On Tuesday someone I follow on twitter announced they were leaving having been driven off through tweets received. This blew up really quickly and so I was able to glean very little in the limited time I had access to their timeline before the account was deleted. Being a timeline only of their tweets, I couldn't see what abuse or menace they were on the receiving end, so I could very well have the wrong reason they found their back to the wall. But I think it was over the use of a single word.
The word 'banter' in its original meaning has the sense of light-hearted verbal exchange. Certainly nothing aimed at wounding. But the word has I think developed a bit more edge as it is used as an excuse to defend hurtful barbs. This is particularly true of team sports dressing rooms, where the cut and thrust of banter is perceived as both a team bonding instrument but also a tool for toughening up. The logic running something like if you can't take the competitive asperity of a dressing room, you probably won't be able to survive in professional sports. It's a proving ground of sorts. A verbal assault course that has to be bested. It's a completely non-sensical argument, since a team dressing room is absolutely the place to retain grudges, because you are forced together with people you probably don't like every day with no escape. As to team building, how many soccer clubs banned card schools that were supposed to help bonding, only for the playboy millionaires to have huge gambling debts with team mates that only ruptured any sense of unity? So much is excused as being 'just a bit of banter' and players often claim they love 'a bit of banter' with the crowd, until they lose it and respond with a gesture that lands them in trouble with the governing body, or worse. I don't think Eric Cantona saw it as just a 'bit of banter' when he leapt into the crowd with a karate kick at an opposition fan who had been baiting him.
So the word itself has perhaps become degraded from its original sense. The ex-twitterer didn't even use the word 'banter', but the slang foreshortening of it to 'bants'. I think the tweet was something like "just bants". I was completely unaware of this idiom and had no idea that's what they were referring to. So I went online to look it up in that gospel of idiomatic usage "Urban Dictionary". I saw that 'bants' was just a shortened slangy version of 'banter', perfect for the cramped language use encouraged by 140 characters on twitter. You shave all of a single character by such usage.
But I'm an old hand at referencing "Urban Dictionary". I know full well that there is likely to be more than one interpretation of any slang or idiomatic term or phrase listed there, and indeed validation and veracity are, as is the prescription of our age, voted on as to confirm or reject. Indeed 'bants' has another meaning and I suspect it was this that brought down the opprobrium on the tweeter's head. (As is often the case, there are actually a couple of minor variations on this second meaning, as UD always manages to convey a sense that any verbal explanation has had its vowels and consonants mangled in the telling as is the wont of the generations who speak without moving their upper lip and that the transcription on UD reflects this local and regional variation).
I'm not going to reproduce the alternative meanings, you can look them up yourself if you're so minded, but it seemed apparent to me that here was a difference between a UK English interpretation of the word 'bants' from an American English one, where the words is actually an acronym and its letter 'N' is highly charged as reiterated once again only this very week in the UK by Jeremy Clarkson's grovelling apology for using it and in the US, by a professional sports team owner stirring up the whole race issue with his own players and abdicating his right to own just such a sports team.
I knew neither meaning of the word as indeed I'd never heard the word before. I think it highly likely the tweeter only knew of the UK English one and thus fell foul of an unintended reverberation in its use. Is that a defence? I have absolutely no idea to be honest, in such a fast changing world of slang and idiom it simply isn't possible to stay on top of every single new word and phrase. "Urban Dictionary" being a crowdsourced compendium of such usage only encourages faster coinage of new idioms and all are of course completely unsubstantiated.
But and this is a big but, you put yourself and your opinions out in public on platforms like Twitter, you better be prepared to stand by and back up every word you post. Because if you put stuff out there that you are not in full comprehension of its meanings, shades, imputations, undertones and overtones, then you expose yourself to all manner of challenges. Should those challenges be vicious, insulting and cruel? Of course not, but they will be and possibly more since the current state of both legislation and law enforcement seems totally overwhelmed by the virtual phenomenon. Which brings me back to the dressing room. It's not how I would choose to forge a bonded, united team environment, but at present that is the state of affairs. You stand up and back yourself with a rhinoceros-plated hide, or you go under. It is the same in social media. And getting your language right is a crucial part.
Showing posts with label Twitter. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Twitter. Show all posts
Thursday, 8 May 2014
Monday, 19 November 2012
War Is Twitter By Other Means
Social media has been full of the exchanges of fire in Gaza. I fully understand eye witness reports, ensuring that the view of people coming under attack is disseminated around the world, where it otherwise might not be reported due to certain media bias. But there is also the official spokepersons' views to counteract the view from the ground. A war of hearts and minds to sway the Western (in the main) World. But most of the Western audience is already fully aligned on one side or the other, such is the long-standing nature of this particular conflict.
Reading some of the responses online, some people seem to be reacting to this as if this has never happened before. Fair enough if you're under the age of 18 perhaps, since Israel sent in its army only 4 years ago in the previous of its attempts to suppress Palestinian militancy . This is a chronic, repetitive state of affairs. Israel talks about ensuring its security, but the best way to do that would be to support and nurture its neighbour rather than cripple its economy and drive its people into poverty. Like it or not, economic wellbeing draws the sting from much protest, even those based on claims of territoriality and identity, in that a tranche of potential opposition is unwilling to rock the boat if they are flourishing economically. When the Palestinians were engaged in a campaign of suicide bombing through the late 1990s and into the early 2000s, the Israelis had to deal with the physical clear up. Since Jewish law demands that dead bodies are preserved integral for burial, every piece of flesh and even the spilled blood was mopped up and buried. A single life is so precious in Jewish teaching, witness the campaign to get the release of one Israeli soldier held captive for 5 years, in return for 1000 Palestinian hostages. Yet they don't extend the same thought to the lives of the civilians killed in air attacks on cities. In fact that seems to represent the exchange rate calculations of the Israelis, for every one of their citizens killed by a Hamas rocket, 1000 palestinians may have to pay the price. The calculus of revenge, deterrent, escalation, call it what you want.
But far worse than not supporting Palestine and its economy, over the years Israel has indulged in a string of abuses heaped on its neighbour, which both fuels Palestinian dissent and just as significantly, has seen a dereliction of duty on the part of the Western world in not sustaining a constant media campaign over. Why do we only wait until hostilities break out, when the mismatch of military might, the disproportionate response by the Israeli Defence Force and densely populated cities are attacked from the air, before raising our voices in protest? Below is a list of continual Israeli abuses of Palenstinian rights and property, which they have been allowed to get away with relatively unscathed by the world's population. Often UN resolutions against Israeli actions or interests have simply been flagrantly ignored by the Israelis, because they can. So when these hostilities are over, let's keep the pressure up on the following.
1) The Israeli state has a right of "Aliyah" enshrined in its constitution. This is the right for any Diasporic Jew who wishes to resettle in Israel, to be granted property by the state, to facilitate his return home. As an echo of the short-lived "40 Acres and a Mule" programme to freed slaves during the US Civil War, it sounds utterly noble. However, look at a map of the region. Israel is tiny. It has no more land. Except what it snaffles away from the Palestinians. The infamous "settlements", inevitably bordering on Palestinian communities, having in all likelihood taken away some of their land. Nothing inflammatory there then. Aliyah is an open ended contract that allows the Israeli state to land grab whenever it fancies it can get away with it. Which given the deafening silence on the issue, is at present, all the time.
2) The Middle East is always associated as being the place where oil is the significant commodity. But not in Israel, where it's water. Much land has been reclaimed from the desert, which Israel has wielded sufficient technological skill to make bloom and contribute to economic production. But it also serves to place a premium on water resources, for water must be channeled to the desert where Nature has seen to it that it is in scant supply. Israel has diverted water courses, tapped into underground wells, removed trees which has altered environmental ecosystems such as groundwater and salt levels. This process has being going on for years, with little protest from the West, despite statistics showing the Palestinians' water supplies is below the World Health organisation's stated daily minimum requirement for good health.
When the Israelis argue that it's only they who make the desert bloom through their dedication, labour and innovation, it is an inherently racist argument that implies Palestinians have none of these required qualities and that they could not make the desert bloom...
3) A security wall separates Israel from the West Bank Palestinian settlements. It was erected in response to Palestinian suicide bombers gaining access to Israel for its targets. Israelis point to the wall's success in virtually eliminating suicide bomb attacks, but at what moral cost? The wall is a form of Apartheid as practised by the whites in South Africa. Since the division between Israeli and Palestinian is along racial lines. Since many Palestinians work in Israel, the wall is a solidification of how the Israelis exploit this fact to make Palestinians all too conscious of their second class citizen's status. Israeli workers don't get searched at checkpoints as a matter of course on their way to work.
And where the wall demanded to be sited on land already occupied or owned, guess which of the two communities had their property sequestered to the wall building programme?
Sidenote: when suicide bombers were getting through to Israel before the wall went up, Israel would punish the family of the bomber by bulldozing the family house. Even on the level of waging a strategic campaign, this doesn't make any sense. All it can do is reinforce the community's sense of outrage, engender sympathy for the family and foster recruitment of more suicide bombers. This came at a time when world opinion was far more divided on the Palestinian cause through this very issue of suicide bombing as a tactic and further thrown into disrepute when it emerged that the ever-shrinking pool of recruits was being bolstered from the ranks of the young and the vulnerable. The wall helped usher some of the sympathy back to the Palestinian corner.
4) Israel has repeatedly practised state-sponsored assassination of Iranian nuclear scientists, as well as Palestinian targets both in Palestine and other neighbouring countries. Yet no one calls them on this.
So please Twitterati and Facebook Fans, don't confine your chat and outrage only as long as the rockets fly back and forth over the border. This is an ongoing situation that needs our agitation and pressure to resolve a long list of injustices and exploitation.
***Make no mistake, this is a conflict over land. A geopolitical struggle with appeal to the Old Testament, mysticism, blood history and the rest. What this actually means in practise is a battle for living space. The war over water, the land under the defence wall, even the nature of fighting within the confines of Palestinian towns, may I recommend you to a tremendous book that deals with the spatial conflict involved throughout.
Reading some of the responses online, some people seem to be reacting to this as if this has never happened before. Fair enough if you're under the age of 18 perhaps, since Israel sent in its army only 4 years ago in the previous of its attempts to suppress Palestinian militancy . This is a chronic, repetitive state of affairs. Israel talks about ensuring its security, but the best way to do that would be to support and nurture its neighbour rather than cripple its economy and drive its people into poverty. Like it or not, economic wellbeing draws the sting from much protest, even those based on claims of territoriality and identity, in that a tranche of potential opposition is unwilling to rock the boat if they are flourishing economically. When the Palestinians were engaged in a campaign of suicide bombing through the late 1990s and into the early 2000s, the Israelis had to deal with the physical clear up. Since Jewish law demands that dead bodies are preserved integral for burial, every piece of flesh and even the spilled blood was mopped up and buried. A single life is so precious in Jewish teaching, witness the campaign to get the release of one Israeli soldier held captive for 5 years, in return for 1000 Palestinian hostages. Yet they don't extend the same thought to the lives of the civilians killed in air attacks on cities. In fact that seems to represent the exchange rate calculations of the Israelis, for every one of their citizens killed by a Hamas rocket, 1000 palestinians may have to pay the price. The calculus of revenge, deterrent, escalation, call it what you want.
But far worse than not supporting Palestine and its economy, over the years Israel has indulged in a string of abuses heaped on its neighbour, which both fuels Palestinian dissent and just as significantly, has seen a dereliction of duty on the part of the Western world in not sustaining a constant media campaign over. Why do we only wait until hostilities break out, when the mismatch of military might, the disproportionate response by the Israeli Defence Force and densely populated cities are attacked from the air, before raising our voices in protest? Below is a list of continual Israeli abuses of Palenstinian rights and property, which they have been allowed to get away with relatively unscathed by the world's population. Often UN resolutions against Israeli actions or interests have simply been flagrantly ignored by the Israelis, because they can. So when these hostilities are over, let's keep the pressure up on the following.
1) The Israeli state has a right of "Aliyah" enshrined in its constitution. This is the right for any Diasporic Jew who wishes to resettle in Israel, to be granted property by the state, to facilitate his return home. As an echo of the short-lived "40 Acres and a Mule" programme to freed slaves during the US Civil War, it sounds utterly noble. However, look at a map of the region. Israel is tiny. It has no more land. Except what it snaffles away from the Palestinians. The infamous "settlements", inevitably bordering on Palestinian communities, having in all likelihood taken away some of their land. Nothing inflammatory there then. Aliyah is an open ended contract that allows the Israeli state to land grab whenever it fancies it can get away with it. Which given the deafening silence on the issue, is at present, all the time.
2) The Middle East is always associated as being the place where oil is the significant commodity. But not in Israel, where it's water. Much land has been reclaimed from the desert, which Israel has wielded sufficient technological skill to make bloom and contribute to economic production. But it also serves to place a premium on water resources, for water must be channeled to the desert where Nature has seen to it that it is in scant supply. Israel has diverted water courses, tapped into underground wells, removed trees which has altered environmental ecosystems such as groundwater and salt levels. This process has being going on for years, with little protest from the West, despite statistics showing the Palestinians' water supplies is below the World Health organisation's stated daily minimum requirement for good health.
When the Israelis argue that it's only they who make the desert bloom through their dedication, labour and innovation, it is an inherently racist argument that implies Palestinians have none of these required qualities and that they could not make the desert bloom...
3) A security wall separates Israel from the West Bank Palestinian settlements. It was erected in response to Palestinian suicide bombers gaining access to Israel for its targets. Israelis point to the wall's success in virtually eliminating suicide bomb attacks, but at what moral cost? The wall is a form of Apartheid as practised by the whites in South Africa. Since the division between Israeli and Palestinian is along racial lines. Since many Palestinians work in Israel, the wall is a solidification of how the Israelis exploit this fact to make Palestinians all too conscious of their second class citizen's status. Israeli workers don't get searched at checkpoints as a matter of course on their way to work.
And where the wall demanded to be sited on land already occupied or owned, guess which of the two communities had their property sequestered to the wall building programme?
Sidenote: when suicide bombers were getting through to Israel before the wall went up, Israel would punish the family of the bomber by bulldozing the family house. Even on the level of waging a strategic campaign, this doesn't make any sense. All it can do is reinforce the community's sense of outrage, engender sympathy for the family and foster recruitment of more suicide bombers. This came at a time when world opinion was far more divided on the Palestinian cause through this very issue of suicide bombing as a tactic and further thrown into disrepute when it emerged that the ever-shrinking pool of recruits was being bolstered from the ranks of the young and the vulnerable. The wall helped usher some of the sympathy back to the Palestinian corner.
4) Israel has repeatedly practised state-sponsored assassination of Iranian nuclear scientists, as well as Palestinian targets both in Palestine and other neighbouring countries. Yet no one calls them on this.
So please Twitterati and Facebook Fans, don't confine your chat and outrage only as long as the rockets fly back and forth over the border. This is an ongoing situation that needs our agitation and pressure to resolve a long list of injustices and exploitation.
***Make no mistake, this is a conflict over land. A geopolitical struggle with appeal to the Old Testament, mysticism, blood history and the rest. What this actually means in practise is a battle for living space. The war over water, the land under the defence wall, even the nature of fighting within the confines of Palestinian towns, may I recommend you to a tremendous book that deals with the spatial conflict involved throughout.
Friday, 23 March 2012
The Atomised Herd Mentality
Last Saturday a football crowd of 35,000 people all united and reacted and behaved as one when a professional athlete collapsed on the pitch in front of them and medical teams fought for an age to restart his heart. The crowd were hushed, concerned, rooting for him, respectful, distraught and behaved with utter dignity. All of this was visibly captured by the TV cameras there to cover the match. All parochial differences between the fans of two competing teams disappeared, any thought of the game needing to continue to an end slipped away instantly as this drama of the stuff of life and death unfolded before their eyes. There were no dissenters, all were linked by their common humanity. 35,000 empathic people.
Last summer there were some seriously destructive riots in the UK in which lives were lost. While the fires were raging for several nights, the mass reaction as gauged through social media was very different from the above. I have attempted to reproduce a slice of that in this week's Friday Flash story off 999 words called "Riotous Assembly". Here the voices were as diverse and disunited as it is possible to conceive.
While there were informative tweets about the rapidly shifting scene on the ground, with helpful tweets about areas to avoid, and towards the end appeals for people to come out and clean up the wreckage of their communities, there was also a cacophony of voices just pitching into the 'debate' which only served to cloud the issue. I can't help feeling that they should have watched on in shocked and horrified silence like the football crowd, unless they were passing on useful information rather than their opinions.
For even as the arson, destruction and looting were raging, people were tweeting their political solutions; curfews, military intervention, or berating an end to the government cuts in education and youth opportunities, the gross inequalities in our society etc. What did these people expect to achieve? Did they really anticipate someone from authority (most of whom seemed to be away on vacation anyway) reading their tweets and acting on them? People just want to opine. To sound off. From the safe place of their house. I just don't get any sense of empathy emerging from such actions. Such people may claim that their voice isn't being heard, which is why they felt the need to offer it. Well many of the the rioters claimed the same thing for themselves when they tried to justify their actions. How can you hear any voice when it is submerged in a cacophony?
Then there were pictures and testimonies posted from the streets during the riots. Some by the participants goading, boasting, showing off their ill-gotten gains (and in doing so raising the chances of them being arrested on their own evidence). But in fact many were snapped on the phones of bystanders stood there observing the mayhem. Not professional journalists, but ordinary citizens who weren't looting, weren't starting fires, rather loitering there with their camera phones and generating 'content' for their blogs, Tumblrs or for YouTube or other means of sharing. Condoning the riots by accumulating material from it, albeit of the virtual and digital rather than stolen sports or electronic goods.
In my piece, by being relayed in reverse order of 'newest' tweets first and oldest tweets last, I hope I have conveyed the building crescendo of voices determined to have their say. Representing so much of a bombardment of the virtual airwaves, that it all just becomes white noise. Any vital information is obliterated by the deluge.
I hope my piece gives a sense of the welter of divergent voices that ultimately just seem to like the sound (look) of their own words on screen. While some treat the issue with great seriousness, others look to derive humour from it. Gallows humour? I might believe that if it wasn't done for self-aggrandisement, to make the person look clever. People are of course entitled to their opinion, but the time for that was probably after the riots had simmered down. This wasn't any real debate. No one was listening to anybody else. Besides, when has anyone ever had their views changed by online shouting? What could be more preposterous than online trolling of people over their views on the riots, WHILE people were having to flee their homes that had been set alight?
Two very different crowd behaviours. One showing the best commonality of humanity. And the other what happens when any such unity breaks down into a free-for-all. Be it one on the shopping high streets, or out in virtual reality.
Tuesday, 20 March 2012
Riotous Assembly - FridayFlash
(If you want to read my commentary on the thoughts behind this piece then click here)
broodboy: Same time next year yeah?
Meta_Lurgi: @GeneralCustard Do you mean out on the streets or here on Twitter?
Carly: Bring your broom tomorrow to clean up Clapham. The community to reclaim our streets from the thugs
GeneralCustard: It's a free for all. There's absolutely no control whatsoever
GeekChic: Flash mob rioting 2.0. This is the future folks!
sicpuppy: @eBaying4Blud Bravo dipshit, your ugly guilty mug now all over Twitter for the Police to identify you. You're going down
HoarseWhisperer: a building has just collapsed. I saw people jumping from it earlier. Just pray no one else was still in there?
eBaying4Blud: Electronic Booty @twitpic All offers?
EveHo: nuffink 2see here world jog on
TiddlyWink: To @skpollard Have you got home okay? Please just let me know
shabbashanks: Croydon's getting a facelift! Burn it down, can only look better that way
Under8: Police car on fire! BBQ pig!
VoyErr: I'm so frightened, I can hardly tweet straight
AJWheeler: Have just been threatened by a thug in a balaclava. it's really ugly out here. Don't know how I'm going to get home
BrapBrap: this aint no egg twitter mongs, its a molotov bomb an its coming your way
SkipJackTuner: <3 LOL and disorder
policeuk: Please RT to get @UK_blackberry to shut down #BBM till riots end #BlockBBM let's get it trending #LondonRiots
RTRT: RT fuzz are in full retreat! #Hackneyriot
RayLeeOtter: So apart from that Boris, how was the holiday? #LondonRiots #WhereisourMayor
RationList: If it's mindless to steal plasma tvs and smartphones, who emptied our minds with drooling over that shit in the first place?
smileyculture: we're all in this together right? U R now mothafuckas!!!!!!
SinNic: whatever can have possessed the dispossessed to take power for themselves?
R_Cane: Avoid Clapham Junction. It's a warzone
HighHeelDrifter: Why isn't there a curfew in place?
gangstar: U say were scum? What about police? Killed another innocent man. Shot him dead in his car
OscarBravo: we need the water cannons to clean this SCUM off our streets
QuantumAl: Stealing blackberries to organise riots to steal blackberries by...
FlimFlammable: That'll be the Wembley, Harlesden, Hammersmith posses. Window shopping now all the windows are kicked in
Trinny: What about Ealing? that's nothing to do with anything from the past. This isn't about deprivation or political protest
memememe: Why not? Nothing's changed since the last lot. Still Tottenham and Hackney gone up innit?
AliciaQ: I can't believe the police are letting it just happen
Nikos: I can't believe this is all happening. Again! #LondonRiots
CitizenSmith: Anyone looting in Tooting?
policeuk: incitement to riot is a serious criminal offence and carries heavy punishment tariffs
Gash: fancy me an upgrade on ma teevee. may roll down to ealing
topboy: keep the party going. keep getting more boys down and at it. They can't stop us. No police. No government. it's all ours for the taking
HistoryMan2.0: @StringVestTheory The Chavnots living the dream!
StringVestTheory: JD Sports? Truly this is the uprising of the Chavs
CarlSBerg: Broken Britain? it is now! #LondonRiots
RagandBone: #NottingHill shut your shops early and pull the shutters down. We're hearing rumours we're next #LondonRiots
clevertrevor85: there's something rioting in the state of Primark
Haughtense: They're breaking into all the shops. Clothes, mobile phones, hulking great tellies
Mash_Yeti: Come to Catford Bluds. No 5-0 down here at all. Make it happen. Mobb rule
OldMaid: There's people breaking into houses here #Ealing
ProfPlum: How many pairs of nicked Nikes equates to the education maintenance allowance? #youdothemaths
Brittstick: too few coppers to enforce order #cuts
SimonShelley: Bunch of about 50 hoodies gathering at Clapham Junction station #LondonRiots
gangbanger: Bluebottles lost their bottle. Oh no wait found it. Crashing down on their tit helmets!
dentedStu: rioters & police playing kiss chase down Peckham back streets
policeuk: Parents, do you know where your children are right now tonight? #Londonriots
sansculottery: Arab Spring, London Summer. Finishing what Guy Fawkes started but we're not lightweights like him #LondonRiots
MCShitehawk: No hype, we own the streets. Feds just standing back watching us. They bare scared
TriggerFinger: Dap @twitpic of mi boys. Took it on mi brand new phone rinsed bout 10 minutes ago #londonriots
2Wheeler: Yeah our riot vans in convoys not police ones! We're cleaning the high streets out
PithHelmet: I've seen vans pull up and collect stuff looted. This is organised #Londonriots
TomCollins: Ppl are stashing their loot in front gardens under bushes & going back 4 more gear #Clapham
HighPilbrow: Can someone tell me what a shooting in Tottenham has got to do with the thuggery in Clapham? Just looking for any excuse
SoldierTru: An fuck snitches too
w7fyt: Fuck da police
SallyArmy: OMG ppl jumping from the flats above and people on the pavement are catching them. Where are the fire brigade? And the Police?
Crunk: Police vans heading to Clapham Junction, roll on to Lavender Hill and Battersea
RayWhittle71: There's shops on fire with people leaning out the windows in the flats above. They're trapped
Links: Fire sale in Clapham. price is right, come on down. everything must go #LDNriot
Mash_Yeti: no we're gonna burn yours!
PlanC: What, you going to burn down your own communities again?
pinhead: smell of petrol and smoke. Uncle says brings back sweet memories #Tottenham
DisU: Endz beef ends tonite
streetfighter: Its ours. its all fuckin ours. Not one Fed in sight
DeadEnds: Feds getting a beating. Bring your bottles and bricks
Tricksy: Bruv this aint about ends right now. Were together against 5-0 cos of Duggan and weve got the streets
SnareDrum: Heard that someone protesting the Mark Duggan killing was beaten by police. Don't they ever learn?
M16N17: Edmonton got no bizness being out of their ends. Lets smack em back down
IWitness: Bus on fire in Tottenham. Police being pelted with all manner of stuff
ghettofuck: Edmonton? Those tards dont even got no proper postcode
hoodboy: enfield? Those pussyoles got no boys. gotta be edmonton
flyboyagaric: its all kicking off tottenham & enfield an i dont mean footy seasons started early
Tuesday, 19 July 2011
Huge Thanks To The Friday Flash Community
I just wanted to express my thanks to everyone and I mean everyone, I've come into contact with through the #fridayflash community over the last 20 months.
I've met some fantastic folk and read some wonderful fiction. I've shared trepidation over blog redesigns, rejection letters, book launches with several of you via Twitter. I've weighed into debates hosted by several of you, done the odd guest blog post and generally tried to actively participate in our community. But now for me the time has come to an end, as the shortest story form is being usurped in my priorities with long-form novel writing.
I can't remember how I came by #fridayflash. Who alerted me to it, or whether it was a punt I took on a link someone posted somewhere on Twitter.
Up until then my blog was a bit derisory. I had only really posted the odd bit of various novel works in progress, completely shorn of their context and viewed by about 1 person a week. When my novel came out in October 2009, I took a decision that I would concentrate on promoting it and would not commit to any new writing for nine months while I did so. I started making videos on self-publishing trends and writing blog posts.
But somewhere around then I also started writing and posting flash fiction. I'm still not quite sure why. I'd barely ever written short stories let alone flash. My writing style shall we say, veers towards the wordy. I'd also sworn I wouldn't be writing any new prose. Well now I've written about 70 and discovered that I can still interweave even the shortest form of fiction with demanding language. I've even performed some of them live at readings. Recorded them for either audio or video. In that 9 months of promotion, (extended to 18 in reality), through writing flashes I probably wrote more regularly and more volume of words than I ever had. 70 stories around 1000 words each, that 70,000 words then and there!
Nor can I remember my first flash piece as it wasn't posted on my blog but on one of a couple of collective writing sites I was a contributor to. My earliest pieces got one or two comments, but within a month or so that had risen to double figures. You guys seemed to validate what I was trying to do with language, within a form that didn't give you much leeway for playing around with it and that gave me great heart since it had been a criticism often levelled against my longer prose. My blog traffic took huge spikes on Fridays and Saturdays. Some of you were kind enough to honour me with blog awards, which I found a little hard to accept as I still don't see myself as much of a blogger!
I'm lucky, I have 3 Fridays in four where I'm not working. That allowed me to dive into reading as many flashes from you guys as I could. Gradually I got acquainted with people's styles; who tended to write genre and those who might tackle anything, so that one had no notion of what you were about to read from week to week.
My heart gave a little kick each time MazzzinLeeds' outlandishly long gun barrel at the top of her blog hove into view, as I wondered what fiendishly clever story she would offer up this Friday. Or hit the 'play' button for Anthony (Bukowski's Basement)'s mood music to accompany reading his story, looked over by that dissolute photo of ChuckBuck himself. Laura Eno's fantastic series of Chronos, Death, a motley cast of characters and cocktails and peanuts, leaving me hungry each week for the follow up. Of Carrie Clevenger's wonderfully evocative Texas Gothic writing, Kat Del Rio's brutally frank stories of people using people usually for bad, Alison Wells, DJ Young and Penny Goring's sublime lyrical treats one could bask in endlessly and Linda (@drwasy) always signing off her comments with "Peace", while rendering her own often deeply unsettling flashes. The sometimes melancholic, always soaring prose of Rebecca Emin and Rach Carter, the politically passionate stories of Virginia Moffatt and the outrageously clever variety of Jon Wiswell and Tony Noland's work. I followed Michael Solander's trend for progressively shorter and shorter distillation of his powerful pieces. Genevieve Ching's and PJ Kaiser's effortlessly smooth transition between styles and themes. Of Mari and Marissa who I always mixed up in the early days on Twitter! And of course the Daddy of the community, the man who made it all possible, Jon Strother.
After writing 52 stories in 53 weeks, I took a break from flash for shadowing NaNoMoWr with a new novel of my own. But after completing a draft of that, I found I had a lot of new flash ideas bubbling under and so returned this January. Like me now, some of the old names had turned to pastures new. This time round I encountered the wonderful prose of Anne Michaud, the OTT muscular writing of Tommy Salami, the ebullient prose of Jason Coggins, the thoughtful pieces of Phillip Ellis and Pete Domican, the quietly affecting work of Lisamarie Lamb and the dark deeds wrought by Melissa Webb. And many more of you for which I want to express my thanks for letting me read. Another hugely admirable writer Tim Van sant and I have swapped notes on flash anthologies and the likely make up of an introduction.
So this has been a wonderfully warm and enriching experience for me. Apart from the friendships, I now also have an anthology of 52 flashes which I will bring out on Kindle over the next couple of months. I will try and dip in and out of your #fridayflash stories on offer, but I have to dedicate my Fridays to my novel work. If I have one regret bout our community, it is that it is mainly writers speaking to other writers and somehow has to try and burst through to reach 'pure' readers.
Thank you one and all for your generosity, your interest in my work and your welcoming openness in having me as part of your community.
marc xx
I've met some fantastic folk and read some wonderful fiction. I've shared trepidation over blog redesigns, rejection letters, book launches with several of you via Twitter. I've weighed into debates hosted by several of you, done the odd guest blog post and generally tried to actively participate in our community. But now for me the time has come to an end, as the shortest story form is being usurped in my priorities with long-form novel writing.
I can't remember how I came by #fridayflash. Who alerted me to it, or whether it was a punt I took on a link someone posted somewhere on Twitter.
Up until then my blog was a bit derisory. I had only really posted the odd bit of various novel works in progress, completely shorn of their context and viewed by about 1 person a week. When my novel came out in October 2009, I took a decision that I would concentrate on promoting it and would not commit to any new writing for nine months while I did so. I started making videos on self-publishing trends and writing blog posts.
But somewhere around then I also started writing and posting flash fiction. I'm still not quite sure why. I'd barely ever written short stories let alone flash. My writing style shall we say, veers towards the wordy. I'd also sworn I wouldn't be writing any new prose. Well now I've written about 70 and discovered that I can still interweave even the shortest form of fiction with demanding language. I've even performed some of them live at readings. Recorded them for either audio or video. In that 9 months of promotion, (extended to 18 in reality), through writing flashes I probably wrote more regularly and more volume of words than I ever had. 70 stories around 1000 words each, that 70,000 words then and there!
Nor can I remember my first flash piece as it wasn't posted on my blog but on one of a couple of collective writing sites I was a contributor to. My earliest pieces got one or two comments, but within a month or so that had risen to double figures. You guys seemed to validate what I was trying to do with language, within a form that didn't give you much leeway for playing around with it and that gave me great heart since it had been a criticism often levelled against my longer prose. My blog traffic took huge spikes on Fridays and Saturdays. Some of you were kind enough to honour me with blog awards, which I found a little hard to accept as I still don't see myself as much of a blogger!
I'm lucky, I have 3 Fridays in four where I'm not working. That allowed me to dive into reading as many flashes from you guys as I could. Gradually I got acquainted with people's styles; who tended to write genre and those who might tackle anything, so that one had no notion of what you were about to read from week to week.
My heart gave a little kick each time MazzzinLeeds' outlandishly long gun barrel at the top of her blog hove into view, as I wondered what fiendishly clever story she would offer up this Friday. Or hit the 'play' button for Anthony (Bukowski's Basement)'s mood music to accompany reading his story, looked over by that dissolute photo of ChuckBuck himself. Laura Eno's fantastic series of Chronos, Death, a motley cast of characters and cocktails and peanuts, leaving me hungry each week for the follow up. Of Carrie Clevenger's wonderfully evocative Texas Gothic writing, Kat Del Rio's brutally frank stories of people using people usually for bad, Alison Wells, DJ Young and Penny Goring's sublime lyrical treats one could bask in endlessly and Linda (@drwasy) always signing off her comments with "Peace", while rendering her own often deeply unsettling flashes. The sometimes melancholic, always soaring prose of Rebecca Emin and Rach Carter, the politically passionate stories of Virginia Moffatt and the outrageously clever variety of Jon Wiswell and Tony Noland's work. I followed Michael Solander's trend for progressively shorter and shorter distillation of his powerful pieces. Genevieve Ching's and PJ Kaiser's effortlessly smooth transition between styles and themes. Of Mari and Marissa who I always mixed up in the early days on Twitter! And of course the Daddy of the community, the man who made it all possible, Jon Strother.
After writing 52 stories in 53 weeks, I took a break from flash for shadowing NaNoMoWr with a new novel of my own. But after completing a draft of that, I found I had a lot of new flash ideas bubbling under and so returned this January. Like me now, some of the old names had turned to pastures new. This time round I encountered the wonderful prose of Anne Michaud, the OTT muscular writing of Tommy Salami, the ebullient prose of Jason Coggins, the thoughtful pieces of Phillip Ellis and Pete Domican, the quietly affecting work of Lisamarie Lamb and the dark deeds wrought by Melissa Webb. And many more of you for which I want to express my thanks for letting me read. Another hugely admirable writer Tim Van sant and I have swapped notes on flash anthologies and the likely make up of an introduction.
So this has been a wonderfully warm and enriching experience for me. Apart from the friendships, I now also have an anthology of 52 flashes which I will bring out on Kindle over the next couple of months. I will try and dip in and out of your #fridayflash stories on offer, but I have to dedicate my Fridays to my novel work. If I have one regret bout our community, it is that it is mainly writers speaking to other writers and somehow has to try and burst through to reach 'pure' readers.
Thank you one and all for your generosity, your interest in my work and your welcoming openness in having me as part of your community.
marc xx
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