Tiah Beautement's Blog, page 85

On Rapunzel is Dead

Short Story Day Africa is pleased to announce that the YA / KIDS anthology is now available on AMAZON for 99US cents and SMASHWORDS* for a donation (of your own choosing) to help keep SSDA alive. Rapunzel is Dead is a vibrant collection of stories by Africa’s younger writers from ages six to seventeen. Short Story Day Africa has assembled the best seventeen stories from their 2013 competition. Illustrations by Cat Hellisen, author of When the Sea is Rising Red, with a foreword by Tiah Beautement. “Don’t look so surprised ladies. You know I love a good party. So naturally...

On The Little Drummer Boy

I didn't write you a Christmas card

Originally published on my blog at Books Live. I didn’t write you a Christmas card. Or a note. Or one of those emails that spreads out thick and fast, coating inboxes and not always well received. There is no turkey waiting in the freezer or fridge. Nor have I procured a ham or duck. I didn’t make brandy balls, or those with rum. Skipped the gingerbread. Bought a pudding in a box, custard in a carton and mince pies the peer out from their cellophane packet. Chances are I’ll only nibble these treats around the edges, saving room for the...

On Home

Home, Toni Morrison - They rose up like men. We saw them. Like men they stood. - - Frank fell asleep between a wool blanket and plastic slipcovers and dreamed a dream dappled with body parts. - - From the windows, through the fur of snow, the landscape became more melancholy when the sun successfully brightened the quiet trees, unable to speak without their leaves. - - You can come up with words that catch it. - - When you write this down, know this: she was a shadow for most of my life, a presence marking its own absence,...

Feast, Famine & Potluck on Amazon and Smashwords Sale

Feast, Famine & Potluck is now available on Amazon Kindle. Also - Happy Short Story Day to our friends in the UK! Short Story Day Africa is celebrating the UK Short Story Day by taking 50% off Feast, Famine & Potluck for today only. If you are in the United States you will see that today it is available for $3.50 on Amazon. If you are outside the US the book may be advertised as more. (International rules of which SSDA does not understand.) BUT we do not believe in leaving the rest of the world out. We are Short...

On Pandemonium: Ash

Pandemonium: Ash, A short-short story anthology - I won't believe my eyes. No. But do you believe your eyes? Now I have just one remaining, will it at least tell me half-truths? - Dan Green, Duidain - When husband and wife are unable to move near enough to kiss one another I kiss each of their lips in turn, a chain to join lips and hearts together. In other circumstances this would be improper, but we are past that now. - Charlie Human, A Raft - Several horses are kissing algae off the rocks, tails swishing a warning that alert...

On goodness

Nobody objects to a woman being a good writer or sculptor or geneticist if at the same time she manages to be a good wife, good mother, good looking, good tempered, well groomed and unaggressive. - Leslie M. Mclntyre

On Equal Rites

Terry Pratchett, Equal Rites - It wasn't a large village, and wouldn't have shown up on a map of the mountains. It barely showed up on a map of the village. - - [Wizard]: 'But she's going to have a lot of problems.' [Death]: 'That's what life is all about.' - - Time passed, which, basically, is its job. - - It didn't occur to her to start worrying. For the first eight years of her life the world had been a particularly boring place and now that it was becoming interesting Esk wasn't about to act ungrateful. - -...

On Morgan: A Lyric by Boyer Rickel

Articulation, a theorist writes, allows a slight gap between the feeling and the self, and that gap permits the freedom of both. The cups used to pound his chest, sides and back, are plastic oxygen masks, designed to clamp over an accident victim’s nose and mouth. When I die, he begins . . . a favorite opening to argument— Don’t be so sure you’ll be first, I nearly shout, every time. Pupil means “little doll”—from the Romans, who noticed we could see ourselves in each other’s eyes. - Boyer Rickel, Morgan: A Lyric

On Feast, Famine & Potluck

Short Story Day Africa's Adult Anthology 2013 - I had meant to summon my father only long enough to see what his head looked like, but now he was here and I did not know how to send him back. - Okwiri Odour, My Father's Head - What I wanted to know was what type of person Father Ignatius thought he was, instructing others to distribute their love like this or like that, as though one could measure love on weights, pack it inside glass jars and place it on shelves for the neighbours to pick as they pleased. -...