You could, with a few bucks to spare, also buy the first issue of Thirty First Bird Review and read my story “The Presentation of the Virgin.”

It’s very short fiction based on/reflecting current news stories, and words throughout link to interesting resources and articles from around the web. It’s a quick read, but the links also provide a chance for some interesting directed reading.

2. Roxane Gay is the first writer in residence over at Necessary Fiction, and she’s just reprinted my story “The Woman on the Sidewalk,” which was originally published in SUB-LIT, which has since died. Now it’s online again forever! Go read it! There is also a bonus post that tells you how this story came about and provides an awesome musical accompaniment! After, read this story by Paula Bomer! Then read this story by Roxane Gay!

3. My story “The Unicorn” appears in Ink Monkey 3. It’s a print magazine that you can buy here. It is not about actual unicorns. Perhaps that is a failure on my part.

A good Qbank (like USMLE World) works, but I think the very best way to review pathology is the Robbins and Cotran Review of Pathology, the question-book-companion of the big Robbins that many/most schools use. Benefits of this book:

• Complete, system-organized review of pathology that covers all the important topics and factoids
• Shelf-style questions and focus
• Contains clear but complete explanations—which is key. You’ll get a lot of questions wrong, but this review teaches you the salient distinctions quickly without being cryptic when you do.
• Because it’s organized by system, you can tease apart related conditions and presentations. If you just do a blanket review, it’s hard to do this. Even if you use a Qbank instead, I would still recommend you do a run-through of the pathology questions by system first.

The link above is to the 3rd edition. I used a copy of the 2nd edition I bought at a local Half Price Books, and it certainly didn’t feel out of date. It’s also cheaper online. I think either one would work fine, though I’m sure there have been improvements made in the intervening five years. It’s a high quality resource; I only found two typos/mis-keyed answers in the entire book.

The point is this: there is so much material on Shelf and Step exams that literally anything you learn could be useful. Time and brain space are the limiting factors, so what you need is an efficient study aid. For the NBME Pathology Shelf, I had four days off to study. The Robbins question book is roughly 400 pages. I was able to do 100 pages a day and then follow it up with a few tables in the First Aid (important cytokines, for example), and that was 100%  sufficient for Shelf purposes.

Sometimes when you do questions without having a read a text first, the whole experience is just frustrating. Studying for the shelf is inherently painful, but this book really did right by me.

Either way, writing contests, as a money-making scheme, are as common as companies that only care about profit and hurting the environment. I’m kidding; contests help fund some really great publications. But a quick look at the number of new “genres” Narrative Magazine has “invented” (iStory, iPoem, Six Word Story) to pull in the dough is enough to make me ill. Actually, so is the name iStory. Clearly one of their interns graduated from the “cheap plastic crap from 2004″ school of advertising. Incidentally, the term iStory was actually created in 2004 during the first iCan’tThinkofaBetterNameforThis product wave, so someone should have Googled it and read the Wikipedia article. Ahem.

Anyway, how is an honest writer to know what contests to enter? More importantly, why bother paying for them in the first place? The odds of winning might be better than the lotto, but unless you’re getting a subscription or something good out of the deal automatically, it’s still a terrible financial decision for most writers, and probably a dubious one for many publications as well. But for the purpose of raising money for an excellent charity…well you get a platform, and then you leverage it.

So, instead of taking contest fees to raise money for Nanoism itself (which I fully believe wouldn’t have even covered the cost of the prize money), the money went straight to a great organization. As a function of this set-up, people also made a tax-deductible donations by entering. So the money is not simply flushed down the drain, so to speak.

And, as an added lure, donating entrants also received “raffle” tickets which gave them a chance to randomly win prizes from the independent publishing community. I went around soliciting publications I like and/or respect, and to their collective credit, most provided materials for the giveaway. People are good people.

Interestingly, the number of non-donating entries was lower than I would have expected based on our previous contests and Nanoism’s growth over the past year. My explanation is two-fold: 1) A lingering sense of guilt about not-donating that caused some people to feel uncomfortable entering. 2) The decreased odds of winning with only 1 story entry (versus the 6, 11 or more that some writers submitted). I thought that might happen, but I was surprised nonetheless.

The end result is that a lot of writers were excited to enter the contest, felt strongly about the cause (which is good), and felt inspired by it. Because in the end, they weren’t really entering a contest. I gave them an excuse to support Partners in Health, and so they did. We raised $650, which is 6.5x what my wife and I would have given if we’d just sent the prize money directly to PIH, and over 30 people are getting literature in their mailboxes as we speak. A small experimental success.

Death is an event, not a story.

Here is my second thesis:

A description of one or more (unhappy) people is a character sketch, not a story.

A story implies motion. It’s not just description. Something needs to change.

With regards to the twitter-sized fiction that I read on a daily basis, this means that the reader should be able to at least infer some change taking place, either before, during, or after the actual words of the piece itself. After all, this isn’t a summary or a synopsis. We’re talking about an iceberg here: the tip is showing above the water, but we know the vast majority of all that ice is underneath the surface.

Now, what about twitter-fiction for twitter-fiction’s sake—who cares? Plenty of my Midnight Stories are not actual stories. They’re character sketches, scenarios, premises, scenes, moments, etc. You could think of it as a writing journal that I share on the internet. Some pieces are finished; many are not. Fine fine. In fact, not all good pieces (of any length) are stories. That’s fine too.

But for Nanoism (including the great contest we’re running through the end of the week), I’m looking for characters I’m interested in and a plot that’s at least mildly discernible. The problem with unhappy relationships and death (especially murder, argh!) is that I don’t care. As Hint Fiction guru Robert Swartwood says in this post (that I completely agree with), you don’t want to write “a story that many other writers would probably come up with at some point.”

And if your story involves someone thinking pithy thoughts during a plane crash, a wife getting revenge on a cheating husband, a husband going ballistic because of an annoying wife, a murderer just plain murdering someone for no particular reason—then you probably have.

The angle for a title (for fiction of any size) is usually a summary or some key/noteworthy words. Perhaps a rephrasing. Moby Dick is about, surprise surprise, Moby Dick (more or less). Most, perhaps even the “good” ones, don”t bring anything new to the table. Fine—but when you write a story that is only 140 characters or 25 words or less, that’s actually pretty inexcusable. You worked hard to cram as much story as you can into a sentence or two, and you’re telling me you couldn’t think of anything else to add? That title could’ve been a whole new element, supported a completely different layer of interpretation. It can do something.

With a novel, titles are often placeholders or descriptors (i.e. The Magician, or something else equally mundane and logical). With micro- and flash-fiction, the usual maxim is that every word counts. That’s actually a lie. There’s plenty of relative fluff even in really compelling stuff. Maybe it counts, but it’s not necessary. But if a title makes up 10-30% of the total word count, it’d better be necessary.

My rule of thumb for a nano title: if the story reads the same way with or without the title, then the title isn’t carrying its weight.

In the best case scenario, the reader feels drawn to come back to the title as a means of tying the experience together. In good Hint Fiction, the twist—if there is one—isn’t at the end: It’s in the title. It’s that last puzzle piece, the one that fell under the couch that you couldn’t find for hours. If the title isn’t conveying some new information (more characterization, plot, setting, location, punchline, backstory, something), then try again. After all, you only had 25 words to tell a complete story (and it could always be a little more complete).  I’ll leave you with a playful example from PicFic’s recent anniversary series.

Except NASA
As the asteroid hits, no one says, “I wish I had spent more time at work.”

Notice that the title (whether you like the story or not) draws the reader’s attention to a completely different aspect of this story. Without the title, it’s a very macro, globalized, everyone-is-the-same story. But the title narrows our focus down to a small group with a very different experience. It asks us to go back and think on it those extra seconds. In other words, the title matters.

That said, and perhaps it’s just an extra year of medical school talking, the questions seem more doable and slightly less minutia-dependent than those found on the NBME Shelf subject exams. On this run, for example, the demanded anatomy is fairly basic—reserved for the highest yield topics like major artery and nerve distributions & common injuries and syndromes—especially compared to the anatomy shelf I “took” last year. While I assuredly failed this exam with soaring colors, it seems slightly less intimidating then before. Still frightening, quiver-in-your-boots hard, but potentially doable. For most topics, it’s breadth, not depth. Only for key topics (basic metabolism, common bacterial and viral pathogens, big-name diseases like CF, CAD, MI, DM, Crohn’s, Addison’s, etc) is minute detail demanded.

For the question style itself, I was surprised overall with the frequency of first-order questions and the amount of useless writing. If you read Kaplan style questions too much, you see a lot of long vignettes with this scenario:

Long-winded clinical presentation of  Strep throat (without identification). The question might ask, what should the patient’s physician ask before administering the therapy of choice? As we use Penicillin for Strep, we need to ask about a Penicillin allergy.

The ID of the bug is a first-order question. The drug of choice is a second-order question. The common adverse side effect of the drug of choice is yet a third-order question. On the Mini Step, most questions were actually first-order questions. Third order was much much rarer. Most frequently—and annoyingly—the long vignettes end with a diagnosis or ID, thereby negating the need to read the vignette at all! My advice: if you’re the type to run short on time, read the last sentence or two before reading the whole vignette. My other piece of advice is that you shouldn’t let Kaplan or other sample tests scare the crap out of you. They pick the most ridiculous questions they can find in order to frighten you into buying their product.

On February 1, 2010, the call went out: Harvard Book Store would produce a book of original short short stories.

On Monday, March 1, 2010, at 5:15p.m., the first copy of Microchondria was printed in Harvard Book Store on Paige M. Gutenborg, our in-store print-on-demand book machine.

Thirty days ago, this book didn’t exist. No one knew what would be in it or what it would look like. Now you are holding a copy of Microchondria in your hands. Now you are going to read it.

We think that’s pretty awesome.

I think that’s pretty awesome too. HBS in the only independent book store I think I’ve ever spent significant time in, and, you know what, why just sell books? Why not also make books? They have a party. They have readings.  They have wine. They print out copies. They sell the copies. Everyone has fun.

It’s a singular book buying experience.

HBS is the bookstore and the book publisher. Afterward, it’s available on their shelves and online here, with more copies just a few minutes away thanks to POD technology. Welcome to independent publishing in 2010.

This story is actually based on a news bit from last December about a Taiwanese man who “beat” World of Warcraft by essentially doing every in-game task. Of course, my understanding is that the new patch added new achievements (makes the game unbeatable doesn’t it?). There’s also a good chance that the “man” was actually more than one player sharing an account, but hey, this is fiction, right? Let the record also state that I used to exclusively wear cargo pants and cargo shorts in my youth.

While you’re there, read “13 Ways of Looking at a Roadtrip” by Barry Graham, which went up in EG last week. Now that is an ending.

What’s changing is access. I might read a short story in a magazine in Australia. Then I’ll follow a link to a new journal that’s just popped up in York, England. Then I’ll read an author bio and find the author’s blog, which has more of her writing and links to other magazines and the magazines and blogs of her friends in Nashville, New York, Portland, Austin, etc. The et cetera continues indefinitely. I find new places everyday. More and more and more writing.

Backer went searching for new fiction. He found “gobs and gobs of it,” and is happy to share the results. Part of his rundown is a very charitable view of twitter-fiction, particularly of my taste for Nanoism:

The difference with White’s stuff, both his own writing and the writing he publishes, is that in it you can see the litwit taking shape as a valid form, shaped by our technology, for getting at the truth.

Overall, an excellent introduction to why “Fiction is dead, long live Fiction,” and a great illustration for why sites like FictionDaily will help us navigate the endless story-seas for more manageable journeys.

And speaking of truth, here are two more Thaumatrope stories. The first, in particular, we must be wary of as we step into the future.