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.

And Onan knew that the seed would not be his; and it came to pass when he went in unto his brother’s wife, that he spilled it on the ground, lest he should give seed to his brother.

Click the link above to read up on lifestyle and writing advice from the Old Testament.

I just won a copy of Joseph Young’s Easter Rabbit from Publishing Genius. Young has made a name for himself as the microfiction guy. His approach is similar to some of the writing I’ve done for Midnight Stories. The contest was to write a story in Young’s style, and I submitted a story from my Twitter feed (more or less) and won, so I suppose that confirms my thoughts on the matter. I’m excited: this is the first book-length collection of micros that I’ll have the pleasure of reading.

I also won a copies of Molly Gaudry’s We Take Me Apart from PANK and the horror anthology 52 Stitches from Robert Swartwood. On my birthday I won a comic caption contest over at HTMLGiant, and cartoonist Jeffrey Brown sent me a bunch of really cool artwork and stuff.

This is all to say that the internet provides. At this rate, maybe we’ll cancel our cable subscription. Eat it, Time Warner!

Victorian-age retelling of Homer’s Odyssey using a cat as the protagonist, who is accidentally left to make the long journey home alone after falling out of his spinster’s carriage. Magical cat powers and epic animal battles optional (but encouraged).

You’re welcome.

You can see it in action at Nanoism’s December Serial Contest and year-round at the short-form poetry journal Four and Twenty (the form is here).

Some disclaimers: This idea accepts plain text only (no boldface or italics) and organizes everything into a spreadsheet. This is not the best way to read large blocks of text but it works for poetry, flash, or any kind of micro. Acceptances/rejections still require a manual email, so if you run something like elimae and you’re firing off responses in three hours flat, you’d probably waste more time copy-and-pasting email addresses than it’s worth. But say you run a quarterly mag or a one-time deal where you’re sitting on pieces for a while and it’s easy to lose track of them—this is a nice way to keep ‘em all in one place. Not just one folder, like with email filters, but literally one document. It’s also handy for doing your own Duotrope-style stats. Sure, you can do this all by hand in excel (or you could code your own system), but this definitely has its uses.

If nothing else, say you’re trying to collect addresses or contact info for writers to include in an anthology. You could send a big email (BCC’d, of course) and manually amass the responses. Or you could use Google Forms to collect the responses into a spreadsheet for you (which is what @nick did for Twitter Wit).

Then floppy disk failures ate our work,
but I did not speak up because I kept a spare.

Then social networks ate our work,
and I knew we were in serious trouble.

When I first read about hint fiction (and some of its examples), I already had a very similar take on my ideal nano story. I completely agree with the definition quoted above as a basis for good short stuff (and I work from a very similar angle in choosing stories for Nanoism). But for some reason, in my experience (and especially in reading submissions for his original contest), many hint/nano stories are a not standalone stories at all but rather some kind of movie tag-line/newspaper headline that alludes to a story. They’re much more compelling if you imagine the guy from the movie previews reading them (though, really, wouldn’t that be true for everything?). If you read one of the various “six word story” outlets, you’ll see an even more extreme version of what I mean.  Entertaining—yes. Standalone—yes. Story? Debatable.

I’m not the kind of person who says a story can’t be short, obviously. But in my reading, it should have some self contained action. The beginning, middle, end definition is not particularly useful. Nor is the conflict, climax, resolution triad. In nanofiction, these elements are often implied in a word or phrase (hinted at, so to speak).  Given the length, it’s unavoidable. For “story”-judgment, I tend to ascribe to the idea of “change.” There must be some fundamental change for the character, however slight, from onset to ending. And to really hit home, the greater story must be hinted at. Leaving it out for the reader to make up is not hinting—it’s omission, and they are not the same thing.

One person killing another person with nothing else is not a story (but it is by far the most common theme I see). The author needs to give the reader some help in deciphering a greater narrative arc. There is a level of necessary vagueness to the form, but just tossing a scene out in 25 words does not a story make. All scene and no story is not good. All plot and no scene is also not good—it’s not supposed to be a synopsis, after all. You need both.

Submissions to the Hint Fiction anthology are open until the end of the month. While Mr Swartwood has already received over a 1000 entries and will publish probably no more than 150, perhaps your submission could net you $25 delicious dollars and an excuse to say, “Oh, why yes, I was published by Norton.”

If you make a return to Bed Bath & Beyond with a gift receipt, you get a gift card for store credit.

If you make the same return without a receipt, you get a store credit receipt: a regular-looking paper receipt with some old-fashioned highlighting and a signature or two or three.

Now, the receipt can be used in any store for any item. In other words, just like a gift card. What possible reason is there for using an easy-to-lose wrinkle-prone receipt for returns instead of a gift card (like every other store in the 21st century)? And if I have a gift card, why can’t I just add the return value onto it so I don’t have to carry around two pieces of paper and one piece of plastic in order to buy overpriced curtain rods?

If it has the exact same buying power, why make a distinction in the first place?

“In order to improve this course for next year, we would appreciate it very much if you would take a few minutes and fill out this evaluation form.”

And the idea behind a survey is a good (nay, excellent) one: to gather feedback and ostensibly make changes and corrections based on it. The issue is in survey construction and follow-through. The usual survey has a variety of broadly worded statements with answer choices 1-5, 1 being “strongly agree” and 5 being “strongly disagree.” There will usually be a text-box for general comments at the end. You take this survey and your answers disappear into the depths of the internet never to be heard from again.

But from the beginning, the idea that you can sum up whether something works effectively or not based on a numerical average is a kludge. Furthermore, even if an average of 4 does approximate satisfaction, that doesn’t mean there aren’t better ways to do things. It’s an understandable shorthand, but anyone hoping that it’s sufficient to understand reception  is fooling themselves. If people’s responses show that weekly quizzes are on the whole useful, that doesn’t mean they wouldn’t prefer or think it better if they were biweekly, on Mondays, on Fridays, longer, shorter, or anything else. If people say dividing the year into 4 chunks is no good, it doesn’t mean 7 would be better. A number is all well and good, but at the end of the day, how someone feels isn’t the crux: it’s why they feel the way they do.

In order for a survey to be effective, it has to take time. Each question needs to have its own comment box. Then, someone needs to go through those comment boxes and compile all of the suggestions and problems. Take the suggestions and complaints, then formulate new courses of action. Then, before implementing them, offer them anew in a survey:  What do you think about these choices? Do they sound good? How good? Better then before? If not, why not? If that takes too much time to do, have students volunteer to do the grunt work. They’ll put in on their CVs, the administrators can continue doing whatever it is that administrators do, and everyone is happy. This is also how you make changes quickly. It doesn’t need to take years.

People tend to make incremental changes to the status quo. It’s hard to make drastic changes, especially if those changes reverse your hard work or go against your own inclinations; it’s even harder to come up with these changes yourself when necessary. This difficulty then breeds the stagnation that allows bad systems to continue even when their obsolescence is practically taken for granted. And yet, this is how you get curricular form with a stethoscope on the heartbeat of a student body.

Sometimes things don’t work—but if a goal is truly to teach a subject effectively, then no one can tell you better what does and does not work than students. This is how you don’t spin your wheels around a problem, making arbitrary changes. You need to ask for feedback, but more importantly, you need to be willing to listen to it.