I am very excited about the piece I wrote for the writing contest that the publishers at Alpha Wolf are throwing for the Short Story Collection to be published... I want to say March, but don't hold me to it. As I've said in the past I feel the art of the short story is dying an I very much want it to be revived.

I remember reading in Literature class the works of O. Henry, Poe, Exuprey, Dahl and begging God Himself to let me write like that! Now I'm not saying that I don't adore Lewis, Moore, Hawthorne because I genuinely do. How ever it seems harder to me to evoke an emotion with less of a word count then it does with a novel. To me it makes it more powerful.

Take Dahl's Lamb to the Slaughter for instance. In the story he depicts a killer's reaction to finding out her husband has been unfaithful. While we as a society know that murder is wrong, we also feel that justice is not. In this way he gets us rooting for the killer and then blindsides us with a surprise ending. Yet the story itself I believe was less than 3 pages in its entirety. Very hard to do.

In contrast when Tellez write of his barber in Lather and Nothing Else in less then 10 pages we are practically begging the main character not to spill the blood of a man we well know deserves it.

The art of the short story is basically evoking every human emotion in as few words as possible and in a few scenes making it all make sense to the reader. This is no easy task. In example Hurst's The Scarlet Ibis shows us a handi-capped boy and how meaningless the child seems to those around him, yet in death the child is nearly all-powerful. His death brings meaning to those around him and colors everything in the author's world and sequentially the readers world.

I write micro-minis. I get 3 pages or less to do all of that! Do you think I need a raise? (LOL)

That's my side of it,

Angel xxoo