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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With such a tight word count, the choice of title is crucial, I'd imagine. How do you choose them? Does your choice of title cause you to revise a story?

Titles, hmm. Sometimes easy, sometimes not. But I do think it's an opportunity to add depth to the story. If a title can take on a double meaning so much the better. For e.g. 'Missing' – she's not only missing as in lost, but she's missing the family as it once was. 'Anchor' – it's not only the anchor doorknocker, but it's the anchor as in mainstay (the girl's father. Then you have 'Hold-up' which is just a hold-up so, yeah wow, not very clever.

We often get asked by entrants in our microlit comps (200 words max) if we will count the title. What do you all think?

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