I haven’t been posting about everything I read lately. To be honest, the constant updating was a bit tedious and the feedback lukewarm.
But, every once in a while I find something that is just too good not to pass on. The short story “What Everyone Remembers” by Rahul Kanakia is one of those stories.
This is a good example of fiction that breaks the “rules of writing” successfully. For example, the protagonist-narrator is largely passive while the other characters take action around her. Also, most of the story is dialogue. Lastly, a lot of the information you need to understand the story is established by telling, not showing.*
Yet, this is a well-written, emotionally engaging story nevertheless. The language is touching, the character interactions natural despite the strangeness of the main character. I believe these aspects of story-telling are far more important to literary quality than most of the mechanistic advice we typically read in writing blogs and books. I encourage writers and readers to take a look!
And, once you’ve read it, take a moment to think about how perfectly the title matches the precise boundaries of the story.
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* This final point might be more a consequence of length than style; if Kanakia were to make a novel of it, he might show more.

At some point, one of our grandchildren is going to read the name “Bin Laden” and think: “weighed down by a lot of containers?”
I am a firm believer in the “traditional” approach to publishing, with its dreaded “gate-keepers” filtering literature’s incoming content for quality. And, of course, for commercial viability. It’s an imperfect, uncomfortable process, sure, but even an imperfect process is better than anarchy.

After cleaning up from Hurricane Irene (and doing a little expansion along the way), Vermont’s famous
Hey, Nelson, why didn’t you identify today as Thanksgiving? And, what the hell is “Brumalia” anyway?
I am a writer myself, but I think discussing art with most artists is like discussing the frequency-selective light reflection of microscopic single gyroid structures with butterflies. They have it, but they don’t really understand it.








