DEADLINE 27TH JUNE

Can you write a story in 100 words including the title? Something like this:

PILLION

On the back of a motorbike you feel everything. Wind, road, speed, gravity. In control of nothing.

The spitterspots of rain. The traffic window-wiping up Euston road, weaving through cars, buses. He’s laughing! Shaking his leather-clad back, swaying left and right past traffic as if as if trying to dislodge me. I want to share his delight. I’m uneasy. Trying to sync my balance with his, leaning as he leans, holding on white-knuckled, wishing I could hold him around his waist with both arms, but I know if I did that I would crush his ribs.

Does he know?

100 words including the title! It’s a great skill, rather like creating the perfect Haiku, or sonnet, or limerick. Try it!

Here’s one I wrote earlier which refuses to be cut down to 100 words. Can you find 8 redundant words?

A woman with a death sentence sat on a bench in Battersea Park in her favourite top and jeans. She didn’t look like someone with a death sentence.

Next to her a pink woman in jeans and a Nirvana T-shirt. “So tell me Claudette,” she said, giving her companion her deep searching look, “how are you really?”

Claudette sighed and attempted to address the question. “I’m getting weaker every day,” she said. “I mean my right arm doesn’t work proper …”

“That’s nice,” Sal, distracted, thinking wish I’d never asked. “You got MS girl, what do you expect?”

“So” Claudette said with a sigh, “and how are you?”

This next one is exactly 100 words – but no title!

He was new to the school. He was like a balloon animal, all strangulated air and pomposity, with a matching inflated ego. He thought he had a right to torment me, the weediest kid in school. Pure bullying. From the first lesson with him I knew hatred, experienced the rise of that negative energy –  grown, honed, perfected, manufactured out of hatred itself. My ally and my enemy.

Day after day it grew until that night when I gathered up my hatred, focused it, pointed it like a missile at his heart, and let it go.

He died that night.

Ooooh creepy! But it doesn’t have to be dark! How about some romance? Some humour? Amuse me and the other judges, make us think, make us shiver, make us laugh.

SO I’M OFFERING £100 FOR THE BEST 100 WORD MEGASAGA AGAIN! This is the 4th MEGASAGA competition – and the deadline is fast approaching!

FULL DETAILS HERE: http://jonelkon.com/megasaga-competition/

Much love,

Jon