I’m going to leave this right here:
Goes to show that you too can have a bestseller on Amazon if you publish in a low-volume niche category (and check routinely, because rankings are based on very short term sales trends).
Still, kinda fun.
Very fun: Nanoism, a few tiny stories, and I made an appearance in the Washington Post yesterday in an article about Twitter’s planned/rumored character-limit change.
For what it’s worth, while the type of fiction I’ve purveyed is only fun within a predominantly constrained system, for people who write Twitter fiction differently, the ability to say more probably wouldn’t be much of an issue (say, those writing in the longitudinal first person like a digital diary of someone surviving a zombie apocalypse).
Yours truly is quoted a couple of times about Twitter Fiction in Verizon Wireless Mobile Living. See “Telling a story, 140 characters at a time,” where a classic Nanoism story from 2013 also makes an appearance (#537).
My very short story “Turkey on Wheat” is back online, republished in The Story Shack with accompanying art by Hong Rui Choo.
Microliterature (“the most popular publication for acclaimed works between 1-1000 words”) has published another entry in my extremely slowly growing collection of Craigslist fiction: “1938 ‘Yosemite Landscape’ Oil Painting,” up on the front page for the next week and at the link above indefinitely.
Microliterature has been around for just over four years, and while the design has changed a bit over time, it has remained pitch perfect venue for very very short stories throughout. Back in 2012, their fine editorial team also published my story, “Did you hear about Lauren?“
The Story Shack has republished my story “You read about local politics and hate the sox” with an accompanying illustration by artist Mike Young. I love this site, and I consistently love seeing what the artists do with their assigned stories. It’s such fresh, inspiring stuff.
Six Questions For… is an interesting site: an ever-growing compilation of interviews with editors of flash fiction publications. Each interview is composed of exactly—wait for it—six questions.
Today’s six questions are with me. About Nanoism. You can read them here.
My flash piece “Memories of Life” was originally published in the now defunct BURST magazine back in 2009. Such is the circle of internet literary magazine life.
Not only has it been republished, courtesy of The Story Shack, but it’s been upgraded with a piece of artwork by Hong Rui Choo that was inspired by the story. You can find them both here.
The Story Shack is I think essentially unique in that their daily-published stories all have commissioned artwork published alongside. And not just any art—art that was crafted specifically for and because of the writing. Seeing the art was a such a thrill, and the site is full of some really amazing companion pieces. I think Rui did an awesome job with it.
I don’t write as much these days as I’d like. And until I began writing some non-fiction pieces about my experiences in medicine last year, I probably hadn’t written a personal narrative in over three years. The process is somewhat disquieting. Accuracy and authenticity and honesty and feeling can be shifting features on a zero-sum scale.
One of these pieces is called “Florence,” and it appears today in Pulse—voices from the heart of medicine, a site dedicated to creative nonfiction and poetry about health care. I get their stories in my email every week, and I actually read them, unlike the way I mean to read other stories that arrive in my mailbox but do not.
You can read it here.
Last month, Twitter—one of the patron saints of creativity—held its first ever Twitter Fiction Festival (#twitterfiction, naturally). Perhaps because Nanoism is straight-up stories and not some sort of collaborative tweetganza, my little longest-running twitter fiction magazine of all time wasn’t made an official selection. Didn’t stop me from doing a little daily themed contest in celebration of course, of which you can read the results/winners here.
Additionally, as a result of the attention on the festival, TIME Entertainment ran a nice feature on twitter fiction, which includes Nanoism as well as some choice quotes from yours truly.