ben white

When it comes to getting information from people, we use email. If you need to organize a lot of it (as if, say, you ran a lit mag) and you have money or the right friends, you might get your hands on a submission system to compile and organize all that good information. Or you might be out of luck. Dale Wisely over at Right Hand Pointing mentioned this really interesting idea to me the other day: use a combination of Google Apps’ forms and spreadsheets to put it all together in one easy to use location. This idea may seem obvious to those who regularly use Google Apps or surveys to collect data, but I was shocked at how clean this functionality is.

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 loseWeight Exercise 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).

First the dogs ate our work,
but I did not speak up because I did not have a dog.

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.

Robert Swartwood is a man after my own heart: a lover of the incredibly short-form. Earlier this year he coined the term “Hint Fiction” to mean “a story of 25 words or less that suggests a larger, more complex story.” Then he got a book deal from W.W. Norton to edit an anthology. Boom, like lightning.

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.”

A bizarre conundrum:

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?

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