowest piece of flash-fiction ever written. In real-time its one hundred words would take exactly 10,000 years to recount. Because of the limitations of a normal human life-span, it has been specially accelerated to the speed of one word per week. It will therefore take just under two years to tell from start to finish.

For a full history of the transmissions, click here.

The Year In Review

Inspired by this post on the many-splendoured Musings of a Penniless Writer blog, I thought now would be a good time to write my own version of one of those year-in-review pieces that fill up newspapers and TV schedules this time of year.

But first I'd like to thank each and every person who has followed me this year. I really, really appreciate it. Sometimes, when it seems like the writing is going nowhere, and the world is indifferent, the arrival of a new follower, or the simple posting of a comment on a blog post, is like a beam of sunlight. No, really, it is. So, thanks again. Here, have a mince pie, please.

So, let's have a look at what happened in 2009 :

• I had two short stories and two poems published by magazines. Two more short stories were accepted for publication in 2010.

• I won some chocolate in Nicola Morgan's Hallowe'en flash fiction competition. This triumph was tempered only slightly by the prize getting lost in the post. I like to think it found a good home ...

• I got my BA in literature from the Open University. Oh, wait, I promised to stop going on about that.

• Prior to this one, I wrote exactly 100 posts on this blog.

• There have been exactly 100 comments on those 100 blog entries. Spooky!

• I now have 18 blog followers, 15 of whom came on board in 2009. I can see from Feedburner that the actual number of regular readers is higher. Thank you, thank you again!

• So far I've had 3,500 hits on my blog this year. My blogger profile was looked at 360 times. I really should put more work into what I've written there.
  

• I discovered Twitter. I've posted 128 tweets so far and currently have 69 followers. Thank you, thank you to you too!
  

• I won one blog award.

• I did a great deal of work on Engn, my current WIP and also on various short stories and poems.
  

• I wrote 7 articles for dailywritingtips.com, where I'm a staff writer.

• I drank a lot of coffee.

So, onwards and upwards. 2010 is just around the corner. Merry Christmas and a prosperous new year to you all.

Flash Fiction : Light Years (13/100)

... vacuum. ...








Light Years is a work of flash fiction. In fact it is the slowest piece of flash-fiction ever written. In real-time its one hundred words would take exactly 10,000 years to recount. Because of the limitations of a normal human life-span, it has been specially accelerated to the speed of one word per week. It will therefore take just under two years to tell from start to finish.

For a full history of the transmissions, click here.

Book Review : Tales from Earthsea by Ursula Le Guin

Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea novels were a source of pure delight when I first discoverd them as a boy. Earthsea lay somewhere between Narnia and Middle Earth in the geography of my mind, a place of magic, terror, beauty and wisdom. I loved all these worlds (although rereading Narnia recently was a disappointment), but it was Le Guin, I think, that had the greatest effect on me. Years later, when I started writing, it was Earthsea that I sailed closest to. Le Guin's work affects me in ways I'm not even aware of. Even down to the use of individual words that I've "made up" only to find that Le Guin thought them up decades ago.

Tales from Earthsea is a collection of short stories - novellas really - set in Le Guin's fantasy world. Various events from the whole history of Earthsea are dramatized. Thus we get the story of Ogion's taming of the Gont earthquake in The Bones of the Earth, events merely alluded to in A Wizard of Earthsea published some thirty-four years earlier. In On the High Marsh, Ged himself turns up, like a long-lost friend.

I was struck, as I was reading the stories, that the wizards in Le Guin can be read as metaphors for writers. It isn't just the way they tend to live in poverty, devoted to their arts. It's more to so with the way they spend their lives searching out and understanding the language of "true speech" : the words of power that allow the world to be understood, identified, manipulated. If you know the true name for something you have power over it, like a writer capturing the essence of something with the perfect word or phrase. Both wizard and writer conjure up believable illusions by using the correct words. Writers, as it were, as spellers, spellmakers. Whether this is deliberate on Le Guin's part I have no idea.

Always, Le Guin's writing is profoundly human, in the widest sense of the term. Everything that people are capable of, good and bad, glorious and horrific, is described. This is literature that is also fantasy : far, far removed from the "commodified fantasy" churned out by the "mills of capitalism" she describes in the introduction. It deserves the widest readership. Le Guin has won numerous "genre" awards for her writing over the years, but never the Booker or the Nobel. It's a strange world.

Tales from Earthsea