Tag: weekly update

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Literally Stories – Week 48

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I am listening to Icelandic Electronica/House giants GusGus 2011 album Arabian Horse.

It makes me wonder.

About all sorts.

But nothing to do with Week 48 at Literally Stories, I hear you say?

Not literally hear. And no Arabian Horse doesn’t have anything to do with Week 48. And yes I concede musical references are an unimaginative standby for producing out of thin air suitable talking points by which to segue seamlessly into this, that or the other. And no I shouldn’t make a habit of beginning my sentences with conjunctions lest I be hauled into custody by the Grammar Police.

Which leads me to the weakest of weak links: serial grammar felony is not an accusation you could level at any of Week 48’s authors.

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Literally Stories – Week 47

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I am reminded

That the pheno

That is NaNoWriMo

Gets under way shortly.

Right across the globe tens of thousands of fifty thousand-word novels, technically novellas — but let’s not quibble about terminology — will be written during the month of November.

For all those (Diane Dickson I mean you!) of a mathematically averse nature, look away now…

Convert those 50K words into Literally Stories short story fiction and that weighs in at the equivalent of at least 30 short stories or one short story per day.

Give or take a Drabble.

For someone who averages 500 words a week this is a tall order indeed therefore I am seeking an extension to the deadline from 30 November to 31 December.

2017.

Plan B is to give NaNoWriMo a miss this year and stick to casting my eye over the week’s goings-on here at LS; trying not to malign the accepted or natural order of days of the week according to the classical planets of Hellenistic astrology.

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Literally Stories – Week 46

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In a wee corner of the multiverse known only to the high command of the Illuminati and former cast members of ‘Allo ‘Allo, an errant ‘server’ has been playing havoc with the day-to-day behind-the-scenes running of Literally Stories.

Nothing to do with WordPress, we should add, which runs as smooth as a very smooth thing (apart from a faulty Facebook widget that needs the kiss of life.)

I digress.

Such old-fashioned methods of communication as carrier pigeon, cup and string and even email have been brought back into service. Nevertheless, the bandwagon rolls on and Week 45 is but a beautiful faded memory as Week 46 wins fresh admirers and so on and so forth…bringing us to Monday.

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Literally Stories – Week 45

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It has been a busy week. No denying it.

Publishing five stories on the site as is our custom plus preparing to launch Literally Stories — The Anthology: it could be said we gave Ground Control a run for its money.

I am not Major Tom. Neither am I sitting in a tin can but I am feeling a little odd today.

Strained.

Nothing that a breeze through this week’s literary line-up won’t put right.

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Literally Stories – Week 43

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Scouting locations for the 2015 Literally Stories Editors team-building weekend — or jolly as the vernacular would have it, is as you would imagine a thankless task, especially when the phrase ‘shoestring budget’ overstates the resources at your disposal.

A three-man ridge tent (for five) with en-suite latrine in the second week in December is hardly Glamping but should at least concentrate the literary mind.

Abii. Vidi. Unde digressus sum.

I went. I saw. I digressed.

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Literally Stories – Week 42

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The last week has thrown up all manner of political oddities from around the world – and I’m not just referring to Donald Trump’s combover which must be standing on end at the news that Arnold Schwarzenegger (an immigrant no less) has stolen his old job on The Apprentice. The Labour Party in the UK has a new leader several light years left of centre. Australia is going through Prime Ministers faster than a stuttering sports team changes managers, and just this afternoon in Burkina Faso a very large chap in an army uniform locked up the President.

At Literally Stories we try and steer clear of politics. No military coups for us. No bloc voting. Just an oasis of calm, storytelling quality in a world of turmoil.

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Literally Stories – Week 41

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For someone who does not know a DSL from a WLAN Week 41 ended somewhat chaotically. I am talking routers of course and some would say what’s new?

Solutions to a faulty on/off button came both high and low-tech.

Cape Town (Nik) provided the know-how. The high-end geek-speak.

Sheffield (me) the low-brow pass me a roll of gaffer tape and I’ll fix mentality.

It really is amazing what you can keep running with an ounce of ingenuity and a paper-clip.

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Literally Stories – Week 40

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Week 40.

Four-Oh blind forty.

Those of you like me who regularly visit the local Bingo Hall in search of friendship, weak coffee, numbers no greater than two digits and dayglo marker pens, will undoubtedly not have the foggiest idea what the origins of ‘blind forty’ are. Blind forty, one of many colourful phrases bingo callers cry out, such as three and seven, thirty-seven.

Those of you who do know what ‘blind forty’ means will no doubt glow with pride when name-called a nerd, anorak or some other pejorative that implies they possess a vast general knowledge.

Uncertain whether or not I should round off my momentary lapse into all things numerical by declaring ‘That’s Numberwang’, or were I in Wiesbaden, ‘Das ist Nummerwang’ I opted to consult a search engine and was greatly reassured this utterance was not such a foolish notion after all.

Even the German translation of the spoof game show Numberwang yielded 160 hits in 0.57 seconds.

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Literally Stories – Week 38

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When I visited the back door portal to Literally Stories Friday morning charged with the task of ordering random words into something a little less random my first thought on typing Week 38 was; Is there any significance to the number 38?

In short. No significance.

The best ‘fact’ I came up with was it is the probable year of the marriage of Claudius and Messalina.

Fascinating.

However if you add ‘th’ to 38 and then parallel, too, the plot thickens into something almost but not quite significant, as you now have the 38th parallel. The demarcation between North and South Korea. An imaginary line that also passes just north of Ashgabat in Turkmenistan, all of which makes one wonder how newspaper columnists survived before the advent of the internet search engine? None of which leads me to this week’s litany of literary marvels that began with The Aviator.

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