Paul A. FreemaN - chaucerian inspirations
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The Shortest Canterbury Tale - The Tapestry-Maker's Second Tale

9/14/2012

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Picture
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!


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The Weaver's Second Tale - The Earl Bites the Dust

9/4/2012

0 Comments

 
Picture
Medieval Poisoning
I finally got to the Earl of Perth's demise in The Weaver's Second Tale. Unfortunately I haven't found the motivation yet to continue further. The storyline has become so intricate that I'll have to put together a corkboard with different coloured cards to plot the action and keep track of all the charactersd and their descriptions / character traits.

In the interim, last week I knocked out my shortest ever Canterbury Tale (The Tapestry-Maker's Second Tale) - more of that next week.

Meantime, here are eight lines from The Weaver's Second Tale dealing with James, the Earl of Perth's death:

Then suddenly the castle’s joyous mood
Transformed, replacing merriment with fear;
For struggling to his feet ’twas crystal clear
From James’s features something was amiss.
His face was pale as chalk, as if the kiss
Of scything Death had brushed against his cheek.
His lips turned blue, and when he tried to speak
No words, just laboured grunts and gasps, emerged.

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!



0 Comments

    Paul A. Freeman

    Paul A. Freeman works in Abu Dhabi, in the Middle East. He lives there with his wife and youngest child.

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