Kate posted one of her humour columns.
I love it.
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Not Quite What I Was Planning is a compendium of mini-autobiographies that were sent to the editors after they launched a contest asking people to sum up their lives in six words. Among those who responded were the always- hilarious Stephen Colbert, author and journalist Sebastian Junger (The Perfect Storm), and author Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love). Among these more public characters, drag queen and author Josh Kilmer-Purcell wittily wrote of himself, “He wore dresses. This caused messes.”
But the editors were equally intrigued by regular people like a 16-year-old from Nashville, Texas called Lizzie Grace, who penned the poignant, “Wanted world, got world plus lupus.”
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Abigail Moorhouse’s “Barrister, barista, what’s the diff, Mom?” needed no further explanation, which may be why it won the contest over more than 5,000 other entries.
The project was supposedly inspired by Ernest Hemingway’s oft-praised teensy story: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” The book’s unexpectedly telling summaries function as deeply personal haikus. “I still make coffee for two,” reads one. “Found true love, married someone else” reads another.
This kind of fiction is known as “flash,” “micro,” “sudden,” “short-short,” “postcard,” “minute,” “quick,” “furious,” and “skinny.” Those terms characterize a story that is under 2,000 words long and more likely ranges between 250 and 1,000 words. …
Rick McCharles 