‘The Mission,’ by Adrian Graham

By Adrian Graham | September 5, 2008

The Mission

I woke up on the beach holding a 9mm.

Then I remembered.

My plane had been shot down and I’d escaped by parachute. I’d been investigating the island, looking for my brother. This time I knew I was heading for trouble - and that’s exactly what I wanted. I picked myself up and ran down a trail, which led into the jungle. A bunch of mercenaries came out and I popped them with head shots. I snatched an assault rifle from one of the bodies.

There were loads of them coming from every angle. I kept on firing.

Reloading.

Firing.

Reloading.

Firing.

I found a rocket launcher and went into the bunker. It appeared to be some kind of research laboratory. I found a card key and used it on a door marked, ‘Research Personnel Only’. Inside, men in white coats were busy experimenting on humans. I saw my brother among them. The mutation they’d injected had already taken hold. He didn’t have long.

I killed the guards, the technicians, the mutants - everyone.

I found the guy in charge. He was attempting to escape on an underground train. I dispatched him with a head shot. After that I fixed explosives to the central generator. I left through a ventilation shaft. I sat on the beach watching the complex blow sky high.

Then I looked out to sea. Somewhere out there was reality.

*

(From the section ‘Computer Games’ in, The Revelation: And a Hundred Other Stories.)

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‘Flash fiction’ is a useful label for writers - not a dogma or religion

By Adrian Graham | September 4, 2008

There’s an interview with me up at Jim Murdoch’s blog ‘The Truth About Lies’. In the first part of the blog he discussed the history of flash fiction and it’s link to the common gag or joke.

Flash fiction has taken a bit of a negative reaction from some of the comments that have been left, so I hope my answers in the interview will help put forward the other side.

I don’t see myself as an apologist for flash fiction - on the contrary, I think it’s a useful label a ‘shortcut’, if you like, to help people ‘get’ very short fiction. Very short fiction is a bit of an unwieldy mouthful in any case. Flash fiction, for me simply means any fiction under 1000 words that’s originally drafted from a ‘flash of inspiration’. To be honest I’m not into the whole academic debate about flash fiction, I’d much rather get on with writing my stories.

In the UK the term ‘flash fiction’ doesn’t have a loaded association, good or bad. That might be different in the US, I simply don’t know.

One of the problems some people might have with the name ‘flash fiction’ is that they might assume the writer fires off a couple of hundred words and that’s it, Job done. Although most of my stories are first drafted in around ten minutes, it takes me considerably longer to edit them. Also, they’re not whimsical pieces of text I randomly trot out. I give them considerable thought and I’m only happy with them if they have a specific point. For me that point is communicating some kind of story, directly or implied. It means giving the story a lively start and a strong end. Each one, I hope, successfully or otherwise attempts to encapsulate a particular idea.

Anyway, my thanks to Jim Murdoch for writing up another great post. There are some insightful points being made.

The interview was conducted by email and I really enjoyed taking part in it. It made me think about my work in a different way, which is always useful. I’ll be conducting some interviews myself shortly too.

Posted in Debates | Tagged | 4 Comments

10 tips for writers who blog

By Adrian Graham | September 4, 2008

I’ve got 10 top tips for writers who blog. It’s not that I’m claiming to be the worlds first, greatest or most able blogger - far from it - but I’m a good learner and I’ve picked up a few tips along the way which I’m happy to share. Here they are:

1 ) People come back for the content  - post up great stuff they’ll return.

2 ) Try and make your blog look good - use a clear font for the text and use at least one image in every post, if you can.

3 ) Use a stat counter to record how many people are visiting your blog. You’ll be surprised what you discover. There are many stat counters, Google Analytics is a good one if you can’t decide which one to use.

4 ) If you’re posting up your own work, post up the good stuff. A blog is a very public space. You only want stuff up there you are proud of. Viewers only know you from what you post up, not your favourites that you hold back.

5 ) Write in a relaxed conversational manner, it’s feels more intimate

6 ) Use a SEO tool. For those who don’t know what an SEO is, it’s a Search Engine Optimisation tool. It processes your content and serves it on a silver spoon to the search engine robots from Google and Yahoo!, etc. (Be careful of Adobe Flash. You can do cool things with it but at the moment Search Engines can’t see the content within it.)

7 ) Reply to comments left on your blog, try to add value to the original post and acknowledge the input of the reader

8 ) Publicise your blog. The easiest way to do this is to leave intelligent comments on other blogs and websites.

9 ) Update your blog regularly. The more the better, be realistic about what you can achieve and make your schedule sustainable.

10 ) Stay fresh. Every now and then save up a weeks worth of posts and take a well earned break.

Posted in Blogging | Tagged , , , , | 4 Comments

‘Everything Done,’ by Adrian Graham

By AG | September 3, 2008

Everything Done

Luke Berringer sat down to write. He was having difficulty because everything he wrote was being written by other people. It was as if they could second guess his ideas before he’d written them.

This depressed him. What was he going to write about if everything had already been done?

After hours of contemplation he came up with something interesting. He was going to write a story about a writer who was having difficulty deciding what to write. He wondered if he should write it in the first or third person. Writing in the first person made it seem more direct but he didn’t want people thinking it was autobiographical. He opted for the third person viewpoint.

Then he thought about the tense. Should he set it in the present or past tense?

He felt a sense of relief. He had a subject, a point of view and the tense. All he had to do was think of a beginning and an end.

As he sucked on a mint an unusual idea hit him. He started typing:

Luke Berringer sat down to write. He was having difficulty because everything he wrote was being written by other people.

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Liars’ League: September meeting

By Adrian Graham | September 3, 2008

It’s time for the Liars’ League again. I won’t unfortunately be able to make it due to other commitments. This months theme should provide the writers and actors with a lot of interesting material! 

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Blogging is publishing

By Adrian Graham | September 2, 2008

Writing fiction is about sharing. When I started writing very short stories I wanted to share them with other people: I wanted a readership. There isn’t a large commercial market for 250 word stories, so I had to do something for myself. I ended up self publishing my stories as a book collection.

I’ve always felt writers write stories to share them with people. Traditionally we’ve done that through printed books but this is beginning to change. It’s about time we woke up to the fact that writing a blog isn’t just a journal, it’s a public space and for want of a better word it is publishing.

We’re gradually moving into eBooks and the like. Whatever the current state of the technology, that transition is going to happen, sooner or later. This transition is going to be important for a lot of poets and short story writers because it’ll bring down the barriers to getting writing seen by a wider audience.

The major obstacle for reading longer fiction digitally is the screen technology - no one WANTS to read a novel on a computer. But it’s fine for a few hundred words.

Posting stories onto a blog isn’t perfect. There’s no real way to generate money from the sale of your writing. Sure you could have ‘advertisement supported’ pages but you need a lot of page clicks to make money that way. It is also possible to password protect Wordpress pages and email the password to readers who have paid for the full story by PayPal or Google Checkout. It’s small beer though. Is it worth it? Why not just publish direct to the Internet, to your blog? This, I think, is increasingly what many poets and flash fiction writers are doing.

I think the most important thing for any writer is getting an audience. If your primary concern is putting your writing ‘out there’, then posting it to a blog makes perfect sense.

Posted in Blogging | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

The debut of the simian powered writing prompt

By Adrian Graham | September 2, 2008

The devils over at the Fiction Lounge have not been idling away their time. Instead they’ve been tweaking all possible algorithms and generated possibly the worlds first simian powered writing prompt.

Whether you are a writer of short stories, flash fiction, novels or any other genre you can name sometimes you need a place to start. This is designed to be one of those starting points. The random writing prompt generator will give you, as you would expect, a randomly generated phrase. All you have to do is write a story from it.

More information about this devious device at Adam Maxwell’s Fiction Lounge.

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Publishers should all have a /covers directory - Boing Boing

By Adrian Graham | September 2, 2008

There’s a post up at boingboing with an idea for publishers to make their cover art public so that bloggers, etc can get images for their blogs. Result: blogs get higher quality images, publishers get their books promoted. Everyone’s happy. Read the full story here.

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‘Inflatable’, by Adrian Graham

By Adrian Graham | September 1, 2008

Inflatable

Daniel liked to socialise with the senior executives. He usually behaved himself but this time he’d gone too far. People at the barbecue whispered, “What’s wrong with him?”

He’d been buying clothes in fashionable shops, barging past teenagers to squeeze into PVC drainpipes. “There’s a lot of life left in the old dog,” he told the bathroom mirror that morning.

Everyone at the barbecue stared open mouthed as Daniel stripped to his g-string.

“What’s his problem?”

He collapsed into the paddling pool. The children fled.

“Man overboard!” Daniel shouted.

They all watched him. No one moved.

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The Truth About Lies asks: Is flash fiction a joke?

By Adrian Graham | September 1, 2008



There’s a wonderful, in-depth post at The Truth About Lies blog. It’s on flash fiction and it gives a great overview with interesting observations about the format, where it’s roots come from, etc. The piece is thoroughly researched and includes many great quotes. More at The Truth About Lies. There’s also a mention about me at the bottom, with an interview scheduled to appear soon! The provocatively titled post is called: Is flash fiction a joke?

Posted in Flash fiction | Tagged , , | 1 Comment