Sunday 8 March 2015

A Memoir and The Understatement

I discovered Flash Fiction Magazine through Twitter, when I began writing Twitter Fiction after Shiva Acharya, one of close friends and literary advisers (no, really!), exhorted me to be more regular on the microblogging site and try my hand at 140-character fiction. He thought I'd be wonderful with it, and as always, he was right.

A Memoir: This was first published in print in eFiction India in February 2014. Flash Fiction Magazine accepted it for publication in April 2014. The site had just been launched and at the time they had space to accept most of the works received, except if the work was really shabby. Now they have a waiting period and backlog, which means they are establishing themselves well already. Go, FFM! This story was also published later in Every Writer's Resource, in December 2014, accompanied by an artwork by Tommy Inberg. So far, this has been my most successful flash.

A Memoir was written in February 2014, inspired by a snatch of description of old furniture in Lilian Jackson Braun’s The Cat Who Tailed a Thief. Being a bibliophile, it is very easy for me to connect to books and regard them as living entities than as a dead tree that has been scrawled over with literary inanities. For how I empathise with a book, read the story.

The Understatement: This was written in October 2014 and published in the same month in FFM. I was trying to attain closure with this piece, and the related eBook My Heart is Your Brothel that I brought out through the free-to-use Papyrus Editor. I was infatuated by a younger colleague just like the protagonist in The Understatement, and it was important that I let the emotions out of my system in order to retain sanity in my behaviour with him as well as with others in his presence. Writing this flash and the set of micropoems (which were first distributed on Twitter before they were compiled into an eBook) helped me do just that - as well as helping me attain closure on the subject.

The story is not one of my best, but I've got some interest generated around it. My readers have seen it in two ways - some think the protagonist was married and that was the punch of the story, while others said they think the protagonist was making up the husband part in order to extricate herself from the situation. You read the story and decide what you want to think - maybe give me a few other viewpoints?

This compilation of my published works is also listed on Facebook in an album format.