William Essex
Shall I tell you a story?
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Telling stories

13/3/2020

 
Lately I’ve been posting short stories on Medium.com. Some new, some not-so-new, and some written for children.

Medium.com, as perhaps we all know, self-describes as an “online publishing platform”. It has the endearing characteristic that it pays for popular content – not much, but there are a few dollars waiting for me, if I can only get around to filling in the US tax form – and of more practical value, it has curators.

These are people – I think people, not algorithms – who pick articles (and short stories, etc.) for circulation to Medium.com’s subscribers and users – yes, both; you can pay for unlimited access or you can read a limited amount per month for free.

I’ve had Medium (dot com) in the back of my mind for a while now. I read an interview with its founder, Evan Williams (co-founder of Twitter), and then I read something else, and happened across something else, and finally took the hint and signed up for an account.

An email started arriving, offering me curated content. After a while, I went in and changed my preferences.

Medium’s okay. I read a lot of what I’m sent. Slightly too much on how to live, how to get by in the big city, how to talk to girls, how to get through your twenties without making a fool of yourself, and I’m pretty sure I also imagined the piece on How to be a writer without having to write anything that I’m remembering now, but there are some good people up there.

Umair Haque, for example. Today’s offering is Notes on a Pandemic: what “We’re in it together” really means. And here’s a piece by Lisa Damour revealing that ‘Anxious’ is the new ‘shy’.

In fiction – oh, here we are. Fiction Writing’s Place on Medium by Tom Farr, and 3 Ways to Make Your Fiction Writing Better – Right Now by Shaunta Grimes. Not to mention The Secret to Becoming a Massively Popular Writer by Ayodeji Awosika.

All interesting, in their different ways. There is also actual fiction (try Bridget Webber).

The unit of approval on Medium.com is the ‘clap’ – which is like a ‘like’ except that you can keep on clapping for as long as you, er, like. There’s probably a piece somewhere on how many claps to give, to signal degrees of approval, and no doubt there’s a block on clapping your own pieces.

This isn’t where I get to boast that I’ve received lots of claps, because, you see, I’ve, um, so to speak, not to put too fine a point on it, er – but what I have noticed is, the claps I have received have (almost) all been for the apocalyptic stories.

If the world ends during the story, or civilisation collapses, or rising sea levels drown everybody – you get the picture. For a truly awful disaster – I get applause.

I do have friends who clap my more sensitively creative-writing-type stories, once I’ve explained the clapping system to them, and I’m sure there are hundreds of articles on How to get more claps for your fiction, but that’s not why I’m writing this.

I like that it’s alive; that there are people reading, curating, clapping. I like the natural-selection aspect – the people who get lots of claps tend to be the people who write well about something interesting.

Mainly, I like having somewhere to put short stories that doesn’t also contain socks.

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Yes, and that's me behind the camera. Long time ago.

If I understand this thing correctly, the risk is that we all come down with an unpleasant viral infection simultaneously, and the modern economy grinds to a halt.

Nothing gets made; no services are provided.

Italy has pre-emptively ground to a halt already, and today’s (Wednesday morning’s) UK news is that a UK health minister has tested positive for the virus.

If I was writing this on Thursday morning, I’d mention President Trump’s ban on Europe/US flights, but as things stand, I’ll just claim credit as an incredibly accurate forecaster.

Either we can beat viruses, or we can’t. This isn’t the “zombie apocalypse”, or Stephen King’s “Captain Trips” (which kills almost everybody in The Stand), but the next virus might be.

This one is a convenient virus, because it works against the excesses of Western Civilisation (sic) and Globalisation (ha ha), not least by grounding so many globe-warming flights.

So yes, let’s all wash our hands – with soap and water; hand sanitiser is just the lazy alternative – and let’s see how much of the world we can save by staying self-isolated at home.

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    In a desk diary scavenged from a house of the dead, a man records his own experiences of the end times: what he has to do to survive; how he came to be marooned where he is; how he reacts to the discovery that he is not alone.

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    What happens here

    This site is no longer updated weekly because I've taken to writing at Medium dot com instead. I may come back, but for now, I'm enjoying the simplicity at Medium.

    No data is kept on this site overnight. Medium posts might sometimes turn up here, and posts from here might sometimes turn up on Medium.
        Mind you, if you get a sense of deja vu when reading my work, that may be because you've lived this life before.

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    Where are we now? We're hurtling round the sun, held to the ground by a weak force that we don’t begin to understand, arguing about trade deals between the land masses on a planet mostly covered by water.
       The dolphins must think us ridiculous. No wonder they only come to the shallow water to play with us, not to signal their most complex philosophies. More.


    Riddle. It takes two to make me, but when I'm made, I'm only a memory. What am I? Scroll down to find out.

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    Read My Shorts?

    Here is yet another page of old blog posts and other writings. Sorry, but I need my metaphorical sock drawer for metaphorical socks. The link to the page is right at the end of the paragraph here.

    A very green picture. I can't remember where I took this.


    Roads without end

    Here is a passage from a review of the book The Road to Somewhere by David Goodhart. I haven't read the book (yet), but the collected reviews would make a worthwhile set of political arguments in their own right. More.

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    Also available in English. Look further down.

    State of the Union

    Several commentators today saying that they've lost confidence in the US. Making their point by talking up the glories of the past. After two weeks of this administration, they're not going back.
         Were they wrong, and they've seen the light? Or has the US changed? I guess the latter is the intended meaning. But we should at least acknowledge the possibility... More.

    Categories
    (Started 4th November 2017; forgotten shortly after that.)

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    Abuse
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    Kitchen parenting

    I have teenage children. When they're home, sooner or later one of them will come to me and say: "Dad! We're going to make a mess in the kitchen!
       "Great!" I will reply, picking up on the tone of voice. "What are you going to do?"
        "We thought we'd slice up some peppers and onion and bits of chicken and leave them glued to the bottom of the frying pan. Burn something in one of the saucepans and leave it floating in the sink."
        "Anything else?" More.

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    Variously available online, in a range of formats.

    No pinpricks

    Okay, so a certain President recently made a speech to his people, in which he told them that their country's military "don't do pinpricks". His intention was to get across that when those soldiers do a "limited" or even "targeted" strike, it hurts. But those of us in the cynical wing of the listening public took it the other way. More.


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    Making mistakes

    We all make mistakes in our relationships. Some are mistakes that can be corrected with an apology. Sometimes - "if only I'd said that, and not that." Sometimes, they're mistakes that are incomprehensible even to ourselves, and sometimes, we do things that show us up as not quite the likeable hero of our own story that we want to think we are. More.

    Man down?

    There's a report by the Samaritans about men and suicide. It's titled Men, Suicide and Society, and it finds that men are more likely to take their own lives than women (in the UK and ROI). More.


    Not available for women

    Offending the status quo

    Looking at both the US election and the revived Brexit debate in the UK, the question is not: who wins? but: how did we get here? More.

    Thinks: populism

    Bright, sunny morning. Breeze. Weather forecast said fog, but it's a blue sky overlaid with vapour trails. Windy season, drifts of Autumn-coloured leaves. Thinking, on this morning's walk, about populism. More.

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    Early morning, Church Street, Falmouth

    9th May 2014

    On the day that I wrote this, the early news told us of a parade in Moscow to celebrate Russia’s defeat of Nazi Germany in the Second World War. Crimea remained annexed, and the Russia/Ukraine crisis was not resolved. At around half eight, the BBC’s reporter in Moscow was cut off in mid-sentence summarising the military display; the Today programme on Radio 4 cut to the sports news. More.

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