I blame the wine...
Midnight of yesterday was the closing date for the Bridport poetry/short story competition. I was hoping to finish up The Tuba Farm to submit but just as I was getting to the end, I thought of a much better ending and I have decided to hold it back so that it's a much better story all round. So instead I submitted a couple of poems: The Fallen and The Girl With Venetian Eyes.
Yesterday was also the closing date for entries to the competition at United Press. I submitted a couple more poems out there and then had the dumbest idea. With five minutes left to submit entries, I thought I would submit a "live entry" - one written on the spot with no editing and submitted without reviewing. Now, I don't think this is good or bad because it is what it is - me hammering words together at the speed of light in a poem like structure and calling it a poem. In the spirit of fair play (and mirth), here it is:
The Animals That Broke The Law
Donkeys.
Hundreds of.
Marauding in the streets.
Throwing bricks through windows
Stealing TVs they will never get to watch.
Chickens.
Jaywalking.
Heads on sticks.
Iguanas.
Out of place in the high street.
Cold and lost.
Run off with a fan heater from Comet.
What the world needs right now is Bob the Rooster.
He will sort this mess out.
There seems to be an avalanche of competitions out there at the moment - maybe they're always out there. I've never looked that hard before, but I certainly have enough material to be shipping out to them. The Boy With Wasps For Eyes can go next. I'm struggling a bit with my own self-imposed word count on that one and there's a nice looking comp with a 2000 word maximum which means I can cut it back and tighten it to within an inch of its life.
I've been meaning to blog this next part for a while. In Waterstones - or maybe it was WHSmiths - I forget now, but they are both the same anyway - they appear to have developed human tragedy publishing into a whole new marketing experience. How much human misery can the reading public actually need? Quite frankly, this is shameful. Shameful of the authors, the agent, the publisher and the bookseller. All of the covers even have the same Lucida Handwriting font design so that tragedy can be easily identified by idiots.
...and before anybody starts, I know it's not Lucida Handwriting but you get the picture. Is it the same all over the world? Google Analytics is telling me that Zodiac Lung has readers everywhere these days... if you're from out of town and made it this far down, please leave a comment if you're familiar with this human misery factory. I'd really like to know if there are books about how a shepherd broke into your bungalow in Cuba one night and locked you in a cupboard...
