Tiah Beautement's Blog, page 148

Short Stories for the Summer

I have fallen into a pile of short story drafts and can only come up for quick breaths of air. Luckily for you, The Guardian's Summer Fiction Special features polished shorts for your pleasure. Enjoy!

Verbal Diarrhoea

My band teacher was a complex man who was born to music, but perhaps not born to teach. Through my life it has seemed that the teachers who can teach are often not the masters of the subject, but people who understand that learning does not always come easily. The masters, in turn, are frustrated by the lack of greatness at their feet. To say our band teacher was often frustrated would be an understatement. To say we acted out in response to his frustration, would be far too polite. One day, ...

Media watch

So how we doing... Malema is happy to kill the media that built him... Editors and the chief were meeting up yesterday (was I the only cynic who wondered if this was a set up for more journalist arrests?) Madam & Eve have found it hard to laugh, and they're a comic strip, for Pete's sake. (Thanks to Book SA for the link) And is this a joke? Did the Minister of Communications really go to China? Would explain a lot about the current proposals to curtail media freedom, I guess. I mean, it does ...

The Plenitude of Emptiness

We were forced to watch the news everyday at school. Which doesn't sound controversial, until one understands that it was adverts with a splash of news, not news with a splash of adverts. The propaganda (and message to buy! buy! buy!) was so overt that the students had no doubt that this was bull. The stupid TV show had screwed up our class schedules and gave our "sponsors" more say about our day than any salesman ever should. We rebelled as much as we could get away with, chatting, turning o...

Bobby Brown's Little Friends

Spoiler Alert! Spoiler Alert! Do not read on if you haven't already read the short story, Bobby Brown. I'm never sure how much I should say about where, how and why a story came into being. But in the case of "Bobby Brown" I feel a moral obligation to tell you a bit. As many of you already know, Bobby Brown himself was inspired from a painting. That was, on the whole, the start. I had nothing more. A name in my head, a man and his guitar and there ya go. Then I keep getting asked about the di...

A twist of fate

I have a draft-in-progress that has the highly un-original theme of writer's block. You may all rest easy in the assurance I am not trying to write the next version of The Shining. So I showed the piece to another writer, since feedback and editing are very important to me (believe me, if I could afford an editor for this blog, I would). The writer wrote back and we ended up discussing the people in our lives who thought we would write. Of course certain family is always supportive, "You can ...

Cape Town Memories

And to the man who let my son have his own private moment in The Planetarium - thank you. You have no idea how much that meant to my star gazing child.

Big Book Chain Chat

Have you seen Litnet's Big Book Chain Chat? No? Well go have a look, then. You may even recognise somebody (pssst - ME.) Here's the deal: People in South Africa (or published in South Africa) who are part of that whole "world of books" are invited to write a blog-ish post. Then YOU, lovely world wide readers, get to "chat" about the topics at hand. The idea is that we start forming a chain. So one writer starts (let's say Richard de Nooy, since he's on there), then another picks up a thread o...

Cape Town Goodies

All I'm gonna say is, it's a good thing I bought that handbag.

Popular Fiction vs Chick-lit

I know I said at one point that I'd tell you more about the talk I heard at the book fair on women's fiction, but BookSA beat me to it. Please have a look at the article BookSA wrote about the event, and The Guardian link Colleen posted in the comments. Good reads!