Writing: it’s a funny business. Until Tuesday I’d never heard of 13-word stories and knew nothing about Granta magazine’s competition on Twitter. Ridiculous, I thought, no way could you write a story in thirteen words! And even if you could, why bother? Much the same as you do when you hear about a haiku or a tanka or a short-short story for the first time. I ended up entering more than 10 13-worders. I don’t write horror stories and I read very little of it these days. But one of my stories was published in The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror, so it would be churlish of me to denigrate it as a genre. I put neither much time nor effort into my first entry, inspired by a phenomenon on Twitter where my followers were all suddenly replaced with an error message. When they returned I looked at what some of the other competitors were entering and decided it looked like fun. I turned my thoughts into a tweet, as I’ve done more than 7000 times before, double-checked the word count and off I went. (Image: Granta’s horror issue.)

“The secret of fortune is joy in our hands.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson

If you could picture your intuition as a person, what would he or she look like? If you sat down together for dinner, what is the first thing he or she would tell you?

(Author: Susan Piver)

“If there’s one thing I can’t stand it’s people telling me they know what I’m thinking.” A short-short inspired by the prompt.

‘“Hey, Nigel!” Kev shouted. “We’re going on a boat-trip.” He was already at the gangplank.’

What happens when three drinkers take an impromptu boat trip? And why are the other day-trippers so relieved to get back to port? The title of this e-book comes from a reference in the introduction to Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim, and a quotation from Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. JP Donleavy’s A Fairy Tale of New York also gets a mention.

Get Port After Stormy Seas on your Kindle, PC or iPad for US$0.99 – less than you pay for the coffee you drink while you’re reading it. A link and short extract follow the jump.

“If we live truly, we shall see truly.” Ralph Waldo Emerson

Not everyone wants to travel the world, but most people can identify at least one place in the world they’d like to visit before they die. Where is that place for you, and what will you do to make sure you get there?

(Author: Chris Guillebeau)

Identify one of your biggest challenges at the moment (e.g. I don’t feel passionate about my work) and turn it into a question (e.g. How can I do work I’m passionate about?). Write it on a Post-It and put it up on your bathroom mirror or the back of your front door. After 48 hours, journal what answers came up for you and be sure to evaluate them.

Bonus: tweet or blog a photo of your post-it.

(Author: Jenny Blake)

“We are afraid of truth, afraid of fortune, afraid of death, and afraid of each other. Our age yields no great and perfect persons.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson

You just discovered you have fifteen minutes to live.

1. Set a timer for fifteen minutes.
2. Write the story that has to be written.

(Author: Gwen Bell – no relation, as far as I am aware.)

My ‘story that has to be written’ follows.

As I said in my previous post, music often plays a role in creating conditions conducive to writing. Just to recap, my criteria for great music to write by are: 1. It has to be more than wallpaper, should enhance your mood while not distracting you from the task at hand. 2. It should engender a mood of anticipation; filled with possibilities, not the intimidation that makes a blank page seem bigger and scarier than the potential it holds. 3. There should be an underlying, bristling electricity that hints at anything-could-happen. You’re seeking an inner tranquillity and an outward tingling; a 3 o’clock in the morning feeling that shifts your mind up a gear.

I’m reviewing another oldie this time, Brian Eno and Harold Budd’s 1984 recording The Pearl. An interval of 27 years between its release and my review seems about right, although it sounds fresh enough to have been recorded yesterday.

Sometimes we walk through the world so full of our own troubles that we don’t even see the world around us. Not even when it includes mangroves and snapping shrimps.

This short-short was inspired by a vintage advertisement for a product which, as far as I know, is sadly no longer available.

Even Timo can see this is a moment that will change everything, and he is only eleven. Set in Germany in 1989.