David said (via email) that if he’d scripted a coincidence like that in the show no-one would have believed it!

and I can see his point. Sometimes life is a lot stranger than you can possibly imagine. I’m now wondering precisely how many bizarre murder weapons there are left to discover, and if this is in fact numerically more than zero. And I’m actually quite glad that I wasn’t able to watch the actual episode last night, because I might quite possibly have had some kind of seizure.

But all credit to Alan and David for taking the time to get back to me.

I’m inclined to think that this is one of those weird coincidences – although a cyanide-laced pocket watch was, frankly speaking, a pretty unlikely murder weapon first time around – because the alternative would in some ways be even weirder. Because it would imply that big name writers hang around the internet looking at sites like Every Day Fiction for ideas to rip off aspiring wannabes like myself. And, frankly, past experience tells me that it tends to be the wannabes that do the ripping off, not the established writers. (And also, strangely, advertising sites for watches like this one – love the subtle changes there.)

What this story does show is that there really is nothing new under the sun. Surprising coincidences do happen. At least I hope that’s the case, because if it isn’t, I’m sending the DVD of Renwick and Marshall’s “Whoops Apocalypse” that I bought last week straight back to Amazon …

This year, however, I’m determined not to make the same mistake, so I’m asking you (once again, I’m afraid) for your votes. I’m in the following categories:

Science Fiction and Fantasy Novels (”Mrs Darcy vs The Aliens”)

Horror Short Story (”Anniversary Feast”)

Romance Short Story (”Hidden Shallows”)

Poem (”Professionalism”)

Nonfiction Article (”Anatomy of a Flash”)

Author

If you only have time to vote for one, please do vote for “Mrs Darcy vs The Aliens”, as it would give the project a tremendous boost. Here’s the link to the main page for the poll.

Many thanks in advance!

Looking forward to going to tomorrow night’s Ride the WorldWord event to celebrate the excellent Short Circuit. The list of people reading is pretty much a Who’s Who of short story writers in the UK, so it should be a good night. I’ve been intending to do a review of said book ever since I read it on holiday, but have so far failed to do so (see first paragraph for excuse). In the meantime, I’ll simply say that anyone who writes short stories and doesn’t have a copy should order one immediately. Don’t wait. No excuses. Just do it. OK? I’ll be interviewing Vanessa Gebbie, the editor, on this very blog on February 1st next year, by the way, which should be interesting – especially as I’ve never interviewed anyone before.

And I’ve just remembered that I still haven’t tweaked my entry for the Willesden Herald competition, and there are only four more days to go until the closing date. When will I ever learn?

1) On Tuesday night this week, I took part in the NYC Midnight “Tweet Me a Story” competition. Basically, I got a word at midnight UK time and then had five hours (yeah right, I said midnight UK time) to write three twitter stories using it. The word for group 19 was “attack”, which could have been a lot worse. Anyway, I threw my three together in half an hour. I find out next Tuesday if any of them are going to go forward to the next stage of voting.

2) I’ve just sent my story off to Jim Wisneski’s ‘Twelve Days of Christmas” project; I’m one of the ones doing “Eight Maids a Milking”. It’s a rather odd piece altogether. I’ll let you know when it appears.

3) I’ve decided that the perfect in-flight movie is “GI Joe – The Rise of Cobra”. Why? Because it’s full of action (read “guns and explosions”), has an idiotic plot and (crucially) you don’t need to be able to hear any of the dialogue in order to follow it. There is no excuse for watching it outside a plane, however.

4) Weirdly, two out of the five writers shortlisted for the National Short Story Award (Sara Maitland and Jane Rogers) were judges in competitions where I won prizes this year. Following this logic, if Zoë Heller wishes to make an impression on the NSSA next year, she knows what to do. OK, Zoë?

5) By the way, well done to both of them for getting onto the shortlist, and especially to Sara Maitland for getting the runner-up prize. I read her collection “Far North” earlier this year, and I can strongly recommend it – especially the title story, which is quite extraordinary.

While acting is what she wants to do for now, she nonetheless hankers after writing, for which, she says, she needs to spend time in London. “I need to interact with the city,” she says, “to meet people, to have strange things happen to me – otherwise what would I write about?” She writes more and more as she gets older, feels that she’s improving and may end up doing the Open University’s creative writing MA when she can afford to take a year off.

What?! Did she really say “otherwise what would I write about”? Yes, I’m afraid she did. I have a feeling that she may have taken on board the “write about what you know” dictum a little too literally. Although to be honest, I would have thought that even at her tender years, as an international actress she’s probably had a few more unusual experiences and met more peculiar people than the rest of us who have spent our long working lives in open-plan offices and cubicles.

No, the crucial point about writing that she seems to be missing is that it’s all about imagination. Unless she can learn to put hers to good use, however many bizarre things that happen to her as she “interacts with the city”, chances are that the end result is going to be a more than a little flat. But I wish her luck anyway – I hope I’m proved wrong.

Curiously, you could say that it was in many ways a failure of imagination that resulted in the recent BBC adaptation of “Emma” (in which Ms Garai took the title role) being so uninspiring. Everyone involved seemed to be under the impression that it should look as much as possible like the Gwyneth Paltrow movie of a few years back, rather than something new. By contrast, the most interesting adaptation of “Emma” in recent years remains “Clueless”, a film that remained 100% faithful to the source material and yet created something completely original out of it.

I can’t say that any of this has affected me personally in any way, although I was longlisted in the Cadenza competition mentioned (so there’s an outside possibility that I might otherwise have scraped onto the shortlist – nah, forget that). The worst thing that’s ever happened to me in my short literary career (as far as I know) occurred during Eurofiction 2007-8, where one of the entrants was so incensed that an (admittedly weak) entry of mine had won one of the rounds, that he copied it from SlingInk and pasted it on another private forum, inviting everyone there to pitch in and criticise it. Which they did, with considerable enthusiasm. I know this, because – unknown to him – I was also, temporarily, a member of that forum under an alias. No names, no pack drill; the perpetrator made a decent apology and no lasting injury occurred. I even incorporated some of the criticism when I finally got around to editing and submitting the story elsewhere (it’s this one).

But weird things happen. In the recent Calderdale competition, where I picked up the third prize, Douglas Bruton was in fact one of those highly commended. And if the results are ever published on the Calderdale website, you will notice that, by a gruesome coincidence, my prizewinning piece, “Possible Side Effects” has precisely the same reverse chronological structure to the Tania Hershman story, “My Name is Henry”, mentioned in the above thread.

Now, I originally wrote my story back in February 2008 for Round 8 of the same Eurofiction contest, at which time I don’t think I’d even heard of Ms Hershman, let alone read any of her stories. (Incidentally, I finally bought “The White Road” a couple of months back and thoroughly enjoyed it – particularly the title story, which is excellent.) The reason why I picked the structure for the story was that it was based on a picture prompt – the picture being a bottle of pills. Thinking the way that I do, I felt that with that as the prompt, there was only one way that the story could end. So in order to make it a bit more interesting, that’s where I started, and the rest of it followed from there.

As it happens, there is a grand tradition of reverse chronology stories, as detailed here, so it’s kind of nice to know that if I was ripping anyone off, it was Virgil, amongst a whole host of others. Either way, if they ever do publish the winning stories at Calderdale, I’m ready for the mob. In the meantime, the plagiarism saga rumbles on. I suspect that we have not heard the end of it even yet.

[EDIT: This is the 100+ post thread that I mentioned above. Apologies for pointing to the wrong one.]