Friday, January 8, 2010

Short Stories

All my life, I've loved short stories. When I started reading, I devoured the experts - Saki, O' Henry, Guy de Maupassent, Katherine Mansfield, Conan Doyle, even Jeffery Archer. Even now, I prefer the short stories of Sherlock Holmes to the longer ones.

It was but natural that when I started writing, I wrote only short stories. As a writer, short stories brought out the best in me- no long descriptive passages, no detailed character descriptions, no long passages of high quality prose. Over a two year period, I must have written a short story a week- many of which did not deserve the space they occupied on my hard disk, some of which catch me by surprise when I re-read them.

It was three of those old short stories that I submitted to the Genre Wars Short Story Contest run by the Literary Lab. Sent them, and forgot all about them. My stories were decent, but I did not think enough of myself either as a writer or as a story teller to expect much from the Contest.

When I got two mails from the Literary Lab telling me that two of the stories were not considered for publication, I only briefly wondered about the third. Imagine my surprise when I got back to my desk after a meeting and found a third mail from them telling me that the third story was going to be included in their anthology.

This is the greatest high I have ever had as a writer. Anthologies were always the books I sought out in libraries and second hand book stores. Never really believed I would ever feature in one myself!

8 comments:

Cruella Collett said...

Congratulations!!! Natasha, this is wonderful news! I completely forgot about the genre wars contest after our collaborative efforts stranded, but I am thrilled that you didn't. I am very happy for you :)

Natasha said...

Thanks, Mari. It was one of my old stories that I sent in - am thrilled it made the cut. Specially since the cover page of the book is so pretty.

Jan Morrison said...

Woo Hoo! How completely excellent! Such wonderful news - how are you going to celebrate? I insist you celebrate early and often! I'm so pleased. Good on ya!
love, Jan

Michelle D. Argyle said...

This has made my day to read your excitement! I can't tell you how pleased I am to include your writing in our anthology. Congratulations!

Elspeth Futcher said...

How wonderful for you!! Many, many congratulations! May this be just the beginning of a very LONG story!

Elspeth

Natasha said...

@ Jan - I am in celebration mode (proof of it is the fact that I have created a new tag - 'pumping fists'). And it is wonderful to have friends like you to celebrate with :-)

@ Glamis - I adore your blog, and I am overjoyed to have my story included. Thank you, again.

@ Elspeth - thank you, so much. And I do hope so. Reading is the thing I love more than anything else, so creating something that can be read is, to me, something as great as Creation itself.

Meera said...

Hey, congrats! But dont give the long ones a miss.

Natasha said...

@ Meera - the thing about me is that I hate giving up. So I will finish what I have started out.

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