October 2023
blog, Sharing A Book Cover with the Famous.
Blast from
the past
I had the
honor of being published by The Daily Telegraph and the Arvon Foundation in the UK some years ago. 1999 to be specific. I took
part in a 50-word short story competition alongside a fellow
writer from Switzerland. My short story, “The Claim” was among 200, fifty-word
short stories, selected from 9000 entrants to be published and featured alongside commissioned writers
like Doris Lessing, actor Ralph Fiennes, and Salman Rushdie among others. I was so
elated. I don’t know why I did not enter
the contest again. The contest seems to have run only from 1999 to 2001. I have been writing forever.
According to the website where the competition was advertised, a mini-saga, minisaga, or mini-saga is
a short story based on a long story. It should contain exactly 50 words, plus a
title of up to 15 characters. However, the title requirement is not always
enforced and sometimes eliminated altogether. Mini-sagas are alternately known as micro-stories, ultra-shorts stories,
or fifty-word stories.
We are informed on the site that the form was invented by writer Brian Aldiss and the newspaper The Daily
Telegraph, which has held several mini-saga competitions, as has BBC Radio 4.
Here is my fifty-word short story as well as a few commissioned pieces by famous writers and actors.
Here is a link to
The Best Short Story Writing Contest of 2023. Perhaps you will now like to give it a try.
https://blog.reedsy.com/writing-contests/short-story/
Althea Romeo Mark
Born in Antigua, West Indies, Althea
Romeo-Mark is an educator and writer who grew up in St. Thomas, US Virgin
Islands. She has lived and taught in St. Thomas, Virgin Islands, USA, Liberia
(1976-1990), London, England (1990-1991), and Switzerland since 1991.
She writes
poetry, personal essays and short stories and has been published in Antigua and
Barbuda, Argentina, The Bahamas, Barbados, Colombia, Germany, India, Italy, Kenya,
Liberia, Norway, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Romania, Spain, Switzerland, U.K, USA,
and the US, Virgin Islands.
Althea
Romeo Mark’s published books include On the Borders
of Belonging, 2023. She is the author of two full-length poetry
collections, The Nakedness of New and If Only the Dust Would
Settle, (English-German), three chapbooks, Beyond Dreams: The Ritual Dancer, Two
Faces, Two Phases and Palaver, Shu-Shu Moko Jumbi. The Silent Dancing
Spirit is an anthology that includes poems by Althea Romeo-Mark and prose
and poetry from participants in a Black Writers’ workshop conducted at the
Department of African American Affairs at Kent State University.
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