A flash of brilliance…

I’d never heard of flash fiction before I joined an online writing group (the much-missed workshop section of East of the Web, back in 2005). I soon learned that it was the backbone of online publishing, the length and style most sought and, as a result, the hardest to do well. Whatever you believe to be the optimum length and structure, the more one reads the more obvious it becomes that it the best flash pieces rely on luring the reader in, setting up certain expectations and then reversing or twisting the result, all in a few hundred words.

Every now and then one comes along that leaves a lasting impression; you keep going back to it, admiring how well it worked. The unfortunate thing is that, with so many writers contributing to so many blogs and e-zines, even a good one can disappear from view too quickly.

Do yourself a favour and check out Extinguished by Laurita Miller, posted on her Brain Droppings blog a few weeks ago. To me, and the other thirty people who’ve left comments, it has everything: a great voice, setting, mood and a killer ending.

Erin Cole's Countdown to Halloween

This should be fun! Erin Cole, on her Listen to the Voices blog, is hosting a series of 13 horror stories by different authors from the 19th of October through to Halloween.

The first story, Michael J. Solender’s Orange Dot, will have you seeing spots in front of your eyes. And your mailbox…

Richard Ridyard & Stolen Words

What a good thing Adam had. When he said a good thing, he knew nobody had said it before. ~ Mark Twain

A rather nasty case of repeated, blatant plagiarism has turned up on the net, exposed by prolific (by my standards!) US writer and fellow 6S denizen Angel Zapata. Full details are here, on his blog.

The perpetrator's name, Richard Ridyard, appears to be stolen as well, being the name of the former editor and director of the South Yorkshire Times, who died in 2003 at the age of 88.

Apart from anything else, it’s a good read, beginning with Angel’s preparedness to be understanding:

“Initially, I was taken aback. Could someone have stolen my work? Is it a case of unconscious plagiarism? Maybe the author really liked my work and wanted to do something similar. I was upset and dumbfounded. I decided more research was required.

What I found was frightening.”

And it is…

Not only was this person stealing from his fellow online authors, mostly in the horror genre, but from established writers like Stephen King and H.P. Lovecraft.

The accused author's stories are being pulled from online sites with a haste which attests to how seriously publishers are prepared to take this issue. Good on them.

Look for the girl with the sun in her eyes, and she's gone.

The Beatles' 'Lucy in the sky' dies
September 29, 2009 - 7:24AM


The woman who inspired The Beatles' legendary song Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds has died aged 46 from an autoimmune disease, the charity that supported her has announced.

Lucy O'Donnell was at school with John Lennon's son, Julian, when she was three and it was his picture of her in 1966 that inspired the classic song.

According to various biographies of The Beatles and O'Donnell herself, the young Julian took the picture home to his father and explained: "It's Lucy in the sky with diamonds."

The song, which featured on the Fab Four's 1967 album Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, caused huge controversy at the time because of its psychedelic theme and supposed reference to the drug LSD though its initials, a charge always denied as pure coincidence by the songwriter Lennon.

Julian Lennon and O'Donnell - who became Lucy Vodden after her marriage - resumed their friendship in recent months after she became ill with lupus, the disease of the immune system that led to her death last Tuesday.

"Everyone at the Louise Coote Lupus Unit was dreadfully shocked by the death of Lucy," said Angie Davidson, campaign director of the St Thomas Lupus Trust that helped Vodden during her illness.

"She was a great supporter of ours and a real fighter. It's so sad that she has finally lost the battle she fought so bravely for so long."

The trust added that Lennon and his mother Cynthia were "shocked and saddened" by Vodden's death. -- AFP

Goodbye, and thank you...

Mary Travers

Ellie Greenwich

Patrick Swayze

Henry Gibson

Jim Carroll has died, died…

Actually, he died on September 11, ensuring that those who recall his work will never forget his day of passing. And yes, I know everyone’s using that “People Who Died” joke, but it seems appropriate; the song was about the staggering number of his friends who had suffered early and violent deaths, and now… hopefully he is with his friends. If we could be certain this was to be our fate, Death would hold no terrors.

You’ll find his NY Times Obit here. I never thought of his music as “punk” – I always thought punk’s blank nihilism devalued it too much, and The Jim Carroll Band was anything but blank. Here was a man whose output was so exciting and provocative that Andy Warhol and Keith Richard sought him out. I played those records a lot back then, never could part with them.

I must admit I’m not closely acquainted with his written output; I guess I’ll find my copy of Basketball Diaries when I unpack the twenty or so boxes of books still languishing in the garage after our last move. But I spent a bit of time today checking out some of his poetry and writings on the ‘net, and it was a good way to pass some time. He was hailed as a great by no less than Alan Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and Patti Smith, which makes him an artist’s artist – they are the ones you need to read, so go Google-cruising if you don’t know his work and you may be pleasantly surprised.

And put his music on while you do…

Shot Glass Stories and other Monday stuff.

Sophie Playle, a fellow denizen of Critters Bar, recently got it into her head that it would be a good idea to publish a selection of 200 word stories culled from the weekly challenge that we have been holding on our little workshop site for a couple of years now. As it turns out, she was right (well, we think so anyway) and the result is Shot Glass Stories, a compendium of short stories told in (or within) two hundred words.



You can get it as a free download here on Lulu, or if you like the old-fashioned feel of a book in your hands and print in front of your eyes, you can buy a copy for a very modest price.

If you’d like to spend a few minutes reading a fine piece of writing that will stay with you, read this wonderful story , by Quin Browne, a capital writer who rarely uses them, and who makes Six Sentences a place I should really get back to more often. That old thing about Time speeding up as your life unspools…? It’s true.

And now, because I’ve had this song stuck in my head for days…

The Scariest Graph You'll Ever See...

In 1983, 50 corporations controlled the vast majority of all news media in the U.S. At the time, Ben Bagdikian was called "alarmist" for pointing this out in his book, The Media Monopoly. In his 4th edition, published in 1992, he wrote "in the U.S., fewer than two dozen of these extraordinary creatures own and operate 90% of the mass media" -- controlling almost all of America's newspapers, magazines, TV and radio stations, books, records, movies, videos, wire services and photo agencies. He predicted then that eventually this number would fall to about half a dozen companies.

This was greeted with skepticism at the time. When the 6th edition of The Media Monopoly was published in 2000, the number had fallen to six. Since then, there have been more mergers and the scope has expanded to include new media like the Internet market. More than 1 in 4 Internet users in the U.S. now log in with AOL Time-Warner, the world's largest media corporation.

In 2004, Bagdikian's revised and expanded book, The New Media Monopoly, shows that only 5 huge corporations -- Time Warner, Disney, Murdoch's News Corporation, Bertelsmann of Germany, and Viacom (formerly CBS) -- now control most of the media industry in the U.S. General Electric's NBC is a close sixth.

--Media Reform Information Center, Links and Resources on Media Reform

(Borrowed from an article on The Existentialist Cowboy's site.)

Writers and Restraints (or, Badinage and Discipline.)

I often worry a bit that we writers who frequent those odd dens of insecurity called workshops sometimes demand too much adherence to “rules” – fair enough, to learn and know them is important, and to be aware of what certain editors demand is wise, but quite honestly I think we’re making a rod for our own backs (cliché, sorry) if we run every single phrase through the mill of correctness.

No other expressive art form (music, sculpture, visual arts) demands such rigid subservience to a set of rules that are sometimes arbitrary, often archaic and frequently ill-defined.

A fellow writer, who I know from several workshop sites, and whose work I like and respect, has become almost fanatical in his loathing of adjectives and adverbs, ruthlessly hunting them down and strongly suggesting their removal. He is in some writing workshop where, apparently, all members are being taught to write “properly” and “expressively” and where, I imagine, they will all end up sounding alike.

Obviously, some adherence to the rules of grammar is advisable in order to avoid confusion and to convey ideas with clarity, and I wouldn’t respect anyone who claims to be a master of their craft while maintaining an almost total ignorance of the tools of their trade, but life is messy and often that’s the most truthful way to write about it. My advice is – write clearly, write honestly and write humanely; everything else is dress rules for the madhouse.

Monday Morning "Look What I Found On YouTube" Segment…

Okay, so John Scalzi and other people found them, after other people found them, but they helped steel me for the week ahead.

Supernatural Presents Jensen Ackles

(Actually this isn't off YT - they didn't allow embedding)