Mat Twassel: Blog

Can there be a series of just one? The other day I noticed I had such a series. Kira. It didn’t seem right to me, so now there is a second Kira story. One of these days I hope there will be a third. In the meantime, I did a cover picture for the first Kira story. “New Scent.” (That was fun, but I don’t expect to go back and do pictures for all my uncovered stories. Can’t have too much fun, right?)

We’re now more than halfway through July, and today I posted the fifth July Bananagram story. Bananagrams are a crosswords concoction of twenty-one letter tiles fashioned into a story of a single sentence. I’ve attempted to illustrate each of the entries.

https://storiesonline.net/n/34459/july-bananagrams

Still more than a week left in July to submit your entry. I expect there will be a new Bananagram for August.

They’re back. The cicadas. We used to call them the 17 year locusts. Now, here in the Midwest, we’re in the thick of it. I wrote my only cicada story about 17 years ago and illustrated it some years later. Now to celebrate the arrival of the cicadas, I’ve added a cover picture of the Cicada I trapped yesterday. I think his name is Al. Oh, our ornamental pear tree, Sylvia, is doing fine, way too big for any netting.

( The story is called The Cicadas Are Coming )

Today I posted the second one sentence story in the Bananagrams collection.

https://storiesonline.net/series/1804/bananagrams

The new story is called A Fey Lie, and it’s a follow up to the first Bananagram story, “Cockwise.”

If you might be interested in contributing your own Bananagram to the collection, check out the information at the end of “A Fey Lie.”

https://storiesonline.net/s/33652/a-fey-lie

I wrote and illustrated the Emma Portal story “Roman a Clef” last December and posted it today. This March Amazon released a First Read Kindle novel by Zibby Owens called “Blank.” The plot involves a young writer who, after having a successful first novel, is suffering from writer’s block, but she gets an idea for a new novel, and begins writing it. She’s well into the project when someone else publishes a novel with essentially the same plot. She’s under pressure to produce a new novel, and as a last resort proposes a book that is nothing but blank pages. Who would buy such a book? Is it possible Zibby somehow had access to my Microsoft account and stole the idea? I like to think that Zibby is colluding with Emma.