Tapestry Making
Last week I completed the shortest Canterbury Tale I've ever written, provisionally titled The Tapestry-Maker's Second Tale. It started life as a 40-line (350-word) piece, written for a weekly flash fiction competition; and although the story felt a little truncated in places, I've entered it in Writers' Forum magazine's monthly poetry competition.
I was caught in a dilema, however. Should I expand the piece (my other Canterbury Tales are from 1,700 to 18,500 words long), and if I should expand it, by how much? I finally decided only to expand on the areas of the Tale that felt truncated, which resulted in a piece that was a mere 64 lines (or 520 words) long.
The Tale is an exemplar, a morality tale, much in the style of Chaucer's Pardoner's Tale, though it runs at only a quater of The Pardoner's Tale's length.
Although I feel a bit of a fraud passing off such a short story as a Canterbury Tale, The Tapestry-Maker's Second Tale is a complete story, with a beginning, a middle and an end, and with a brevity that will make it a useful advertisement for my 'Lost' Canterbury Tales project.
Below are the opening six lines:
Three Persian merchants, trav’ling from abroad
Took refuge in a barn to count their hoard
Of oriental gold, for since their dash
From China they had not assessed their cache.
The reason for their headlong flight was fleas
Which spread - through bites - a fatal new disease.
Anyhow, that's it for this week!
Below are links to my two Global Short Story Competition winners, my short-listed story for the National newspaper, Abu Dhabi, and my Canterbury Tale published by Coscom Entertainment:
http://coscomentertainment.com/?p=159
http://www.globalshortstories.net/winningstoriesjuly09.pdf
http://www.globalshortstories.net/winningstoriesdec09.pdf
http://www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/short-story-a-day-for-decisiveness
Happy writing!
I was caught in a dilema, however. Should I expand the piece (my other Canterbury Tales are from 1,700 to 18,500 words long), and if I should expand it, by how much? I finally decided only to expand on the areas of the Tale that felt truncated, which resulted in a piece that was a mere 64 lines (or 520 words) long.
The Tale is an exemplar, a morality tale, much in the style of Chaucer's Pardoner's Tale, though it runs at only a quater of The Pardoner's Tale's length.
Although I feel a bit of a fraud passing off such a short story as a Canterbury Tale, The Tapestry-Maker's Second Tale is a complete story, with a beginning, a middle and an end, and with a brevity that will make it a useful advertisement for my 'Lost' Canterbury Tales project.
Below are the opening six lines:
Three Persian merchants, trav’ling from abroad
Took refuge in a barn to count their hoard
Of oriental gold, for since their dash
From China they had not assessed their cache.
The reason for their headlong flight was fleas
Which spread - through bites - a fatal new disease.
Anyhow, that's it for this week!
Below are links to my two Global Short Story Competition winners, my short-listed story for the National newspaper, Abu Dhabi, and my Canterbury Tale published by Coscom Entertainment:
http://coscomentertainment.com/?p=159
http://www.globalshortstories.net/winningstoriesjuly09.pdf
http://www.globalshortstories.net/winningstoriesdec09.pdf
http://www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/short-story-a-day-for-decisiveness
Happy writing!
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