Hi ho silver lining…

Hello, everyone. I have neglected my blog recently for two good reasons: firstly, I took advantage of the beautiful weather over the last three weeks or so to get out and about and to tackle the acres (seemingly) of ground elder that were choking everything except the Evening Primroses, which go from strength to strength and, secondly, the truth is I haven’t really anything interesting to say. I was waiting and hoping for a success or two (!) to report but aside from making three long lists (including Fish flash, which was very long indeed) one short list (Flash500) and having a couple more stories published on the Ether app, things have been very quiet on the writing front.

I did another, very enjoyable, stint as a selecting editor on FlashFlood and I am delighted to report that the standard was very high overall. People seem to be getting their heads round the genre at last and coming up with some very original themes and formats. There was much less misery around, too, which comes as a relief when you have over fifty pieces to read in a day! What did strike me, and I wasn’t the only editor to notice this, was how many stories were set in stations and on trains. I guess it goes to show how much time so many of us spend commuting! Not wasted time, as it turns out.

What I have done is buy an e-reader – a Nook HD. Yes, I know I wrote a piece not so long ago condemning e-readers as the devil’s work, but an offer came up that I couldn’t refuse and, I have to say, I love it and so does my husband. Even my son is impressed and he’s tried every device on the market! It was half the price of a Kindle Fire and has many more features and formats available for reading. I have been able to download both the Kindle and Ether apps via Google Play, along with iplayer and 4OD, which were too big and fast for my ancient, but trusty, Mac G4. So I’ve been buying apps and books like a madwoman, playing games and watching dance sequences on Youtube, all of which have been out of bounds until now. I have also downloaded Office Suite Professional and there is a decent keyboard, so I can even do odd bits of writing! I haven’t actually read anything on it as yet, but if the weather is as bad in Edinburgh/The Lake District next week as is threatened, it should come in very handy.

And that’s about it for now. I wish you happy reading and successful writing!

Here comes the Judge!

This week I had the pleasure of choosing a winning story from the seven shortlisted entries in Southville Writers’ first open competition. Having just submitted some hundred-word stories to a comp myself, I was eager to see what others could do in so few words. The only stipulation was that an aspect of Bristol must be mentioned somewhere along the way.

I was impressed by all the stories, particularly by the strong sense of history that permeated most of them. Although I take part in the selection of flash fiction for NFFD’s Flash Flood, this is the first time I have had to choose one story over another and, let me tell you, it isn’t easy! However, one story stood out immediately and kept its place during many subsequent readings. Those that seemed quite light — almost abstract — at first, revealed more depths and insights with each visit.

I have permission to post the winning story and the runner-up with my comments. If you’d like to read my thoughts on all the shortlisted pieces, please visit Southville Writers’ website. Congratulations to Ali and Pauline and many thanks for letting me post your great little stories on my blog!

FROM THE ARNOLFINI by Ali Bacon

The yellow boat called Blackbird beaks its way through chill and choppy waters. The crew are raw and clumsy, rowing for dear life. Crowds on the quay look once and turn away, expecting more than this as entertainment.

Watching from five floors up, we are warm, remote, content to chart its progress.

‘Look, boat,’ says the toddler on my lap.

‘Its name is Blackbird.’

‘No, yellow boat,’ he says.

A scuff of wind, a missed stroke, a wobble that goes way beyond correction.

Excitement at last.

‘Look, look! Yellow blackbird drowning.’

***

My comment:  this was the story that made me want to punch the air and shout, ‘Yes!’ From the moment the Blackbird ‘beaks’ through the water, I knew I was in safe hands. In a few words, the writer conveyed a place, an event, a relationship, the human condition, humour and pathos. The winner – I couldn’t ask for more!

Ali Bacon lives in South Gloucestershire where she reads, writes and reviews on http://alibacon.com. When she isn’t writing she knocks a small white ball round a golf course and makes strictly unserious attempts at ballroom dancing. Her debut novel A Kettle of Fish is a roller-coaster family drama set in Scotland. E-book and paperback from Amazon. A Kettle of Fish on Facebook Ali on Twitter @AliBacon

EXPECTING THE MOON TO TANGO by Pauline Masurel

“Come doon y’daft wee hinnie and dance with me!”

He brandishes the rose. She beams serenely down from lofty height. Her silvery-blue skirts shine bright against dim expectations of the sky. He shakes off his donkey jacket, slips fleetly across Castle Green, smooching frost-spangled silence in the crook of his arm.

One of these nights she will though, you can tell. She gazes longingly at dented snow. She’d love to dance, really she would, and after a sniff or two of whisky he’s the only man alive who knows her secret.

“Don’t be shy lassie,” he croons, “I’ll nae tell.”

***

My comment: I loved this story, for the sharply visual nature of the writing and a peep inside the imagination of a joyful drunk. This was my runner-up because, although I enjoyed the beautifully rendered Scottish dialect, a more local accent would have placed the piece more firmly in the area.

Pauline Masurel lives in the rural borderlands of Bristol. She is a gardener who writes short and very short fiction. She often performs her work in the Bristol and Bath areas. There’s more about her writing on her website http://www.unfurling.net and you can find her on Twitter @unfurlingnet.

If anyone is based in the Bristol area and would like to join the group, visit their website or pop along to one of their very friendly events. There’s one coming up on 16th April and yours truly will be there.

Naughty, naughty…

(N,n) N stands for nipples, norks and nightie. And nylon stockings. It also stands for No, and is therefore used by the Catholic Church as a symbol of guilt and abstinence. There is no N in “priest”, which should come as no surprise, really, although there are two in “nine-year-old choirboy”.

Nelderick (n): A specially scooped golf club used for the violent removal of the brains of golfing fashion designers. It looks a little like a proil or an ice-cream scoop on a long and really whippy metal stick. The golfing fashion designer is tied to a ceremonial stake, and is struck in the face as hard as is humanly possible with the nelderick. The resulting mess is often spectacular, and forms a pattern which is then used as a design base for the clothing of women whose husbands spend most of their waking lives on golf courses aspiring to look like Payne Stewart did.

Nirtle (n, zool.): The shell opening through which a turtle sticks its head, or through which it withdraws its head when threatened. In desperate times, Pacific islanders have been known to use the nirtles of extremely scared turtles for sexual congress, although it should be remembered that the turtle has quite a sharp and often poisonous bite, and a screaming Pacific island man running around with a turtle’s shell hanging from his penis should receive immediate medical attention. Polynesian island females found favour with the French artist Paul Gauguin by their ability to suck turtle poison from the wounds of extremely aroused tourists, although it is possible that Gauguin was only pretending a turtle had bitten him.

Noosh (exclam): A word that entered the English language after a series of TV advertisements for Clarks Shoes. The catch-line, ‘New shoes?’ became the response of the male partner each time he found his own meagre section of closet space invaded by another pair of ridiculously expensive and impractical barbie-boots. At a certain stage in this relentless encroachment, the male is unable to utter the full phrase. ‘Noosh?’ accompanied by clenched fists, a boiled complexion and projectile spittle is a warning to the female partner to regulate her acquisitions or find a new benefactor.

Norgleflass (n): The feeling of barely concealed glee you feel when there’s a major fucking hippie bastard festival on just down the road and it starts absolutely wankering down with rain on Friday and the weatherman says it’s not going to stop until Monday, with associated gale force winds, hail, thunder, flooding and an unseasonable chill, and you know they’ll be dragging dreadlocked corpses and skinny dogs on strings out of the nearest estuary from now until next spring. The word dates back to the Norgleflass Festival in Denmark in 1975, at which three members of the Grateful Dead’s road crew drowned and nobody noticed until fourteen hippies all claimed their identities on payday.

Much naughtier Ns can be found in Hand-Knitted Electricity for a modest sum.

Mmmmmm…

(M,m) M stands for Marshall Mathers (Eminem), and for Milo Minderbinder (M & M Enterprises off of Catch-22). As such, M is a controversial letter, frequently bugged by the FBI and demonstrated against by women and the poor. The government recently introduced a range of sweets called M&Ms in an effort to dilute the anarchy associated with the letter, backdating their “history” to the 1930s in a dangerously Orwellian piece of popular culture reinvention which had conspiracy theorists all in a tizzy. Blue M&Ms were banned as they contained a mixture of nutra-ceramides and LSD, and Steve Tyler off of Aerosmith refuses to eat brown ones.

Marzely (adj): Descriptive of the feeling resulting from eating one too many deep fried Mars Bars

Hugh McBride had much call to regret his choice of snack, for he instantly felt marzely and within moments had vomited onto the chaise longe.

- Sir Walter Scott, Heart of Midlothian.

Meffulence n. the ability to subvert any topic of conversation to talking about oneself. For example, in a discussion about whether the Beatles or the Rolling Stones were more influential in rock music the meffulent will say something like, “Well, I never liked the Stones much. And with good reason. Had a stone in my shoe last week and it tore a huge hole in my tights.”

Mimp:

1 (n): A mime artist with stage fright

2 (n, prop): The real name of the high priest of the Illuminati known in Australia as dwiw

Misanthemum (n): A homicidal pot plant

Morbel (n): An unusually pretty female whose beauty is only skin deep. She has a destructive – even malign – personality, and long periods spent in her company can result in serious mental health issues and/or death. Most men have a morbel or two lurking somewhere in their past, and most men carry permanent emotional scarring because of them. The world’s most famous morbel is probably Monica Lewinsky.

Many More Ms can be found in Hand-Knitted Electricity (A Dictionary of Linguistic Absurdities).

L-O-L!

(L,l) A letter extremely popular with the Welsh and in Catalan regions of north-east Spain. It is believed that the letter was invented by Salvador Dali in 1931 to set him apart from Welsh people called Dai, but the invention resulted in a fistfight between Dali and Picasso, which eventually led to the Spanish Civil War

Linidinian (n, mus.) The technical name for the little drum roll and cymbal bash used to emphasise the punch lines of really bad comedians who are desperately attempting to hold the attention of a stag party crowd as they wait for the stripper.

Lockstormworthy 

1 (adj): Descriptive of a tornado-belt trailer-caravan which has been rendered stormproof by virtue of having been pre-destroyed before building. The trailer is constructed in the form of a half-mile trail of debris, and it’s inhabitants, Bud, LaDestiny and the twins, Bubba and Bubba, are then humanely destroyed and reported missing. The saving in food stamps, welfare payments and rehousing costs can then be pumped back into society and given back to the banks for re-investment. For more details, see the Wicked Witch Trading Company Inc website at We’reNotInKansasAnymore.com.

2 (n): An ecologically sound chastity belt, lightweight and biodegradable, yet capable of withstanding assault by an entire battalion of stormtroopers.

Lychinhampton (n, prop): A botanical garden just a short walk away from Kew which is less well-known because it produces only rude and disgusting fruit and vegetables and as such entry is restricted to the over-18s.

The Lychinhampton courgette-and-double-artichoke combination can be found next to the enormous pear and the gigantic set of melons. Lychinhampton Bananas are trained to grow straight and maintain an angle that juts a little above the horizontal. They are situated next to the burst figs. Cucumbers dangle among the soft peaches, and there are private cubicles available to couples who become overwhelmed with the whole Carry On Nature thing.

Lychinhampton also holds unofficial dogging evenings in the car park (First and third Tuesdays – in the summerhouse if wet).

NB. From now on, extracts will be posted weekly. If you can’t wait that long, you can get ahead of the crowds by buying Hand-Knitted Electricity. Don’t forget to buy a spare copy for the birthday you always forget until it’s too late. Or for Mother’s Day, 10th March. Don’t get caught with your pants down again this year!

Special K

(K,k) K is an insidious letter, often used to give some innocent sounding word overtones of Eastern European totalitarianism – see atomik, Amerika, Kalifornia and Ku Klux Klan. Children in the UK are not allowed to use the letter K until secondary school.  A campaign was instigated by Senator Eugene McCarthy in the late 1950s to banish the letter from the alphabet for being un-American, but the plan was quietly shelved after McCarthy was discovered stamping on kittens in the Ambassador suite of the Riot Hyatt in Los Angeles during the gubernatorial primaries just after Labour Day 1962.

 

Ker-Splunk (n, prop): A game popular in modern dogging circles. The idea is that a group of gentlemen drop their car keys into a bowl of fresh semen and their wives fish them out one at a time with their teeth. Whoever owns the car keys then has to lick the woman’s face clean before driving home alone and in tears. The game was first popularised in Eighteenth century Austria, where, under the auspices of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, rich members of the gentry were encouraged to drop their horse-bridles into barrels of tepid semolina and their wives were ordered to fish them out using only their mouths. The unfortunate owner of the horse was then forced to watch while someone else rode his wife home instead.

Kleap (n, prop): A combined toilet and bidet, invented in 1877 by Klaus Kleap of Hamburg. The system pumped water upwards after receiving a deposit, therefore cleaning the user’s behind, but went disastrously wrong when the prototype was demonstrated at the Klingerhöfen Science Festival. Unfortunately it pumped the raw sewage back up the anus of Count Otto Von Strumm, who had volunteered for the demonstration. After several months of recuperation the Count recovered but was forever after referred to as being “full of shit”. Kleap retired from inventing in disgrace and died in poverty some years later.

Want more? Get it here.

Jumping Jehosephat, it’s J!

 

(J,j) An underused letter, except by JK Rowling, who often uses it when signing autographs or dedicating books to little girls who will love her forever because of it. This letter scores eight points in Scrabble, and is therefore popular with linguists who can slap in onto the front of “Ocular” when there’s a spare triple word score space available at the board’s top left-hand corner, especially if they can spell out “Jonquil” going the other way.

Jaff (n): A musician who everyone thinks is cool and hip when he’s really so out of it he can’t even think. Named after Herman Jaff (1928-78) the German jazz bassist who set the world record for the longest pause during a a solo, of 4 hours 23 minutes, until someone noticed he had actually slipped into a coma.

Jarve (n): An indeterminate hybrid dance favoured by those who can’t hear a beat or move in a rhythmic fashion. It consists largely of bouncing up and down and wildly swinging a partner’s arms so that everyone within six feet gets elbowed, kicked or knocked over. Jarvers aren’t popular on the dance circuit, being oblivious to any nuisance or injury they are inflicting. Even Morris enthusiasts can’t stand them, and that’s saying something.

Jassern 

1 (vb): To deliberately misspell your offspring’s name in a vain attempt to look cool. See children’s author Stephenie Meyer or Big Brother contestant Sezer (pron. Caesar). The word jassern derives from the original name of Jason Donovan, who was originally christened Jassern Donervan by his father, a semi-literate Australian mobile fast-food vendor. This level of intelligence was soon passed on to British reality TV stars. Jade Goody’s mother, Jackiey, when asked whether to spell her name with an IE or a Y, replied: “boaf. Nyaaaaaaaa-haaa-haaaha-haaar!”, thereby lowering the UK’s overall cultural quotient significantly in only a few seconds.

2 (n): A musical style much favoured by middle-aged air guitarists.

Jephlery (n): The practice of naming a child, or spelling its name differently, to sound posh. Thus ‘Jeffrey’ or ‘Geoffrey’ would be spelt ‘Jephrey’ and ‘Karen’ might be spelt ‘Caren’ and pronounced ‘Car-run’. The opposite of Jassern.

The first person to guess which letter comes next will win the chance to buy a copy of Hand-Knitted Electricity.