Spineless Wonders

An independent Sydney-based publisher of short Australian stories from single stories to novellas as well as single-author collections and anthologies. Spineless Wonders hosts The Carmel Bird Award for short fiction and The joanne burns Microlit Award for microfiction and prose poems.

Author Q&A with Susan McCreery for Thurs. 8pm AEST - please leave your Qs here

We'll be chatting with the author of Loopholes, Susan McCreery, here on Thursday night. Loopholes is a collection of microfiction - many less than half a page in length - so it will be great chance to hone in on this short short form. Plus Loopholes has just been nominated for The Most Underrated Book Award which will be announced next week at The Wheeler Centre in Melbourne. So this will also be a good chance to chat with an emerging author about her writing journey and how she feels about the attention her book is receiving. I'm leaving a couple of questions below to kick off the evening's discussion. Feel free to leave your questions below too.

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Thanks for doing this Q&A! Can you please explain the difference between micro fiction, short stories, flash fiction? Thanks

Thank YOU, Jemma! I love a good grilling. No, really, it's a great platform and great community. I think there are a few diff terms for this really short form - microfiction, microlit, flash fiction, short-short stories. These are the ones I know about, anyway. Bron decided that Loopholes would only contain stories under 250w. I'd submitted longer ones - up to 800w I think. I'd still call these microfiction. Not sure where the cut-off is, maybe 1000w. This would have to be short story territory.

There feels to be a difference between microfiction and very short stories which is more than simply length. I can't quite put my finger on the difference. Maybe it's how much a reader contributes?

Yes, our version of the short short form (which we call 'microlit' and which encompasses prose poetry as well as microfiction) has an upper limit of 800 words. it was just an arbitrary limit - but most publishers and writers' comps will make similar kinds of decisions.

Oh yes prose-poems. That's another one. And in the foreword to Lydia Davis's collection they even use 'fables' 'observations', etc.

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