/ Podcasts

Color Me Drabbled

I recently found an excellent fiction podcast called The Drabblecast. Run by Norm Sherman, it focuses on flash fiction of up to 2000 words, but also precedes those stories with “drabble.”

A drabble is an extremely short work of fiction exactly one hundred words in length, although the term is often misused to indicate a short story of less than 1000 words. The purpose of the drabble is brevity and to test the author’s ability to express interesting and meaningful ideas in an extremely confined space. In drabble contests participants are given a theme and a certain amount of time to write. Drabble contests, and drabbles in general, are popular in science fiction fandom and in fan fiction. The concept is said to have originated in UK science fiction fandom in the 1980s; the 100-word format was established by the Birmingham University SF Society and popularized online at 100 Words. The particular language used may greatly affect the ease or difficulty of writing a drabble. For example, the Finnish two-word sentence “Heittäytyisinköhän seikkailuun?” translates English as “What if I should throw myself into an adventure?”, a sentence of nine words. This density of meaning makes Finnish a much easier language in which to write a drabble than English. Even easier languages would be those which exhibit extreme polysynthesis, such as Cherokee, where an entire English sentence can often be expressed in a single word. The term comes from Monty Python’s 1971 Big Red Book. In this book, “Drabble” was a word game where the first participant to write a novel wins. In order to make the game possible in the real world, it was agreed that 100 words would suffice.[From Drabble – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia]

Last week, I submitted my first drabble to The Drabblecast and upon waking this morning, feeding the cat, resetting the Airport Extreme because it wasn’t connecting to the internet and finally checking my email . . . I found it has been accepted.

Yay me!

I don’t have a date for broadcast yet, but am really excited to hear Mr. Sherman’s presentation of the story because the production values, music, sound effects, soundscapes and readings on his podcast are quite good. You should give The Drabblecast a listen and keep an eye out for my story, “One of Our Kind.”

The Drabblecast Link

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