Don’t worry if you can’t work out whether or not you saw double in Week 61.
I can assure you, you did.
No need therefore to visit an Ophthalmologist or a Neurologist or anyone whose job title ends in ologist. Your eyes were not deceiving you. There were two Allisons, but only one Cron, who made a double appearance, plus a welcome return to Literally Stories by Dave Louden.
Continue reading “Literally Stories – Week 61 – Seeing Double”
I know that there will be tears all round as you begin to realise that Mr West is tied up and not able to do this week’s round-up. There will be even more tears when you read this and realise that it is me who is filling in! Adam is excellent at tying up the weeks and giving us some excellent meaningful meanderings relating to the said week so I thought I would do the same.
Three galleries of Literally Stories author head-shots went live on the site a little earlier today. Do take a look…
According to Wikipedia no-one was born in the year 59. Two people died. They were Roman. Or possibly Greek. I have never heard of them or know anyone who has, therefore I must set aside any attempt to find some common ground, some tenuous link between the 59th week of publishing on Literally Stories and events1957 years ago.
Instead I will announce the forthcoming Author Galleries. They are happening soon. Coming forth. Pages and pages of head-shots of the writers who patronise LS.
If you have sent us a photo you will be there. Alongside another writer. Randomly situated amongst your fellow authors, each picture an alternative portal to the author’s published works on the site.
Opportune to ask anyone who has employed the services of a professional for the purpose of capturing their image, their author-ly avatar, to confirm whether that photograph is subject to copyright and if so to let us know if there is any attribution required to accompany it.
Copyright being what it is we don’t want to step on anyone’s toes.
Continue reading “Literally Stories – Week 59 – Somewhere Over the Rainbow”
Our resident Statsmeister, Nik Eveleigh — as he doesn’t give a fig feel free to mangle the pronunciation of his fine family name any which way you like for instance try Evil-Eye, Evel-Eeee or in Afrikaans I am reliably informed, Ever-LICCCCHHHHHHH — has been busy tweaking his spreadsheet.
Cape Town this time of year is a trifle warm I understand, so we mustn’t judge. However, for once Mr. Ever-LICCCCHHHHHHH’s obsession with figures — I mean extremely useful hobby — has produced a stat worth dwelling on for more than 0.37 seconds.
A submission we received at Literally Stories in the past couple of days tipped the total word count for all said submissions over the one million mark.
Yeah. I know. I should have warned you to sit down first.
Folk as far afield as Reykjavik and Rotherham, Berlin and Barnsley are reeling in the face of this earth-shattering revelation and no doubt wondering if in fact it was their story that triggered this sensational milestone and what exactly this means to them.
In an ideal world a pop-up box should have appeared on the ‘lucky’ author’s screen informing them that as the writer of the one millionth word to be read by the Literally Stories Editors they had won a holiday for two to the Seychelles.
Sadly, Pop-Up blockers being what they are these days thrills such as that are a thing of the past.
What hasn’t changed is Monday’s promptness at the beginning of our literary week…
Continue reading “Literally Stories – Week 58 – One million words”
Did you know that Henry J. Heinz introduced the marketing slogan ’57 varieties’ in 1896 and later claimed that he was inspired by an advertisement he saw while riding an elevated train in New York City for a shoe store boasting ’21 styles of shoe’.
Well there’s a coincidence, one that leads me to a very obvious conclusion: the Illuminati are up to their old tricks again pulling strings and doing other underhand things you can’t actually see, or get anyone to believe in, as they always insist on pouring cold water on the obvious connections you made whilst reading clearly connected articles on Wikipedia.
The facts are the facts plain and simple.
Week 57 on Literally Stories saw the 285th story published on the site. Fact. In the year 285 Diocetian defended the Danube from Sarmatian raids and what do you know, the Danube flows through Germany and that’s where (Bavaria) it all kicked off for those dastardly secret society types who love eating bratwurst with, you’ve guessed it — baked beans. Also fact.
*The names in this blog have been altered to protect the innocent — not the guilty.
Email One — 23 December 2015.
Twas the night before Christmas, when all thro’ the house
Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse…
In actual fact Twas the night before the night before Christmas, when an email landed in the Literally Stories inbox. Attached to the email a short story for our perusal.
Standard acknowledgement email is dispatched by yours truly.
All well and good.
Christmas came and Christmas went. New Year beckoned. New Year came and was soon spent and the story we received 23rd December continued to languish in our gmail account.
Forgotten. Unloved. Unread.
9 January 2016 — Email Two.
A standard rejection email is sent out to a much-loved LS published author, *Gertrude Ponsonby.
11 January 2016 — Email One
Email One is unearthed by the same buffoon who forgot to bring it to the attention of fellow Editors. Sincerest apologies email is duly dispatched to potential LS author patiently awaiting a reply:
Sorry *Engelbert — we somehow failed to flag up your story for reading… we will read it and get back to you very shortly.
12 January 2016 — Email One
Email is sent to the author of unloved, abandoned, forgotten story to tell them it is no longer unloved and will soon have a home at Literally Stories.
14 January 2016 — Email Two
A standard rejection email is sent out to the much-loved LS published author, *Gertrude Ponsonby; the same author who received the same email for the same story five days previously.
Oops!
Later that day
Much loved LS published author replies with typically pithy good humour:
Continue reading “Literally Stories – Week 56 – A Tale of Two Emails”
Hurrah!
Santa was back on form this year. He clearly read the message I left him, very carefully unlike last year when some incompetent stand-in or faux Mr. Claus totally f***** up.
Dear Santa I wrote — as you do — I would be most grateful if you could kindly arrange it that your elves assist you in the delivery of a number of…
Now conjure up a long list of ‘literary books’ by the likes of Orwell, Dostoevsky and other suitably heavyweight names including Albert Camus.
NB: To avoid severe embarrassment as once suffered by yours truly, please note that Mr. Camus was born in Algeria (then French Algeria) and his name is pronounced, not unsurprisingly for the French, Al-Bear Ca-Moo.
Not Al-But Ca-Mus.
Any road, as we say round these parts, you can imagine the puzzlement, nay sinking feeling that besieged me, when unwrapping many book-shaped packages I came across The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton and did not subsequently discover The Outsider by said Algerian.
YA fiction is not, as you would no doubt hazard a guess, top of my must-read genre list, but to be fair to S.E.Hinton I read The Outsiders (published 1967), which was written by her when she was still in junior high school, and it is indeed a fine book of its type.
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2015 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 46,000 times in 2015. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 17 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.
We wish all our readers and writers a Happy Christmas and a Merry and successful New Year.
Here are our reflections on 2015 …
literally stories 