Nice! Vampiric flash-fiction! But perhaps this would be micro-fiction? Sorry, Simone--I can't keep up with the proliferation of the patois surrounding the short fiction world? What the hell is "hundo" anyway? I keep seeing that word all over Medium, usually as a tag on erotica content, I assume that's another category of truncated fiction. I know it's very popular, but I'm not known for parsimonious prose!
I don't know whether it's flash or micro either. I treat writing like eating - when I'm full and when the story is done, I stop. A 'hundo' is a story in exactly a hundred words. It's great fun in a creative writing class but can get a bit tiresome or contrived.
Agreed--the few "hundo" pieces I've looked at don't seem to be much of anything, really. "Contrived" is a perfect term--a proper three-act story within a 100-word hard limit (complete with characters and plot), is absurd. It may play as tour-de-force literature for the TikTok types, or as an experimental/minimalist thing if I'm in a charitable mood. But 100 words to me is one or two very well-crafted sentences, a portion of a paragraph, an entire paragraph, but hardly an entire piece. Symptomatic of our times, when short attention spans are supposed to be the target audience. There was a horrid piece on Medium last week in which the author claimed that the "novel was dead" along with traditional publishing (the title read something like that), and that all writers should just give up on pen and ink, books, and the like--and just submit to the machine--"you can earn money from a 2-page piece," and we should be content as creators with that. It got lots of comments. I wrote a rather passionate comment--or, refutation, rebuke, defense, whatever--of this asinine position. He wrote back telling me I wasn't being polite. My reply: "I have written what I have written." No further comments were received...
I read the piece you referred to on Medium. My fingers where hovering over the keyboard to comment but I decided, if someone was going to write something that stupid they could live in their own little world without books, until the power goes off.
Well, as you know, when I'm confronted with abject stupidity (as was the case with this textbook exemplar of 21st century, techie, fast-buck, soulless philistinism), I mount a full-on pro-art, pro-human, merciless onslaught with no quarter given! In my retort I made a point of blaming the optimistic, evangelical zeal for the "digital age" and "democratization" of writing and publishing (as he advocates) for the proliferation of literary sewage contaminating the planet, and that "democratization" was in no way indicative of something positive. To expand the metaphor, how would he feel about the "democratization" of neurosurgery?
Nice! Vampiric flash-fiction! But perhaps this would be micro-fiction? Sorry, Simone--I can't keep up with the proliferation of the patois surrounding the short fiction world? What the hell is "hundo" anyway? I keep seeing that word all over Medium, usually as a tag on erotica content, I assume that's another category of truncated fiction. I know it's very popular, but I'm not known for parsimonious prose!
I don't know whether it's flash or micro either. I treat writing like eating - when I'm full and when the story is done, I stop. A 'hundo' is a story in exactly a hundred words. It's great fun in a creative writing class but can get a bit tiresome or contrived.
Agreed--the few "hundo" pieces I've looked at don't seem to be much of anything, really. "Contrived" is a perfect term--a proper three-act story within a 100-word hard limit (complete with characters and plot), is absurd. It may play as tour-de-force literature for the TikTok types, or as an experimental/minimalist thing if I'm in a charitable mood. But 100 words to me is one or two very well-crafted sentences, a portion of a paragraph, an entire paragraph, but hardly an entire piece. Symptomatic of our times, when short attention spans are supposed to be the target audience. There was a horrid piece on Medium last week in which the author claimed that the "novel was dead" along with traditional publishing (the title read something like that), and that all writers should just give up on pen and ink, books, and the like--and just submit to the machine--"you can earn money from a 2-page piece," and we should be content as creators with that. It got lots of comments. I wrote a rather passionate comment--or, refutation, rebuke, defense, whatever--of this asinine position. He wrote back telling me I wasn't being polite. My reply: "I have written what I have written." No further comments were received...
I read the piece you referred to on Medium. My fingers where hovering over the keyboard to comment but I decided, if someone was going to write something that stupid they could live in their own little world without books, until the power goes off.
Well, as you know, when I'm confronted with abject stupidity (as was the case with this textbook exemplar of 21st century, techie, fast-buck, soulless philistinism), I mount a full-on pro-art, pro-human, merciless onslaught with no quarter given! In my retort I made a point of blaming the optimistic, evangelical zeal for the "digital age" and "democratization" of writing and publishing (as he advocates) for the proliferation of literary sewage contaminating the planet, and that "democratization" was in no way indicative of something positive. To expand the metaphor, how would he feel about the "democratization" of neurosurgery?