The Best of CaféLit 9 was one of those books where we asked those who had been in the previous volume to vote for this year’s stories They were to pick five and give five points to the best, four to the second best etc. We totted up all of the points and found a rank order. We published the top 40,000 words. The stories were published in rank order in the book.
Okay, so my two stories ‘The Yellow Bus’ and ‘Three’s a Crowd’ were the last two to be included. Never mind. They got there.
‘The Yellow Bus’ is based on a true story. I always say, anyway, that bus journeys provide writers with tons of ideas.
‘Three’s a Crowd’ was based on a writing prompt.
I write short stories as a way of punctuating my involvement with my novel writing. Every time I finish an edit I write a short story or something similar. I go to Fair Submissions and try to write something for whatever is on the landing page. I enjoy the discipline of writing to a brief. However, that doesn’t mean that the story hasn’t come from something I met on one of my travels – perhaps on a yellow bus.
How did these two stories end up in CaféLit?
I submit something every day somewhere. I keep a spreadsheet of what has gone where and what is available to submit. CaféLit comes to the top of the list every now and then.
I never give up on a piece, but I do reedit before I send it out again.
Recently, I had a piece of flash creative non-fiction accepted that had been out eleven times before.
By the way, we use a different method each year for selecting which stories go into The Best of books. 14 and 15 are chosen by different editors. 16 will be by yours truly. Who knows what we’ll do for 17?
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