Browsing all articles tagged with short stories.
Monthly Short Story Winner: Story Generator
This month’s theme has many fathers and mothers. Lady_Ty who posted the Shakespeare Adaptation Generator in the Ideas Topic on the Fantasy-Faction forum, Raptori who modified it (we kept some of their choices!), ClintACK who provided the online dice roller we used, and last but not least ScarletBea and yours truly who put it together. […]
Monthly Short Story Winner: Potions and Elixirs
Outside of RPGs and adventure games, potions hadn’t been very popular until a certain professor humiliated a little wizard student lesson after lesson in his potion class. This month our entrants were to show us there is more to potions than Severus Snape, Felix Felices and Polyjuice Potion. Rules: 1. This must be prose or […]
Monthly Short Story Winner: Based On A Random Wikipedia Article
I don’t think we ever had a prompt that was so not fantasy related and so open. We were really curious about the stories this prompt would produce and the wide variety of themes: steampunk, portal, grimdark, military, parallel universe – depending on the article you got, anything was possible. Writer’s had to take the […]
Monthly Short Story Winner: Well-Known Fairy Tales from a Different Point of View
We know these stories by heart – but only from the hero’s POV. Did you ever think about the motivation and justification the big bad wolf had for eating Red Riding Hood’s Grandma? Maybe he was the good guy and we got it all wrong? Remember, the winners write history and they never picture themselves […]
Monthly Short Story Winner: Apocalypse
The Apocalypse. For real this time. And one none of the conspiracy theorists saw it coming. The world is going to end in a day. What will to happen until then? Rules: 1. This must be prose or poetry. 2. If the world’s not going to end in your story you are out 3. Prose […]
The Hammer and the Goat; The Vagrant and the City by Peter Newman
Covers count; every author knows this. Covers can make you buy books, they pose questions, raise mysteries – draw in the eye and the imagination. It is rare, however, for the cover of one book to make you buy a different book, but so it was with me this weekend. Later this month, the final […]
Monthly Short Story Winner: Nightmares
Everybody knows about nightmares, so I felt that in this case an introduction wasn’t necessary. Rules: 1. This must be prose or poetry. 2. A nightmare or nightmares must be a central part of the story 3. Prose must be 500-1500 words long. 4. Poetry must be 100-500 words long. 5. You will be disqualified […]
Monthly Short Story Winner: Fanfic
This is the third year we’ve done Fanfic February (wow, time is fleeting…). The first year you could write whatever you wanted, last year I limited the books you could choose from. And this year I want you to write a fight scene between two characters (or groups of main characters) from different authors. FitzChivalry […]
Monthly Short Story Winner: Breaking The Fourth Wall
Most of you are familiar with the term “breaking the fourth wall”. It’s mostly done in children’s books (like Grover in Sesame Street’s The Monster at the End of this Book), comics (see above) or movies (comedy movies mainly) and means usually a character becoming aware of their fictional nature, directly addressing the reader and/or […]
Slipping by Lauren Beukes
Slipping by Lauren Beukes is a collection of previously published short stories and nonfiction. Having read—and loved—two of her novels, The Shining Girls and Broken Monsters, I jumped at the chance to read this collection. Everything I liked about her novels I found here: dark and unsettling imagery, relationships forming and exploding, clever turns of […]
Ten Tips For Short Story Writing
Short stories can be great fun to write, but sometimes tough to get the knack of. For anyone who wants to try their luck at this form, I’ve come up with a list of useful tips to help you get started. 1. Keep the focus. One reason that short stories fail is the writer tries […]
Monthly Short Story Winner: Young Love
This month’s stories are about people experiencing true love (or what they believe to be love) for the first time. I know that writing about feelings – and especially love – is quite hard too but since love is an integral part of life, it was about time to try writing about it. If you […]
