The entries for our short story competition, in association with Bebo and Ziji publishing, have been pouring in. We thought we'd put up some of the ones we've enjoyed so far.
Perhaps it's no surpise that even the shortest entries have dealt with weighty matters, but there are a couple of themes which seem to have caught your imagination. Many of your nanotales deal with old age. Nick Dwyer confidently takes on the perspective of a man adrift on a sea of his own forgetting in When's Dinner?, while Michael Havneraas's The Tale of Marty Tremolo offers a vignette of an old man dozing in front of the television. I must confess a tear came to my eye as I came to the end of PM Bye's My Father and I. The stripped-down punctuation slows the reader into a hypnotic rhythm which makes every detail count.
Arguments have also been popular. Rik Haslam's is sparked by a cat, while Shawn Casselle's How Good Life Really Is folds in another theme which has inspired our authors, the gap between dreaming and reality.
Perhaps it's the weather, but upbeat stories are pretty thin on the ground. But there's still time - the competition closes on March 16.
