I wrote a condensed 100-word revision of Sunday’s story to send off to a free competition (see extra post yesterday). So today I shall be working on my review of Ideas Above Our Station short story collection, also the Memoir of Forgetting; plus I have a poetry collection to send off.
Philosophy yesterday fizzed with excitement, everyone batting ideas to and fro like a dozen simultaneous games of ping-pong: I, however, was stuck in brain-fog in the Land of Having a Cold and did not contribute much. We are still on Descartes and I was impressed to see that Penny had brought an edition of the Pensees in French. I would have liked to study it, but sadly there wasn’t time – although we did consult it for the original meaning of a particular word.
Descartes says that animals are basically machines and don’t think; ie they don’t have a ‘mind’ or a ‘soul’. Nowadays we would dispute at least part of that and say that animals – some animals – exhibit emotion. They show fear or happiness; they exhibit care for one another and some species even show signs of grief when one of them dies.
But! back to the short story and I am listening to a podcast about the craft of short-story writing:
http://blogs.chi.ac.uk/shortstoryforum/masterclass-with-david-vann/
Condense and be precise – that’s the motto for writing short stories.
Kirk out
Sarada Gray 